The British Monarchy 汉译

The state coach, clumsily shaped and about the size of an old-fashioned farm wagon, trundles slowly along. The windows are small and, from the pavement, it’s difficult to see inside; such coaches were designed as moving containers of privacy, whose occupants could engage in absorbing discussion, doze or conduct seductions without being observed. A hand waves, a face appears. Leaning uncomfortably forward, the Queen is doing her best.

The wave is mechanical, the smile is a response to duty. When she walks, the Queen keeps to her ordained pace; she has never been seen to run or hurry. When she stops to speak to one of her other subjects, she utters the correct number of words: no more, no fewer. All her public behavior—and that means most of her conscious life—is programmed and regulated. One thinks, one can’t help thinking, of those dolls which are wound up to produce a routine of actions and sounds.

It’s all for the tourists, really. About that, the impresarios are brutally candid. Once, being summoned to take part in a television charade billed as a “discussion on the monarch”, I found myself seated close to the chairman of the British Tourist Board. What he had to say was simple: The Queen is his greatest come-on. A fanfare indeed for the descendant of Henry of Agincourt, of the scheming and commanding first Elizabeth, of the stubborn Charles who at least offered his head and not merely his smile. This is the monarch valued, her heritage swallowed by commerce—an attraction worth more than Shakespeare’s birth place and the Soho porn shops rolled into one. If Britain has become a quaint spectacle, a licensed and pensioned relief from the modern world, a Ruritania for condescending delectation, the monarchy is the special article for the customers with Diners cards.

Still, while the tourists take the front seats, thousands upon thousands of British people are gawking from the galleries. The monarchy mystifies, no doubt of that—in the full sense of the term “mystification”. Its function is to spread a bemusing mist that conceals realities: to delude, to distort and to divert. Every Jubille, to take the opposite case, has served function. In 1887, to screen the poverty that had begun to worry the middle-class conscience and also to stifle a nascent republican movement. In 1897, to sanctify the trumperies of imperialism. In 1935, to conjure away the grimness of mass unemployment and the thread of Hitler. In 1977, to cover every intractable problem with excuses for complacent resignation.

Among socialists, whose presumed aim is to cleave through falsehoods and confront truths, this ought to be understood far better than it is. To put the monarchy on the immediate political agenda might well, for several good reasons, be foolish. But to assent to a consensus acclaiming its virtues is another matter. The monarchy is the apex of a structure snobbery, unearned privilege, reverence for tradition unjustified by reason, and humiliating subservience—the complex of English vices that inhibit real social change. To make a simple point, it isn’t conceivable that if we had no monarchy we should have an arbitrarily appointed House of Lords.

The monarchy is a dead hand, and that is bad enough; but it’s a dead hand that could dangerously come alive. Dr. Kenneth Morgan in an erudite article details the steady decline in royal interference on the political scene. I’m not so sure that the monarchy hasn’t gained a reserve power from its unquestioned impartiality between the established parties and its assumed devotion to a numinous patriotism. Parliamentary democracy is extensively discredited in the popular mind and not entirely secure; no one can be quite certain that the seams wouldn’t have come apart if the second election of 1974 had produced no majority. The summons to an authoritarian savior could, in distinctly possible circumstances, be put across if the move were made swiftly enough and respectably enough to disarm resistance. And who would provide the respectability? It was the King of Italy who delivered power into Mussolini’s hands in 1922, and the King of Greece who absolved the colonels from illegality in 1967. Nothing in the record of the British monarchy, nor in the social sympathies and prejudices of Elizabeth II, guarantees a stand against the pressures that would be exerted in such conditions.