The Crown and the Self, A Monarchical Balancing Act

“ Mankind have always been very much divided in opinion in respect to the personal character of Queen Elizabeth, but in one point all have agreed, and that is, that in the management of public affairs she was a woman of extraordinary talent and sagacity, combining, in a very remarkable degree, a certain cautious good sense and prudence with the most determined resolution and energy. ”

“ When she was weary of mystifying foreign statesmen she turned to find fresh sport in mystifying her own ministers. Had Elizabeth written the story of her reign she would have prided herself, not on the triumph of England or the ruin of Spain, but on the skill with which she had hoodwinked and outwitted every statesman in Europe during fifty years. Nothing is more revolting, but nothing is more characteristic of the Queen, than her shameless mendacity. It was an age of political lying, but in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christendom. ”

“ I do not present Queen Elizabeth either as a very interesting or as a faultless woman. As a woman she is not a popular favorite. But it is my object to present her as a queen; to show with what dignity and ability a woman may fill one of the most difficult and responsible stations of the world. It is certain that we associate with her a very prosperous and successful reign; and if she was lacking in those feminine qualities which make woman interesting to man, we are constrained to admire her for those talents and virtues which shed lustre around a throne. ”

“ There are writers who have made the discovery that Elizabeth was a very poor ruler, selfish and wayward, shortsighted, easily duped, fainthearted, rash, miserly, wasteful, and swayed by the pettiest impulses of vanity, spite, and personal inclination. They have not explained, and never will, how it was that a woman with all these disqualifications for government should have ruled England with signal success for forty-four years. Statesmen are indebted to good luck occasionally, like other people. ”

“ The other sentiment which in no small degree influenced the conduct of the great Queen was her excessive fondness for admiration as a woman. She filled her solitary throne with a dignity and a majesty which could not be surpassed; and it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of a character which should have strength and impetuosity enough, even if marriage could have given the right, to overawe her lion-like spirit and assume the reins of government in defiance of her will. Certain it is that no such prince then lived. ”

“ So that I cannot be hard on the embarrassed Queen for a policy which on the strict principles of morality it would be difficult to defend. It was a dark age of conspiracies, rebellions, and cabals. In dealing with the complicated relations of government in that day, there were no recognized principles but those of expediency. Even in our own times, expediency rather than right too often seems to guide nations. It is not just and fair, therefore, to expect from a sovereign, in Queen Elizabeth's time, that openness and fairness which are the result only of a higher national civilization. ”

“ At the same time the Queen's collisions with Parliament and people were always the less dangerous because she was a woman, and so could yield without indignity where a man would have been humiliated and discredited—an advantage overlooked by the historians who praise her sagacity. ”

“ To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it. For myself I was never so much enticed with the glorious name of a King or royal authority of a Queen as delighted that God hath made me his instrument to maintain his truth and glory and to defend his kingdom as I said from peril, dishonour, tyranny and oppression. There will never Queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety than myself. ”

“ A spirit of self-justification so haughty and so unprincipled, a perseverance in deliberate falsehood so resolute and so shameless, ought under no circumstances and in no personage, not even in a captive beauty and an injured queen, to be confounded, by any writer studious of the moral tendencies of history and capable of sound discrimination, with genuine religion, true fortitude, or the dignity which renders misfortune respectable. ”

“ She made her own glory identical with the prosperity of the realm; and if she did not rule by the people, she ruled for the people, as enlightened and patriotic monarchs ever have ruled. It is indisputable that the whole nation loved her and honored her to the last, even when disappointments had saddened her and the intoxicating delusions of life had been dispelled. She bestowed honors and benefits with frankness and cordiality. She ever sought to base her authority on the affections of the people,--the only support even of absolute thrones. ”

“ No one has anything to say against the Queen which carries any weight or is worth listening to. She is undoubtedly a woman of virtue and good sense. So good a woman, I venture to think, never before reigned over any people, and that she is not a great woman, an Elizabeth, a Catherine of Russia, or even an Isabella of Castile, is surely rather to the advantage than otherwise of the monarchical institution in its present stage of existence. Here, then, one might think, if anywhere and ever, the principle of personal loyalty has a fair chance and a full justification. ”

“ But the greatness of the queen rests above all on her power over her people.
We have had grander and nobler rulers, but none so popular as Elizabeth. The passion of love, of loyalty, of admiration, which finds its most perfect expression in the “Faery Queen,” throbbed as intensely through the veins of her meanest subjects. To England, during her reign of half a century, she was a virgin and a Protestant queen; and her immorality, her absolute want of religious enthusiasm, failed utterly to blur the brightness of the national idea. Her worst acts broke fruitlessly against the general devotion. ”

“ Still, fully allowing all this, it is beyond doubt that her subjects, and especially her women subjects, have deep cause for gratitude and affection to the Queen. She has set a high example of duty and faithfulness to the whole nation. The childish resolve, “I will be good,” has never been lost sight of. With almost boundless opportunities for self-indulgence, and living in an atmosphere where she is necessarily almost entirely removed from the wholesome criticism of equals and friends, she has clung tenaciously to the ideal with which she started on her more than fifty years of sovereignty. ”

“ It cannot be like that of France, the throne of a Cæsar, a despotic institution claiming to exercise its despotism over the people by virtue of the will and delegated power of the people. The English Crown never can be an active governing power. It will be the last idol in the invaded sanctuary. It will stand alone, among the pedestals from which popular reform has swept the embodied superstitions which were its long companions. It must live, if at all, on the old affection or the toleration which springs out of custom and habit. ”

