British Monarch Quotes

He has kind of a homicidal face. Or is that just syphilis making him insane? British monarchs do love their syphilis." "A prerequisite of the job," he agreed.

More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is." (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.)

I have to be seen to be believed.

[T]he hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. One can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around, as in 'American Jewish Congress' or 'American Jewish Committee.') And any of those groups can and does have a 'national day' parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an 'English-American' let alone a 'British-American,' and one can only boggle at the idea of what, if we did exist, our national day parade on Fifth Avenue might look like. One can, though, be an Englishman in America. There is a culture, even a literature, possibly a language, and certainly a diplomatic and military relationship, that can accurately be termed 'Anglo-American.' But something in the very landscape and mapping of America, with seven eastern seaboard states named for English monarchs or aristocrats and countless hamlets and cities replicated from counties and shires across the Atlantic, that makes hyphenation redundant. Hyphenation—if one may be blunt—is for latecomers.

In 1828 the British historian Macaulay dubbed the press gallery in Parliament a ‘fourth estate’ of the realm. Today the news media appear to have become the first estate able to topple monarchs and turn Parliament into a talking shop which ceases to exist if journalists turn their backs.

As the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said: ‘A cigarette is a pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool at the other.’ In the history books of the world, the cigarette and its depredations have been ignored, yet it killed every British monarch who died in the twentieth century.

Beckley had an unslakable thirst for political intelligence. Benjamin Rush said of Beckley that “he possesses a fund of information about men and things and, what is more in favor of his principles, he possesses the confidence of our two illustrious patriots, Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison.” 32 Beckley was constantly trying to dig up derogatory information to satisfy the Republican fantasy that Hamilton and Washington headed a pro-British monarchical conspiracy. Jefferson never shed his intense admiration for Beckley. When elected president himself, he restored Beckley as clerk of the House of Representatives and, loading him down with still more honors, appointed him the first librarian of Congress.

Hamilton drew freely on statements he had made at the Constitutional Convention to distinguish his “elective monarch” from a king. The British king, he pointed out, was hereditary, could not be removed by impeachment, had an absolute veto over the laws of both houses, and could dissolve Parliament, declare war, make treaties, confer titles of nobility, and bestow church offices. It clearly exasperated Hamilton that critics were drawing facile comparisons between the American president and the British king. In

The advantages of a hereditary Monarchy are self-evident. Without some such method of prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession, an interregnum intervenes, rival claimants arise, continuity is interrupted and the magic lost. Even when Parliament had secured control of taxation and therefore of government; even when the menace of dynastic conflicts had receded in to the coloured past; even when kingship had ceased to be transcendental and had become one of many alternative institutional forms; the principle of hereditary Monarchy continued to furnish the State with certain specific and inimitable advantages. Apart from the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments and affections which congregate around an ancient and legitimate Royal Family, a hereditary Monarch acquires sovereignty by processes which are wholly different from those by which a dictator seizes, or a President is granted, the headship of the State. The King personifies both the past history and the present identity of the Nation as a whole. Consecrated as he is to the service of his peoples, he possesses a religious sanction and is regarded as someone set apart from ordinary mortals. In an epoch of change, he remains the symbol of continuity; in a phase of disintegration, the element of cohesion; in times of mutability, the emblem of permanence. Governments come and go, politicians rise and fall: the Crown is always there. A legitimate Monarch moreover has no need to justify his existence, since he is there by natural right. He is not impelled as usurpers and dictators are impelled, either to mesmerise his people by a succession of dramatic triumphs, or to secure their acquiescence by internal terrorism or by the invention of external dangers. The appeal of hereditary Monarchy is to stability rather than to change, to continuity rather than to experiment, to custom rather than to novelty, to safety rather than to adventure. The Monarch, above all, is neutral. Whatever may be his personal prejudices or affections, he is bound to remain detached from all political parties and to preserve in his own person the equilibrium of the realm. An elected President – whether, as under some constitutions, he be no more than a representative functionary, or whether, as under other constitutions, he be the chief executive – can never inspire the same sense of absolute neutrality. However impartial he may strive to become, he must always remain the prisoner of his own partisan past; he is accompanied by friends and supporters whom he may seek to reward, or faced by former antagonists who will regard him with distrust. He cannot, to an equal extent, serve as the fly-wheel of the State.

Taken as a whole, the last four administrations represent the culmination of a century of executive abuse. With each successive president from forty-one to forty-four the disease grew worse. By the time Obama leaves office in 2017, Americans will have suffered under twenty-eight consecutive years of unconstitutional executive usurpation of power. An elected king? The British taxpayer spends around $50 million annually to support the entire royal family. With an annual budget that exceeds $1 billion for expenses, including travel, the American president supplanted the British monarch in everything but a title long ago.

In the last century, when a wicked and unworthy subject annoyed the Sultan of Turkey or the Czar of Russia, he had his head cut of without much ceremony; but when the same happened in England, the monarch declared: ‘We are not amused’; and the whole British nation even now, a century later, is immensely proud of how rude their Queen was.

