One of our home discussion groups meets on a Tuesday evening
and spent their last session discussing the anniversary of the Queen’s
coronation and His Grace of Canterbury’s sermon thereat. I understand they
talked round the subject, and round it again, and came to no firm conclusions
beyond, by a short hair, preferring the hereditary monarchy to any other
available means of selecting a Head of State.
On the wireless in the afternoon I heard Simon Jenkins
debating about the same topic. He argued, very forcefully, for a reform of the
monarchy that would sever its connection with religion, so that the next
coronation would happen somewhere other than a church and divest itself of any
mention of God. There was some odd reasoning in this – stating that the Church
had ‘hijacked’ the monarchy was an idiosyncratic reading of history – but the
overall point that religion, and particularly the Church of England, doesn’t
mean much to most people is hard to refute. What struck me most, however, was
Mr Jenkins’s contention that this new conception of monarchy would reflect the
fact that ‘the monarch exists because of the State’. Constitutionally, I always
thought the opposite was the case, that the monarch is prior to the State and
authority flows from her, which is
precisely why republicans object to it. I noted that never once did Mr Jenkins
refer to ‘the people’; his case had a decidedly Hobbesian tone.
My opinions of hereditary monarchy have reversed polarity
more than once over the course of nearly 30 years, although they have become
more settled since being a Christian. I’ve argued – at least recently – that
the existence of the monarchy acts as a sign pointing beyond the structural
arrangements and ideological conflicts of the polity to the primacy of human
relationships and personal loyalties, as well as to an authority which is
outside those structures. The dream – my dream – was that at the heart of the
State should be a powerless monarch anointed by a powerless Church, a standing
reproof to notions of human power and rivalry. I don’t think we’ve ever
actually got there, because for it to work requires both monarch and Church
consciously to embrace their own powerlessness. To be Christlike. We were
getting there – certainly the Church of England has been – but at the very
moment when it becomes possible for us, the
dream seems to become socially impossible.
The monarch exists because of the State. Perhaps this is what we believe now;
perhaps it’s no more than the truth.
We live in a time when the State extends more and more claim
over us. One of the assumptions on which the progressive case for same-sex
marriage is that marriage is a legal condition which doesn’t exist until the mechanisms
of the State create it – not merely recognise
it, as is the present theory. The family is a site of danger and threat in
which parents are not to be trusted to raise children, and neither are workers
ranging from teachers to train drivers to be trusted to get on with their work
supervised by their own professional bodies, but need the structures of the
State to check them, rate them, punish them. The lies that the State
perpetrates and the fears it arouses to justify doing this only dramatise the
process.
If it’s true that the monarch can no longer – if she ever
could – function as a sign that relativises all this, which points beyond it,
then I can see no point in the Church’s anointing of it. I suspect that the
sacral conception of monarchy tenuously survives only because the Queen is
personally a devout Anglican who believes it herself, and when she dies, it
will more than likely die with her. Then it will indeed be true that the
monarch will exist to serve the State. In those circumstances the shreds and
tatters of sacral monarchy can’t achieve anything more than obscuring the
truth.
I feel somewhat the same way about the liberalism to which I’ve
held tenuous allegiance over more than twenty years; that it seems rooted in a
philosophy entirely inadequate to cope with the world we find. As the State
becomes a black whirlpool sucking into itself all meaning and definition, the
situation ordinary people are in require something more than benign confidence
in capitalism, individualism (though not too
anarchic) and mild reform; like the old monarchy, I begin to suspect that liberalism
itself simply decorates falsehood. And we need truth, so far as we can get it. 
