The past three days have revealed many things about our leaders and celebrities. One is that few of them know all the words to the National Anthem, which, in a verse almost never sung, asks God to scatter the Queen’s enemies. Another is that she has amazingly few enemies.
On Sunday Britain’s leading republican pressure group, Republic, invited supporters to demonstrate against the jubilee celebrations on the green space between Tower Bridge and City Hall in London. About 60 people showed up. When they shouted “Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie, Out, Out, Out,” they were drowned out by “God Save The Queen”. Outside London, republican activism has been even thinner on the ground.
It is easy to forget, in the soggy summer of 2012, that half a generation ago the royal house of Windsor had stretched the British people’s patience close to breaking point. The Queen’s “annus horribilis” earned her some personal sympathy when she acknowledged just how horrible it had been in her 1992 Christmas address. But the already far-fetched notion of the Royal Family as a harmonious model for others had dissolved with the foundering of three of her children’s marriages. Taxpayers were reluctant to fund the restoration of a fire-damaged Windsor Castle, and voters earnestly debated alternatives to a selection method for the post of head of state that owed more to pharaonic Egypt than democracy.
Steadily, and with hardly an unscripted public word, the Queen has since led the monarchy to a remarkable comeback. It is not a straightforward matter to separate her own role in this from the intrinsic merits of a constitutional monarchy and the priceless public relations value of two huge and costly celebrations — a royal wedding and a Diamond Jubilee — in consecutive years. Even so, this much is clear: republicanism is in retreat and our decorative, disarming descendant of dynastic rule has seldom seemed a more natural fit.
Republic, on its website, demands “a new constitution based on democratic values — not medieval ones”. Why not have both? With the emergence of the rule of law, we have dispensed with the barbarism of the Middle Ages. With the help of the monarchy we have kept a strong, tangible sense of our history. More importantly, it is quite wrong to assert that the largely ceremonial role fulfilled by the Queen must be at the expense of our democracy. It is true that we did not vote for her. It is also true that she represents the whole country in a way she never could if we had. She wields no political power, but she embodies everything we have in common that is not political.
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The same can scarcely be said of Presidents Sarkozy, Hollande or Obama. Mr Obama congratulated the Queen yesterday as “an example of resolve that will long be celebrated”. He is an admirable man with admirable intentions. But because he combines the role of head of state with that of president he has proved as divisive as his predecessor. Elected heads of state without political power, by contrast, must reckon with irrelevance while in office (Joachim Gauck is the President of Germany), and with regret afterwards that they could not accumulate the wisdom and insight acquired by the Queen simply by staying put.
No political system has a monopoly on goodness. It is easy to assemble a purely rational argument against an hereditary monarchy. It would be far harder to replace it with anything that answered so successfully our yearning to belong, while impinging so little on our need to be heard.
Besides, we are not purely rational beings. The British monarchy is endearingly eccentric and it sustains a healthy tension between our vivid history of trial and error and a blander present of regulations and elections. It helped to form our past and has earned its place in our future. For that and much more, the Queen deserves our thanks.