The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was written in exile in Paris and published in 1651. Like many texts of the time, The Leviathan is an allegory. It recalls mediaeval rather than Renaissance thinking. The leviathan is the Commonwealth, society as a total organism, in which the individual is the absolute subject of state control, represented by the monarch. Man - motivated by self-interest - is acquisitive and lacks codes of behaviour. Hence the necessity for a strong controlling state, 'an artificial man', to keep discord at bay. Self-interest and stability become the keynotes of British society after 1660, the voice of the new middle-class bourgeoisie making itself heard more and more in the expression of values, ideals, and ethics.

This pageantry involved the British not merely exalting the principle of hierarchy in ensuring reverence for their own queen, but extending it to India, honouring ‘native princes’, ennobling others and promoting the invention of ersatz aristocratic tradition so as to legitimize their rule. Thus the British created a court culture that the princes had to follow, and a hierarchy that sought to show the Crown as successors of the Mughal emperor. The elaborately-graded gun salutes, from nine guns to nineteen (and in only five cases, twenty-one)6, depending on the importance, and cooperativeness, of the ruler in question; the regulation of who was and was not a ‘Highness’, and of what kind (the Nizam of Hyderabad went from being His Highness to His Exalted Highness during World War I, mainly because of his vast donation of money to the war effort); the careful lexicon whereby the ‘native chiefs’ (not ‘kings’), came from ‘ruling’, not ‘royal’, families, and their territories were ‘princely states’ not ‘kingdoms’—all these were part of an elaborate system of monarchical illusion-building.

When we say that the Negro wants absolute and immediate freedom and equality, not in Africa or in some imaginary state, but right here in this land today, the answer is disturbingly terse to people who are not certain they wish to believe it. Yet this is the fact. Negroes no longer are tolerant of or interested in compromise. American history is replete with compromise. As splendid as are the words of the Declaration of Independence, there are disquieting implications in the fact that the original phrasing was altered to delete a condemnation of the British monarch for his espousal of slavery. American history chronicles the Missouri Compromise, which permitted the spread of slavery to new states; the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, which withdrew the federal troops from the South and signaled the end of Reconstruction; the Supreme Court' compromise in Plessy v. Ferguson, which enunciated the infamous "separate but equal" philosophy. These measures compromised not only the liberty of the Negro but the integrity of America. In the bursting mood that has overtaken the Negro in 1963, the word "compromise" is profane and pernicious.

Treason the only crime defined in the Constitution. Tyranny as under the Stuart and Tudor kings characterized by the elimination of political dissent under the laws of treason. Treason statutes which were many and unending, the instrument by which the monarch eliminated his opposition and also added to his wealth. The property of the executed traitor forfeited by his heirs because of the loathsomeness of his crime. The prosecution of treason, like witchcraft, an industry. Founding Fathers extremely sensitive to the establishment of a tyranny in this country by means of ambiguous treason law. Themselves traitors under British law. Under their formulation it became possible to be guilty of treason only against the nation, not the individual ruler or party. Treason was defined as an action rather than thought or speech. "Treason against the US shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid & Comfort...No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same Overt act, or on Confession in Open Court." This definition, by members of the constitutional convention, intended that T could not be otherwise defined short of constitutional amendment. "The decision to impose constitutional safeguards on treason prosecutions formed part of a broad emerging American tradition of liberalism...No American has ever been executed for treason against his country," says Nathaniel Weyl, Treason the story of disloyalty and betrayal in American history, published in the year 1950. I say if this be treason make the most of it.

The so much boasted constitution of England. That it was noble for the dark and slavish times in which it was erected, is granted. When the world was over run with tyranny the least remove therefrom was a glorious rescue. But that it is imperfect, subject to convulsions, and incapable of producing what it seems to promise, is easily demonstrated. Absolute governments (tho’ the disgrace of human nature) have this advantage with them, that they are simple; if the people suffer, they know the head from which their suffering springs, know likewise the remedy, and are not bewildered by a variety of causes and cures. But the constitution of England is so exceedingly complex, that the nation may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the fault lies, some will say in one and some in another, and every political physician will advise a different medicine. I know it is difficult to get over local or long standing prejudices, yet if we will suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the English constitution, we shall find them to be the base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new republican materials. First.—The remains of monarchical tyranny in the person of the king. Secondly.—The remains of aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the peers. Thirdly.—The new republican materials, in the persons of the commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England. The two first, by being hereditary, are independent of the people; wherefore in a constitutional sense they contribute nothing towards the freedom of the state. To say that the constitution of England is a union of three powers reciprocally checking each other, is farcical, either the words have no meaning, or they are flat contradictions. To say that the commons is a check upon the king, presupposes two things: First.—That the king is not to be trusted without being looked after, or in other words, that a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy. Secondly.—That the commons, by being appointed for that purpose, are either wiser or more worthy of confidence than the crown. But as the same constitution which gives the commons a power to check the king by withholding the supplies, gives afterwards the king a power to check the commons, by empowering him to reject their other bills; it again supposes that the king is wiser than those whom it has already supposed to be wiser than him. A mere absurdity!

The British constitution was full of powers that existed, often for historical reasons, but were never used. Monarchs could theoretically refuse to sign Bills into law, for example, or declare war without the sanction of Parliament, but long before George VI’s time they did neither. Churchill’s ability as minister of defence to overrule the Chiefs of Staff, a prerogative he never exercised, was one of these. There were plenty of fraught meetings over the next five years, so tense that one can see where Churchill’s signet ring dug a groove into the arm of his chair in the Central War Rooms when he rubbed and thumped it, but they did not go beyond the bounds of acceptable disagreements among gentlemen (although the handsets of telephones regularly had to be changed as Churchill banged them on the desk when he got bad connections).