“ Your Majesty hath been loved by a whole people, by princes and great men in a different sort—is it not the world's talk that none that ever reigned hath drawn such slavery of princes, and of great nobles who have courted death for hopeless love of one beyond their star? And is it not written in the world's book also that the Queen of England hath loved no man, but hath poured out her heart to a people; and hath served great causes in all the earth because of that love which hath still enlarged her soul, dowered at birth beyond reckoning? ”

“ The highest glory of England today is not that she placed her crown on the brow of her trusted and beloved new monarch, a man whom the nations of the earth welcome to their galaxy of rulers, but that she lays her mantle of fifty years' rule through war and peace and progress such as never was known before, upon the grave of a woman—that mantle on which no stain has ever rested and on which the sunlight of happiness is shadowed and dimmed only by the tears of a sorrowing nation, as it is reverently borne to its honored rest. ”

“ The formal limitations of our Queen's prerogative, sedulously as she has respected them, have never destroyed her sense of responsibility; wifehood and motherhood have not contracted her sympathies, but have deepened and widened them. The very sorrows of her domestic life have knit her in fellowship with other mourners. No great calamity can befall her humblest subjects, and she hear of it, but there comes the answering flash of tender pity. ”

“ But still, when we look back upon those dear privileges, the obtaining of which has cost so much money, and the maintaining of which has cost so much blood, we must with a deep sigh reflect upon the precarious circumstances of the nation, whose best privileges hang uncertain upon the nice and tender thread of royal mortality, and say we are happy while these last, and these may last while her majesty shall live. But what if the queen should die? ”

“ The wearer of a crown has done nothing to gain it but give himself the trouble to be born. He has no claim to the reverence or respect of men. Yet he insists upon it, and receives some show of it. His life is mainly passed in keeping up this battle for a lost dignity and worship. ”

“ More dangerous than all the attacks of the democracy and all ‘gnawing’ at the roots of the monarchy is the loosening of the bonds that still unite the people with the dynasty through the example of open and avowed opposition on the part of the heir to the throne, through the intentional disclosure of discord in the Royal House itself. ”

“ Monarchy is destroyed, when the prince, directing every thing entirely to himself, calls the state to his capital, the capital to his court, and the court to his own person.
Monarchy is destroyed, in fine, when the prince mistakes his authority, his situation, and the love of his people; and when he is not fully persuaded that a monarch ought to think himself secure, as a despotic prince ought to think himself in danger. ”

“ The feudal lords, since they have lost their power, seek to make themselves amends in their enjoyments. Sovereigns themselves seemed to be, for the future, subjected to this law: the throne, with our liberal ideas, insensibly ceased to be a signory, and became purely a magistracy; the Prince having only a simple practical character to sustain, always sufficiently dull and tedious in the long run, must seek to withdraw from it, to come as a mere citizen, and take his share in the pleasures of society. ”

“ To know the Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses is to realise that they neither understand the aspirations of the democracy nor sympathise with them, for, reflecting the glory of Autocracy they are more firmly convinced than any other Royal persons in Europe that a gulf divides them from the rest of mankind. And this conviction is so deep that they appear to believe that the most ordinary actions are ennobled by the mere fact that they are performed by persons in whose veins flows the Imperial blood. ”

“ One could like him, one could even admire some of the qualities which he undoubtedly possessed, but it was utterly impossible to respect in him the Monarch, or to esteem the man, so strange did his conduct sometimes appear, a conduct which finally dragged him into an abyss, together with his family and with his dynasty. ”

“ Things that in a republic are entirely personal, as marriages, births, christenings, deaths, and burials, whether of high or low, in a monarchy are, if they affect royalty, of public and national concern, and it would not be easy to show how one royal act differed from another in greater or less publicity. ”

“ Royalty itself, in its idea the expression of the collective nation, and a sort of constituted witness to its best mind, we try to turn into a kind of grand advertising van, meant to give publicity and credit to the inventions, sound or unsound, of the ordinary self of individuals. ”

“ The right rôle for monarchy to-day is, believe me, to be above all things democratic—not by truckling to the ideas of the people in power—the 'ruling classes' as they still call themselves—but by daring to be human and natural, and to refuse absolutely to be dehumanized on the score of its high dignity and calling. ”

“ A King, protected by a Constitution, can do no wrong. He is unshackled with responsibility. He is empowered with the comfort of exercising the executive authority for the benefit of the nation, while all the harsher duties, and all the censures they create, devolve on others. ”

“ The government of a weak, irresolute monarch, may be wise, moderate, and firm;—that of an obstinate, capricious prince, on the contrary, may be feeble, undetermined, and relaxed. The reputation of public measures depends upon the minister, who is responsible, not upon the king, whose private opinions are not supposed to have any weight against the advice of his counsel, whose personal authority should therefore never be interposed in public affairs.—This, I believe, is true constitutional doctrine. ”

“ What is the dignity of the crown, though it were really maintained;—what is the honour of parliament, supposing it could exist without any foundation of integrity and justice;—or what is the vain reputation of firmness, even if the scheme of the government were uniform and consistent, compared with the heart-felt affections of the people, with the happiness and security of the royal family, or even with the grateful acclamations of the populace! Whatever style of contempt may be adopted by ministers or parliaments, no man sincerely despises the voice of the English nation. ”