Why Britain Can’t Quit the Monarchy

Why Britain Can’t Quit the Monarchy

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

Last year’s best-selling book in Britain—more successful than Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me or The Guinness Book of World Records—was Prince Harry’s extraordinary memoir, Spare. The more than 700,000 people who bought a copy were presented with an intimate account of the cruelty of life in the royal zoo. And then, having read the sad story of a family torn apart by press intrusion and emotional dysfunction, almost none of those 700,000 people started seriously agitating for republicanism. In May, the protests at the coronation of King Charles III were small and scattered (and overzealously repressed). One year into the new king’s reign, 62 percent of Britons say they still want a monarchy, with 26 percent against and 11 percent unsure.

What is the appeal of hereditary rulers in the age of artificial intelligence and the air fryer? In 2022, I traveled to Albania, one of several European countries that dispensed with its monarchy after the Second World War, to interview its self-styled crown prince, a gentle, charming man called Leka who had been raised in exile in South Africa. I also spoke with Karl von Habsburg, the man who, if the Habsburg empire still existed, would be its emperor. Both expressed a sense that history moves in cycles, and that perhaps their territories would one day return to them. “Two generations in this framework, it’s very little,” said von Habsburg, whose family first took power in 1273 and controlled large swathes of Central Europe until 1918.

Britain, however, appears to be exempt from these cycles. In the 17nth century, the country lasted 11 years as a republic before pleading with Charles II to return from exile in France. He was an easy king to love, and he presented a jolly contrast to the dour Puritans who had dominated the interregnum. In the ensuing centuries, the British monarchy survived a king who couldn’t speak English (George I, drafted in from Germany when none of Queen Anne’s 17 children survived); a king who went mad (George III, see the film for more details); and a king who put his wife on trial for adultery (George IV, very poor form). In the early 20th century, George V even survived the embarrassment of the First World War, conducted against his German first cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, which prompted him to change the family name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the solidly British Windsor.

As that potted history shows, a certain pragmatic flexibility has always characterized the British monarchy. Royal line ended? Send for the nearest German. King gone mad? Get a regent in. In 1935, the French author André Maurois began an Atlantic article exploring the persistence of the British monarchy with George V’s observation that “knowing the difficulties of a limited monarch, I thank Heaven I am spared being an absolute one.” The French kings believed that they were chosen by God and that no secular authority should restrain them, so Louis XVI ended up at the sharp end of a guillotine. By contrast, the British royals have steadily withdrawn toward a symbolic role, and thus kept their castles and their heads.

Maurois’ article is particularly intriguing because he was writing from the middle of a Europe in flux. Born Émile Herzog, he came from a family of textile manufacturers who had been driven out of Alsace, a region on the French-German border, by a war between France and Prussia. As an adult, he lived through two world wars that reshaped the European map. The Great War ended with Kaiser Wilhelm II deposed and Tsar Nicholas II executed; by 1935, when Maurois was writing for The Atlantic, Stalin had taken power in Russia and Hitler in Germany. The latter dreamed of a thousand-year Reich at a time when six and a half centuries of Habsburg rule were still a recent memory. As Maurois wrote:

Now this century has witnessed the fall of most of the world’s thrones. It has seen republics substituted for monarchies in France, in Spain, and in Portugal, and dictatorships take the place of empires in Germany and in Russia. It has seen the separation of the countries which for so long were united under the sceptre of the ancient Hapsburg dynasty. But the same century has seen the British monarchy become more firmly established. The British Crown appears to the historian much stronger in 1935 than it did in 1835, or even in 1875.

Many of Maurois’ other observations also hold true. “Loyalty to the monarchy in England is not a question of party,” he wrote. “The Laborite feels it equally with the Conservative.” In 1928, he noted, the left-wing Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald began an address to French socialists in 1928 by asking them to pray for the health of the king. “Many among those present were taken by surprise. They would not have been had they known England,” he wrote. “There affection for the royal family is perhaps even stronger among the masses of the people than among the nobility.” The radical playwright George Bernard Shaw, “in one of his dramatic prophecies, has imagined an England gone Communist in which the King still remains the most popular of men. It is not an impossible hypothesis.” Today, the real division in support for the monarchy is by age, rather than political affiliation: 80 percent of people over 65 years old want it to continue, compared with 37 percent of young adults.

Maurois went on to outline the qualities that allowed the British monarchy to endure while so many others fell. “The mainspring is that the King, in order to remain a neutral umpire, must never assume responsibility for an act of government,” he wrote. Nearly a century later, this neutrality is still crucial—Britain, unlike America, has a head of state who is above politics, who is neither liberal nor conservative. He is a national symbol who belongs to everyone: a socialized aristocrat, as weird as that sounds.

As America heads into an election that will test its commitment to democracy, the idea of constitutional monarchy guarding against authoritarianism seems counterintuitive but compelling. Does a monarch soak up sentiments that could otherwise be directed to a strongman leader—a Trump, a Bolsonaro, an Orbán?

“The masses have a natural and inevitable tendency to put their faith in a man,” wrote Maurois in 1935. “Even in democracies public opinion centres about an individual. For the average American, the New Deal is Roosevelt; in the eyes of the entire world, Fascism is Mussolini.” He argued that monarchs provide a focal point in a way that is appealing to something deep in human nature; if one person will come to embody the spirit of a nation, better to ensure that person has no real political power. Perhaps Britain has been spared a personality cult as powerful as Trumpism because we already have a guy who lives in a big house full of gold furniture. Even better, we don’t have to pretend he got there on merit.