Baron, Baroness Originally, the term baron signified a person who owned land as a direct gift from the monarchy or as a descendant of a baron. Now it is an honorary title. The wife of a baron is a baroness. Duke, Duchess, Duchy, Dukedom Originally, a man could become a duke in one of two ways. He could be recognized for owning a lot of land. Or he could be a victorious military commander. Now a man can become a duke simply by being appointed by a monarch. Queen Elizabeth II appointed her husband Philip the Duke of Edinburgh and her son Charles the Duke of Wales. A duchess is the wife or widow of a duke. The territory ruled by a duke is a duchy or a dukedom. Earl, Earldom Earl is the oldest title in the English nobility. It originally signified a chieftan or leader of a tribe. Each earl is identified with a certain area called an earldom. Today the monarchy sometimes confers an earldom on a retiring prime minister. For example, former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is the Earl of Stockton. King A king is a ruling monarch. He inherits this position and retains it until he abdicates or dies. Formerly, a king was an absolute ruler. Today the role of King of England is largely symbolic. The wife of a king is a queen. Knight Originally a knight was a man who performed devoted military service. The title is not hereditary. A king or queen may award a citizen with knighthood. The criterion for the award is devoted service to the country. Lady One may use Lady to refer to the wife of a knight, baron, count, or viscount. It may also be used for the daughter of a duke, marquis, or earl. Marquis, also spelled Marquess. A marquis ranks above an earl and below a duke. Originally marquis signified military men who stood guard on the border of a territory. Now it is a hereditary title. Lord Lord is a general term denoting nobility. It may be used to address any peer (see below) except a duke. The House of Lords is the upper house of the British Parliament. It is a nonelective body with limited powers. The presiding officer for the House of Lords is the Lord Chancellor or Lord High Chancellor. Sometimes a mayor is called lord, such as the Lord Mayor of London. The term lord may also be used informally to show respect. Peer, Peerage A peer is a titled member of the British nobility who may sit in the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. Peers are ranked in order of their importance. A duke is most important; the others follow in this order: marquis, earl, viscount, baron. A group of peers is called a peerage. Prince, Princess Princes and princesses are sons and daughters of a reigning king and queen. The first-born son of a royal family is first in line for the throne, the second born son is second in line. A princess may become a queen if there is no prince at the time of abdication or death of a king. The wife of a prince is also called a princess. Queen A queen may be the ruler of a monarchy, the wife—or widow—of a king. Viscount, Viscountess The title Viscount originally meant deputy to a count. It has been used most recently to honor British soldiers in World War II. Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery was named a viscount. The title may also be hereditary. The wife of a viscount is a viscountess. (In pronunciation the initial s is silent.) House of Windsor The British royal family has been called the House of Windsor since 1917. Before then, the royal family name was Wettin, a German name derived from Queen Victoria’s husband. In 1917, England was at war with Germany. King George V announced that the royal family name would become the House of Windsor, a name derived from Windsor Castle, a royal residence. The House of Windsor has included Kings George V, Edward VII, George VI, and Queen Elizabeth II.

Is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the second, by the Grace of God, still monarch of any African realm? No. this couldn’t be a protest against Her Majesty to abdicate any African realm. No! Or is he or she avenging the substitution of African beliefs with Western culture by the British Missionaries who destroyed their culture and heritage?

When we speak of the ‘Crown’ we sometimes mean the Monarch himself; but more often we mean the Government or some Department of it, or some department of some Department, and sometimes in practice, it is to be feared, some subordinate clerk in some department of some Department. All these Departments, nominally controlled by one who is nominally the King’s Minister, enjoy in practice the benefit of the doctrine that the King can do no wrong.

Now its most ardent defenders are to be found amid the multiple Protestantisms which British emigration has bequeathed to the USA. Some of them, ‘King James Only’ folk, believe that it possesses an extra dose of the Holy Spirit not granted to any other English version, which is very generous of them, considering that it was commissioned by a monarch whose jovial bisexuality would cause them apoplexy at the present day.

First, historically, the ability of the people to defend themselves has been a critical precondition to securing liberty from monarchs and tyrants. For that reason, those in government power always want to disarm the populace, because an unarmed populace is subservient to the whims of their masters. When the British Crown became repressive, the American colonists did not throw off the yoke of tyranny by relying on impassioned speeches, pamphlets, or books. Instead they shouldered muskets, launched a revolution, and defeated the mightiest army on the face of the earth. Had the colonists been weaponless, we would likely be speaking with a British accent right now.

The QSMV Dominion Monarch was launched in 1938 to be a luxury passenger liner. Designed with refrigerated cargo holds, she was built to connect Great Britain with other Commonwealth countries. At that time, “The Sun Never Set on the British Empire!” When World War II erupted, the Dominion Monarch was commandeered by the Crown, painted grey and served as a British Troop Ship for the duration of the war. After the war she was the ship that carried Adeline and her daughters back to South Africa. The Dominion Monarch was released from Government service on July 21, 1947 and was restored to being the magnificent ocean liner she was intended to be. The ship later served as a floating hotel for the Century Exposition in Seattle, Washington, before going to the breakers in Japan, on November 25, 1962….

