Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1 - [15]

British official language identifies monarchy as the most vital act of union, and as an enduring one. The very name of this state “The United Kingdom”, makes clear the centrality of the Crown, and conveys a sense of permanence. The national anthem, too, focuses on the Crown and underlines its endurance.

In his famous commentary on the constitution, the Victoria journalist Walter Bagehot offered a detached, often a sardonic analysis of the monarchy, but he accepted that the institution was a resilient one. Monarchy, Bagehot suggested, benefited from being a relatively easy political system for people to understand. And the appeal of a royal family of the British type was particularly tenacious, he argued, because it virtually guaranteed ‘nice and pretty events' at regular intervals, and held up a glamorous mirror to emotions and choices that were widely shared and familiar. As we were reminded in July 2013^{15 this still holds true.}

Yet Bagehot also recognised that it was inappropriate to place too much stress on royal continuities. Privately he believed that support for the monarchy might well decline as access to education in the UK became more widespread, and he speculated that such a falling away of support was likely to happen sooner in Scotland than in England. Whatever you think of this, in one respect Bagehot was right. To understand how and why monarchy mattered here, one needs to look not just at tradition and custom, but also at disjunctions and at change over time.

A patchwork of different kingdoms existed throughout these islands from the early Middle Ages. England became a single kingdom in the tenth century, while a single king was able to control most of Scotland by the thirteenth century. Wales and Ireland, however, were more fragmented and conflict-ridden, experiencing multiple and competing rulers. And although successive English kings tried to conquer the outer zones of the British Isles, it was, in fact, a Scottish king —

Unit I. UK: from Empire to Democracy

Unit I. UK: from Empire to Democracy

James VI — who finally effected¹ a Union of Crowns, bringing under his single rule in 1603 his own kingdom, Scotland, the kingdoms of Ireland and England, and the principality of Wales.

In the short term the Union of Crowns produced neither royal stability nor unity. In 1643 James's son and successor, Charles I, was executed in public and Britain became briefly a republic. Monarchy returned in 1660; but in 1688 a grandson and namesake of James was driven off the throne to be replaced by a Dutch prince William of Orange and his wife Mary¹⁶¹⁷. There was another change of dynasty in 1714, when the English-born Queen Anne died without direct heirs, and was replaced by George of Hanover, a German prince^{18. As all this suggests, the apparent antiquity of monarchy in these islands masks considerable discontinuities in terms of evolution and the dynasties involved.}

At the same time, while monarchy has often functioned as a national cement and emblem, it has also served to connect all or sections of these islands with other parts of the world. The British Empire, for instance, pivoted ideologically and organisationally on the monarchy. In legal theory, anyone born in the British monarch's dominions anywhere in the world — regardless of religion, race or ancestry — was potentially a British subject, who owed the monarch allegiance and was owed protection in return. The present Queen's position as head of the Commonwealth is in part a pale survival of this previous system and theory of empire-wide British subjecthood.

The sovereign of the United Kingdom is also Supreme Governor of the Church of England, from the late seventeenth century the monarchy was widely viewed as a guarantor and symbol of the prominent Protestantism of Great Britain as a whole, and of the Protestant supremacy in Ireland. It was because the House of Hanover was a Protestant dynasty that most Britons — though not all — were prepared to accept its import and accession to the British throne in 1714. Moreover, as Britain subsequently increased in power and wealth, it became more common for men and women to view it as a new Israel, a chosen land.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the idea that the monarchy was integral to Britain's providential destiny and prosperity ceased to be identified so powerfully with Protestants, and was strengthened by a course of events. In harsh reality the British monarchy was the beneficiary of successive global crises that were almost entirely outside its control. Had the United Kingdom been defeated and/or invaded during the Napoleonic Wars before 1815, or had it been overwhelmed in the First World War or the Second, then monarchy here — as in many other parts of Europe — might well have collapsed or been irredeemably tarnished. As it was, victory in all three of these massive conflicts helped to secure the monarchy's existence, and bestowed^{19 on it a kind of superstitious attraction and charisma.}