'A Calmer and More Exalted Sphere'

Americans have always viewed British royalty through an ambivalent lens. As former colonials, those of us with a historical memory have a natural skepticism about the monarchy. Some of us remember the American Revolution, with varying degrees of understanding and reverence. On the other hand, we gawk at celebrities. The royals represent glamor, wealth and scandal, and some of us lap it up. 

Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation took place less than eight months after I was born. She has always been my queen, in the American sense – a faraway and reliable symbol of what I take to be British dignity, grace and common sense. In an unimaginative sense, she was an anachronism, a relic of an unenlightened age. When first reading the political works of the English essayist Walter Bagehot (1826-77), I was surprised by how snottily dismissive he could be of Queen Victoria and the monarchy in general. C.H. Sisson (1914-2003), a constitutional monarchist, replied in The Case of Walter Bagehot (Faber and Faber, 1972):

 

“So Trooping the Colour must be regarded as a leg show of guardsmen, the crown as a bauble, and the Coronation itself as something for the illustrated papers. The Queen was dignified in Bagehot’s phraseology – which meant she was not much good. She was for fools to goggle at.”

 

In England: An Elegy (Chatto & Windus, 2000), Roger Scruton writes about the monarchy in a way that even Americans can understand:

 

“The constitutional monarchy is the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere. Not being elected by popular vote, the monarch cannot be understood as representing the interests only of the present generation. He or she is born into the position, and also passes it on to a legally defined successor. The monarch is in a real sense the voice of history, and the very accidental way in which the office is acquired emphasises the grounds of the monarch’s legitimacy, in the history of a place and a culture. This is not to say that kings and queens cannot be mad, irrational, self-interested or unwise. It is to say, rather, that they owe their authority and their influence precisely to the fact that they speak for something other than the present desires of present voters, something vital to the continuity and community which the act of voting assumes. Hence, if they are heard at all, they are heard as limiting the democratic process, in just the way that it must be limited if it is to issue in reasonable legislation.”