ORIGIN OF TWO COUNTRIES They say Churchill said: “Jordan was an idea I had one spring at about four-thirty in the afternoon.” The fact is that during the month of March 1921, in just three days, British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill and his forty advisers drew a new map for the Middle East. They invented two countries, named them, appointed their monarchs, and sketched their borders with a finger in the sand. Thus the land embraced by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the clay of the very first books, was called Iraq. And the new country amputated from Palestine was called Transjordan, later Jordan. The task at hand was to change the names of colonies so they would at least appear to be Arab kingdoms. And to divide those colonies, to break them up: an urgent lesson drawn from imperial memory. While France pulled Lebanon out of a hat, Churchill bestowed the crown of Iraq on the errant Prince Faisal, and a plebiscite ratified him with suspicious enthusiasm: he got 96 percent of the vote. His brother Prince Abdullah became king of Jordan. Both monarchs belonged to a family placed on the British payroll at the recommendation of Lawrence of Arabia. The manufacturers of countries signed the birth certificates of Iraq and Jordan in Cairo’s Semiramis Hotel, and then went out to see the pyramids. Churchill fell off his camel and hurt his hand. Fortunately, it was nothing serious. Churchill’s favorite artist could continue painting landscapes.

Charlie smiled. ‘Actually, right now I feel like venting; maybe seeing how loud I can make the speakers in the gym and doing a workout of some kind. Does the hotel have music?’ ‘Um, pass?’ ‘You haven’t tried? Dude! Sort the shit. Hey, Valles?’ ‘Hello.’ ‘Play Queen.’ ‘Disambiguation. One: Play the Queen: Act like a queen: female monarch. Subjects needed. Two: Play the Queen: Act like a queen: a person with excessive emotional outbursts. Setting demanded. Three: Play music related to “Queen”: Playqueen: New Zealander electropop group. 2040s. Four. Play music related to...’ ‘British rock band. 1980s.’ ‘Album, or track?’ ‘I Want to Break Free.

She hit a new low in mid-July when she took up with Dodi Fayed, the son of Egyptian tycoon Mohamed Fayed, who had been repeatedly denied British citizenship by the U.K. government. Mohamed Fayed had befriended Diana as a generous benefactor of several of her charities. He appealed to her, according to Andrew Neil, a sometime consultant for Fayed, “by cultivating the idea that both were outsiders and had the same enemies.” Diana met Dodi while she and her sons were staying at the ten-acre Fayed estate in Saint-Tropez. At age forty-two, Dodi was a classic case of arrested development: spoiled, ill-educated, unemployed, rootless, and irresponsible, with a taste for cocaine and fast cars. He showered Diana with extravagant gifts, including an $11,000 gold Cartier Panther watch, and sybaritic trips on his father’s plane and yachts. From the moment the story of their romance broke on August 7, the tabloids covered the couple’s every move with suggestive photographs and lurid prose. William and Harry, who were at Balmoral with their father, mistrusted Dodi, and they were embarrassed by their mother’s exhibitionistic behavior.

Technically, Sheena predates even Superman, having first appeared in the primordial dawn of comic books in 1937. But her true origins are older than that. Sheena is often described as the female version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 creation, Tarzan. The majority of Burroughs’ popular works revolves around a tension between the savage and the civilized, also seen in Sheena’s adventures. Burroughs’ work, like that of fellow adventure writer H. Rider Haggard, came out of the colonial era, and was written for men and boys who yearned for an escape from stifling modern life, through tales of dangerous worlds and exotic women. The common theme of these stories is that a man from the civilized world finds his way to a fantastic, often barbaric, world of adventure, where he falls in love with an intoxicating savage princess. While most of Burroughs’ heroines, like Dejah Thoris or Dian the Beautiful, were in need of rescuing, Haggard’s 1886 novel She introduced a stronger heroine. The novel’s English protagonist encounters the beautiful queen Ayesha, the ruler of a lost city in Africa. Ayesha is referred to as “she who must be obeyed,” and is a creature that provokes both fear and lust. Ayesha was the ultimate fantasy of civilized man: the beautiful, savage white queen, ruling a kingdom unhindered by the laws of modern morality. This brand of men’s fiction produced the swirling foam of exotic and erotic fantasy from which rose the jungle Venus known as Sheena. (...) Now that we have some historical context on these female monarchs, let’s talk about their specific origins. In the 1930s, there were several studios that produced art and stories for the various publishers who were getting into the new field of comic books. One of the most successful and prolific was the Universal Phoenix Studio, operated by two young artists named Will Eisner and Jerry Iger. In 1937, they created a female Tarzan-type character named Sheena for the British tabloid Wags. The strip was credited to the pseudonym W. Morgan Thomas, and the heroine’s name was meant to remind readers of H. Rider Haggard’s She. Demand for new comic book material was growing in the United States, and American pulp magazine publisher Fiction House was looking for material for a new comic book. Sheena made her American debut in 1938’s Jumbo Comics #1, just three months after Superman’s now legendary first appearance. She was the first female adventure character in comic books. This would be just one of her claims to fame.

