Dieu Defend Le Droit

I have just remembered that some years ago, work along the bypass in Lanchester revealed a memorial plaque to the former Princess Diana. Soon after her death, it had been erected by the Parish Council, which still had many of the same members. Yet no one could remember its ever having existed.

Anyway, what is the monarchy for? Well, it binds to the modern or postmodern State people who might otherwise experience various degrees of estrangement from it. Thus, the pioneering social democracies have been in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Scandinavia and the Benelux countries, with institutions such as the National Health Service enjoying more or less universal support even among the downright reactionary.

In death, however, Diana has had the role of binding to the State, through the monarchy, a very different category. Those are the people defined by the social revolution since the 1960s, the economic revolution since the 1980s, and the constitutional revolution since the year of her demise. The people most likely to regard the monarchy as pressingly irrelevant or offensive.

And why would Diana not serve that purpose? The Spencers are one of the great Whig dynasties. They played no small part in engineering the accession of the present Royal line, and they bankrolled its indigence for much of the eighteenth century.

Now, not dissimilarly, the allegiance of a sufficiently large and vocal section of society is conditional on the great expectations of Diana's son and grandson. What matters to those people is that William V and George VII are the coming kings of Dianese descent. Some of them even demand, although they will always do so in vain, that a generation be skipped, so that Diana's heir might ascend the Throne immediately upon its next becoming vacant.

That is a kind of Whig Jacobitism. But it has probably secured the monarchy well into the twenty-second century. And with it, the support of even the downright reactionary for the social democracy of the modern or postmodern State.