Barbarism, thy name is Britain. In this day and age, if any societal structure is a revolting blot on the fabric of the democratic world, it's not Russia or North Korea, but the not-so-great Britain. The queen might have been a nice person, I don't know. But when a person is declared the supreme authority (head of state) of an entire people by birth, it's not something to take pride in, rather it's something to be ashamed of. Britain may mourn the death of the queen as a person, but no land deserves to be called civilized while mourning the death of a monarch. Let me put this into perspective. Almost every week a country celebrates independence from britain - if this doesn't tell you why the monarchy is the antithesis of everything that is civilized, nothing can. I wonder, they can throw a homeless man in jail for lifting a bread out of hunger, yet the empire walks free, even after raping, pillaging and looting from 90% of the world's countries! Where is the ICC (International Criminal Court) now, when one monarch after another sits on the throne, wielding the crown jewels encrusted with national treasures stolen from all over the globe!

Thus the British created a court culture that the princes had to follow, and a hierarchy that sought to show the Crown as successors of the Mughal emperor. The elaborately-graded gun salutes, from nine guns to nineteen (and in only five cases, twenty-one*), depending on the importance, and cooperativeness, of the ruler in question; the regulation of who was and was not a ‘Highness’, and of what kind (the Nizam of Hyderabad went from being His Highness to His Exalted Highness during World War I, mainly because of his vast donation of money to the war effort); the careful lexicon whereby the ‘native chiefs’ (not ‘kings’), came from ‘ruling’, not ‘royal’, families, and their territories were ‘princely states’ not ‘kingdoms’—all these were part of an elaborate system of monarchical illusion-building.

The Freedom narrative spans from the American Revolution’s origins in the nature of colonial British America—a society in which freedom was limited and in which everyone was the subject of a distant monarch—through the crisis in the British Empire that followed the French and Indian War, to the events of the War for Independence itself, and ultimately to the creation of the first great republic in modern history.

On July 10, as the Austrian Foreign Ministry was drafting its ultimatum to Serbia, thousands of British naval reservists began arriving at manning depots, where they were issued uniforms and boarded their assigned ships. By July 16, the Second and Third Fleets had sailed from their home ports to join the First Fleet for the royal review at Spithead, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. On July 17, King George arrived and the First Lord, bursting with pride, presented the monarch with a fleet that Churchill declared to be “incomparably the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the history of the world.” On

We are all very familiar with the concept of faery queens, whether from Mab, Titania or from Spencer’s famous poem, and British folk tradition gives the strong impression that they are widespread. Other than Oberon, faery kings are rather less frequently mentioned. We hear of an unnamed monarch in the poem King Orfeo, the ‘eldritch king’ of the ballad Sir Cawline, the elf king of Leesom Brand and, finally, the small faery man of the ballad the Wee Wee Man seems to be some sort of faery ruler or noble.113 As mentioned earlier, the sixteenth century Scottish poet Montgomerie wrote of “the King of Pharie with the court of the Elph-quene.’ It’s not apparent whether there is any major significance to his choice of wording, which seems at least to imply that the king is in some manner subservient to his consort.

Nobody without a mastery of the Burmese language and cultural background could hope to reach out to the people of Burma. Therefore the modern educated felt too diffident to suggest the reassessment and reform of accepted values. The scholars of the old school on the other hand were too close to traditional institutions to be able to judge them objectively. Fielding Hall was one of those Englishmen who fell in love with Burma and the Burmese, of whom he had a romantic and in some ways simplistic vision. Nevertheless his observations on Burmese society were often shrewd and he noted a phenomenon which must surely lie at the basis of the failure for a true renaissance to take place under colonial rule. He remarked of monarchical Burma that there was no noble or leisured class between the king and the villagers. Consequently, the monarch had to recruit as his ministers men from the villages who, for all their natural capacity, did not have the ‘breadth of view, the knowledge of other countries, of other thoughts, that come to those who have wealth and leisure’. The situation had not changed radically under British rule.

They assured him that the president was bound to act with ‘the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers and cannot act independently of that advice’. As they saw it, the position of the president of India was even weaker than that of the British monarch.

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, monarchs were often dependent on particular ministers. However, it was not until the eighteenth century that a recognizable first, or “prime,” minister began to emerge. George I, the first of the Hanoverian kings, had little interest in British politics, spoke little or no English, and spent six months of each year on the Continent.

The most powerful person Gandhi met in London was the British monarch, King George the Fifth, one of whose titles was Emperor of India. On 5 November, the king hosted a reception for the delegates to the Round Table Conference. The invitation specified that those attending should wear ‘Morning Dress’; finally, after much to-ing and fro-ing between the palace officials and Mahadev Desai, they decided to make an exception for Gandhi.

First and foremost, the queen of British Faery is Mab. She may very well be a homegrown monarch, perhaps descending ultimately from the Irish/British goddess Medb/Maeve. Her ancestry isn’t wholly clear and it has been proposed too that she might be related to the continental queen of the fairies and witches, Lady Habundia or Dame Abonde.

There seems to me to have been twice as much done in some ages in defending the Bible as in expounding it, but if the whole of our strength shall henceforth go to the exposition and spreading of it, we may leave it pretty much to defend itself. I do not know whether you see that lion—it is very distinctly before my eyes; a number of persons advance to attack him, while a host of us would defend the grand old monarch, the British Lion, with all our strength. Many suggestions are made and much advice is offered. This weapon is recommended, and the other. Pardon me if I offer a quiet suggestion. Open the door and let the lion out; he will take care of himself. Why, they are gone! He no sooner goes forth in his strength than his assailants flee. The way to meet infidelity is to spread the Bible. The answer to every objection against the Bible is the Bible.

Kings were expected to lead their armies in person, which put them in the midst of a kind of hacking slaughter that clearly spared no one. That could qualify as a kind of rough egalitarianism, but the last European monarch to die in combat was King James IV of Scotland, who invaded England in 1513 with thirty thousand soldiers, noblemen, and clergy. He saw a third of his force annihilated before he himself was cut down. Almost thirty years earlier, King Richard III of England had been unhorsed and killed at Bosworth Field. After those battles, the kingly virtue of fighting alongside noblemen and commoners began to die out, and monarchs were content to order other men to do their fighting and dying for them. There is obviously little merit in having leaders of modern democracies do the work of combat infantry—even lieutenant colonels don't do that unless absolutely necessary—but that doesn't mean sacrifice need disappear from public life. In a deeply free society, not only would leaders be barred from exploiting their position, they would also be expected to make the same sacrifices and accept the same punishments as everyone else. The authors of the American Constitution were among the wealthiest and most powerful men of their society and yet, with a few narrow exceptions, they made themselves subject to the same laws and penalties that governed others. (Many also risked being hanged for treason if the British won the war.) It was one of the few times in recorded history that a society's elite stripped themselves of special protections and offered to serve the populace, rather than demanding to be served by them.

held in schools, mangers are displayed on public land at Christmas, and various official occasions—such as the enthronement of a new monarch—

When the British government presents proposals for Royal Assent, the responses on behalf of the Monarch are still given in Anglo-Norman, for example: ‘La Reyne remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le veult’ (The Queen thanks her good subjects, accepts their bounty, and wills it so) or ‘La Reyne/Le Roy le veult’ (The Queen/King wills it).

between the constitutional formality and the political reality. For example, ministers are responsible formally to the monarch. Because of the political changes wrought in the nineteenth century, they are by convention responsible now also to Parliament. By convention, the government

Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901) marked the transition from a monarch

In the meantime, the Germans established numerous bridgeheads on the south bank of the Somme, to be used when the southward advance began. Panzers invested Boulogne on May 22nd, and on May 23rd, the British evacuated their troops at midnight. The French garrison surrendered at noon two days later on May 25th, recognizing their utterly hopeless position. The British government ordered an evacuation of Dunkirk on May 26th, but the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the French forces accompanying them could not escape that easily, however. Near catastrophe struck on May 28th when the Belgians surrendered to Germany, opening a colossal gap in the Allied lines. King Leopold III, showing consistency of character at least if not moral courage, informed the British and French of his planned capitulation only hours prior to the actual surrender, leaving them with practically no time to prepare for its disastrous military consequences. The action earned Leopold III such sobriquets as “King Rat” and “the Traitor King,” nicknames he did little to disprove when he evinced more willingness to negotiate with Hitler for restoration of Belgian independence than he had shown in dealing with France and Britain, which sought to defend Belgium's freedom in the first place. British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill blasted the Belgian monarch's abrupt surrender in a detailed speech summarizing the repercussions: “The surrender of the Belgian Army compelled the British at the shortest notice to cover a flank to the sea more than 30 miles in length. Otherwise all would have been cut off, and all would have shared the fate to which King Leopold had condemned the finest army his country had ever formed. So in doing this and in exposing this flank, as anyone who followed the operations on the map will see, contact was lost between the British and two out of the three corps forming the First French Army.” (Churchill, 2013, 174).

authority. She is a serious figure: Her Majesty, the British monarch and head of the Commonwealth. But as anyone who has ever met her will tell you, in person she is very warm and human with a well-developed sense of humour. Look at it another way,

Monarchy Sonnet Bloodline doesn't determine destiny, Only determination can do that. Biology doesn't see royalty, Only bugs without backbone do that. They say above the law is nobody, Yet the royalty makes their own law. If this is what civilization is about, It's much better to be an outlaw. The very existence of monarchy, Is a sign of a medieval society. We deny visa to hopes and ambition, Yet kings and queens receive undeniable loyalty. So I address the monarchs of planet earth, Grow up and give your character a real birth.

The gradual formation of liberal, secular democracy over the Enlightenment and the Modern periods was characterized by struggles against oppressive forces and the search for freedom. The battle against the hegemony of the Catholic Church was primarily an ethical and political conflict. The French Revolution opposed both church and monarchy. The American Revolution opposed British colonial rule and nonrepresentative government. Throughout these earlier periods, institutions like, first, monarchical rule and slavery, then patriarchy and class systems, and finally enforced heterosexuality, colonialism, and racial segregation were challenged by liberalism—and overcome. Progress occurred fastest of all in the 1960s and 1970s, when racial and gender discrimination became illegal and homosexuality was decriminalized. This all occurred before postmodernism became influential. Postmodernism did not invent ethical opposition to oppressive power systems and hierarchies—in fact, much of the most significant social and ethical progress occurred during the preceding periods that it rejects and continues to be brought about by applying the methods of liberalism.

It’s not a day we have to seize, it’s an era. We need a revolution, not a sticking plaster over a gaping wound. As Nietzsche said, we must revalue all values. We must redefine capitalism and change it from free-market capitalism (designed to serve globalists), to social capitalism (designed to serve all the citizens of the nation). We need to remove the plutocratic boot from the neck of democracy. We must seek to build a true meritocracy in a society free of monarchs, dynastic families, privilege, inheritance, cronyism and nepotism.

No one can talk about meritocracy in the UK until the monarchy has gone. This is the 21st century, for God’s sake. There is no justification for a monarchy. It symbolizes every conceivable force of anti-meritocracy and unequal opportunities: one rule for them and a different rule for everybody else. The only legitimate “monarch” would be one of Plato’s philosopher kings: the non-hereditary smartest person in the country. Imagine how different the UK would be if its head of state were its most intelligent person, from any background, rather than some old German pensioner with no discernible talents whatsoever. Mark Antony said to Octavian, “You, boy, owe everything to your name.” Likewise, the Queen of England owes everything to her name. She has nothing else to commend her.

Even the “free market”, which they support so assiduously, is just another mechanism to allow the rich to bypass democracy, to be unelected and unaccountable (like the monarch). The market is merely monarchy by a new name, with the masters of the universe as the new kings.

The need for recruitment, especially in the Scottish Highlands, became acute at the time of the revolt of the American colonies against British monarchical rule. And there was another huge shadow, in this case across the European, not the American, map: this was the threat of revolution in the country just across the Channel. The storming of the Bastille by a revolutionary mob on 14 July 1789 was the first unmistakable public manifestation of what would be known with hindsight as the French Revolution.

Nothing! thou elder brother even to Shade: That hadst a being ere the world was made, And well fixed, art alone of ending not afraid. Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not, When primitive Nothing Something straight begot; Then all proceeded from the great united What. Something, the general attribute of all, Severed from thee, its sole original, Into thy boundless self must undistinguished fall; Yet Something did thy mighty power command, And from fruitful Emptiness’s hand Snatched men, beasts, birds, fire, air, and land. Matter the wicked’st offspring of thy race, By Form assisted, flew from thy embrace, And rebel Light obscured thy reverend dusky face. With Form and Matter, Time and Place did join; Body, thy foe, with these did leagues combine To spoil thy peaceful realm, and ruin all thy line; But turncoat Time assists the foe in vain, And bribed by thee, destroys their short-lived reign, And to thy hungry womb drives back thy slaves again. Though mysteries are barred from laic eyes, And the divine alone with warrant pries Into thy bosom, where truth in private lies, Yet this of thee the wise may truly say, Thou from the virtuous nothing dost delay, And to be part with thee the wicked wisely pray. Great Negative, how vainly would the wise Inquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise, Didst thou not stand to point their blind philosophies! Is, or Is Not, the two great ends of Fate, And True or False, the subject of debate, That perfect or destroy the vast designs of state— When they have racked the politician’s breast, Within thy Bosom most securely rest, And when reduced to thee, are least unsafe and best. But Nothing, why does Something still permit That sacred monarchs should at council sit With persons highly thought at best for nothing fit, While weighty Something modestly abstains From princes’ coffers, and from statemen’s brains, And Nothing there like stately Nothing reigns? Nothing! who dwell’st with fools in grave disguise For whom they reverend shapes and forms devise, Lawn sleeves, and furs, and gowns, when they like thee look wise: French truth, Dutch prowess, British policy, Hibernian learning, Scotch civility, Spaniards’ dispatch, Danes’ wit are mainly seen in thee. The great man’s gratitude to his best friend, Kings’ promises, whores’ vows—towards thee may bend, Flow swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end.

[And conversely, Woodrow Wilson finishes dead last.] Yes [...] I think World War I was avoidable for the United States, certainly; we kind of look back on Germany as being 'evil' (because of World War II), but back in World War I it was much more ambiguous who was at fault - and the allies, including our French and British allies and the Russians also were at fault - and after World War I there was a revulsion because the Bolsheviks released their correspondences with Britain and France: Britain and France were trying to grab colonies, and so the American people said, 'We were fighting...we lost all these people in this massive war just to help these people grab territory?' So there was a revulsion at that time; we don't hear that now because we're distant from it. Woodrow Wilson has been elevated as one of the better presidents but I think if you go back and look at it, the war was avoidable...and of course Woodrow Wilson helped bring Hitler to power by insisting on the abdication of the Kaiser after World War I - which was totally unnecessary. Germany was a constitutional monarchy before the war, and was vilified. It was actually the most aggressive state in Europe [...] and there were many things wrong with the Kaiser's personality, but I think Germany is unnecessarily vilified for that war.

The expectation of at least being solicited for advice had rapidly faded, and Ponsonby’s role was often reduced to the farcical sending of the same papers back and forth, via footmen, to the Queen a few rooms away. He already had the distinct impression that his monarch did not work as hard as she claimed, despite the sycophantic protection of Dr Jenner. The perception of some, like Disraeli, that she worked tirelessly on Foreign and Colonial Office dispatches in the seclusion of her rooms was a fiction, in his view. And how could she do the work of government properly at Balmoral in isolation from her ministers? Ever more entrenched in going nowhere and seeing only the few people she liked, Victoria did not even enjoy having her children around her.

As for a resumption of Victoria’s public duties, the events of 1871–2, while doing much to turn the tide of her unpopularity, did little immediately to alter the deeply ingrained habits of the previous decade. The insularity and self-absorption of those lost years had seen a hardening of her least-attractive image as the dour, prudish, humourless and repressive Widow at Windsor – an erroneous view that has come down through history, and which has marginalised the Queen’s many good attributes. These worst excesses of stubborn self-interest had indeed seen her become at times ‘maddening, cruel, hateful, pitiful, impossible’.4But out of so much darkness and negativity there finally emerged the monarch whose great virtues – lack of vanity, human sympathy, an absolute honesty and sound common sense – finally gained the ascendant in her later years.

In a triumphant subversion of the traditional image of the monarch in splendid robes of state at the heart of great ceremonial set-pieces, by the century’s end Queen Victoria dominated the national consciousness as its antithesis – in all her bourgeois ordinariness – as revered widow and ‘Mother of the People’, and (on an international scale) as Grandmama of Europe. It was an extraordinary alchemy, unique to Queen Victoria as monarch. For by the end of her reign there was no one to rival her in her wisdom, her years of experience and her grasp of statesmanship and international affairs.

Animosity was whipped up once more: it was time the Queen stepped down or the monarchy was done away with altogether. Charles Bradlaugh, President of the London Republican Club, argued that ‘the experience of the last nine years proves that the country can do quite well without a monarch’, urging not violent overthrow, but a peaceful transition. After so many years of only nominal monarchy, the Act of Settlement that had established the House of Hanover on the British throne in 1701 should be revoked on the Queen’s decease.

In the end, boosted by the assumption of her new title of Empress of India and her unrivalled supremacy over her royal relatives in Europe as ‘the doyenne of sovereigns’, Queen Victoria grew into the familiar, imposing image that has come down to us of ‘Victoria Regina et Imperatrix’.32The British monarchy retained its firm hold upon the affections of the middle classes, who could relate to Victoria and her ‘comfortable’ motherliness and, through her, ‘felt related in some degree to something that [was] socially great’ – their very own royal family. It is a sentiment that has survived into the reign of her great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II, a monarch whose unerring sense of duty bears all the hallmarks of the tradition set by Prince Albert. But whether it will survive beyond her is doubtful.

The whole congregation, as they did so, was gripped by a ‘royal silence that the sacredness of the place and the majesty of her office demanded – a real silence.’ Gavard had not been particularly impressed with the sight of the Queen: ‘fat and short…with a discontented-looking face’; but that silence – not the natural silence of the void, as he recalled, but ‘the silence of thousands of people holding their breath at the presence of the monarch finally among them’ – was quite extraordinary.61It was a ‘thrilling moment’, Munby recalled, when the organ sounded out, just as the sun broke through the clouds outside and ‘sent beams of slanting light down through the misty vault of the dome, upon the gold and scarlet and purple crowds below’. As the 250-strong choir burst into the words of the Te Deum, Lucy Cavendish, like many others, felt a shudder of recognition: ‘Never before had I realised what a Psalm of Thanksgiving it is, and most beautiful and moving were the words specially dwelt upon by the music:…“When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death”.

The courage needed to face up to her lonely task as monarch had, meanwhile, totally deserted her; her relationship with Albert had been crucial to her own sense of self and the way she lived her life, and without him she was rudderless. Indeed, her whole life had been one long pattern of reliance on others: during her childhood she had become used to incessant surveillance, imposed by her mother. She had never had to stand and act alone until the first months of her reign, after which she had quickly let go of her early promise as an active queen, to accept the guidance of a powerful man – her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Then Albert had come along and, as she was sidelined by pregnancy after pregnancy, he had assumed many of the onerous responsibilities of state on her behalf. However, it went against the grain for Victoria not to fulfil her role conscientiously, as he had so assiduously trained her, but alone as she now was, she was so mistrustful of her own judgement that it was much easier simply to give way to grief and do nothing.

Duty had been the motivating force in Albert’s life, but with Victoria it was different. She wanted more; she wanted love. Without it – without Albert – all she had to cling to was her great and enduring grief. But as her family and court watched in dismay, the damage of such pathological mourning to her normal functioning as monarch was becoming ever more apparent. Her recovery was not, as one might normally expect, contingent on the passage of time, as a simple matter of ‘getting over it’. What was needed was a crucial and necessary shift in dependency, from her dead husband to a living substitute: a strong and protective male, who would look after her as Albert had done. This role now fell to the most unlikely of candidates – the blunt and down-to-earth John Brown, who after his arrival at Windsor at the end of 1864 had slowly begun to break down the incapacitating pattern of the Queen’s grief at a time when every other option had failed.

Still, with memories of the Revolution fresh, they reserved significant powers for Congress, endowing it, for instance, with the authority to declare war, thereby avoiding the British precedent of a monarch who retained this awesome power.

A war in the Holy Land is unlikely to boost the productive capacity of the economy, and Richard’s ransom was a direct money transfer from British subjects to a foreign monarch.