SCHOLAR ISLAND
Monarch
Monarchy –not so much that it works, but it is the only social order best worth trying to make work….
"How strange and rather wonderful it is that it should be the role of monarchy today not to act out fantasy but to be the one institution that seems able to be natural and normal."
Peregrine Worsthome
"A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life....A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and as such , it rivets mankind."
Walter Bagehot
"We must consider our subjects' good before our own. They are indeed like a part of ourselves since we are the head of the body, and they are the limbs. We must give them laws for their own advantage only; and we must use the power we have over them only so as more effectively to bring them happiness."
King Louis XIV
"There isn’t any power. But there can be influence. The influence is in direct proportion to the respect people have for you….Monarchy is, I do believe, the system mankind has so far evolved which comes nearest to ensuring stable government."
Prince Charles
In His Own Words
"There is properly no contradiction between royalty and democracy; rather they supplement and complete each other….Royalty at its best has always functioned in unison with a willing allegiance, and has been to that extent dependent on freedom."
Wilson Knight
Royal Throne of Kings
"When royal power supported by aristocracies governed nations, society, despite all its wretchedness, enjoyed several types of happiness which are difficult to appreciate today. Having never conceived of the possibility of a social state other than the one they knew , and never expecting to become equal to their leaders, the people did not question their rights. They felt neither repugnance nor degradation in submitting to severities, which seemed to them like inevitable ills sent by God. The serf considered his inferiority as an effect of the immutable order of nature. Consequently, a sort of goodwill was established between classes so differently favoured by fortune. One found inequality in society, but men's souls were not degraded thereby."
-Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America
"When one day I saw him (Louis-Philippe) driving down the Champs-Elysees, hidden deep inside his carriage, hussars before, behind and on each side, I noticed with surprise that these cavalry-men, with their muskets at the ready, served to make more manifest the state of open strife (between King and people), while giving that strife a look of burlesque. There passing before me went bad conscience personified."
Karl Marx
(Thackeray's description of England's King George IV)
To make a portrait of him at first seemed a matter of small difficulty. There is his coat, his star, his wig, his countenance simpering under it: with a slate and a piece of chalk, I could at this very desk perform a recognizable likeness of him. And yet after reading of him in scores of volumes, hunting him through old magazines and newspapers, having him here at a ball, there at a public dinner, there at races and so forth, you find you have nothing-nothing but a coat and a wig and a mask smiling below it-nothing but a great simulacrum, His sires and grandsires were men. One knows what they were like: what they would do in given circumstances: that on occasion they fought and demeaned themselves like tough good soldiers. The sailor King who came after George was a man: the Duke of York was man, big, burly, loud, jolly, cursing, courageous. But this George, what was he? I look through all his life, and recognize but a bow and a grin. I try to take him to pieces, and find silk stockings, padding, stays, a coat with frogs and a fur collar, a star and blue ribbon, a pocket-handkerchief prodigiously scented, one of Truefitt's best nutty-brown wigs reeking with oil, a set of teeth and a huge black stock , under waistcoats, more under waistcoats, and then nothing. I know of no sentiment that he ever distinctly uttered. Documents are published under his name, but people wrote them-private letters, but people spelt them. He put a great George P. or George R. at the bottom of the page and fancied he had written the paper; some bookseller's clerk, some poor author, some man did the work; saw to the spelling, cleaned up the slovenly sentences, and gave the lax maudlin slipslop a sort of consistency. About George, one can get at nothing actual. That outside, I am certain, is pad and tailor's work; there may be something behind, but what? We cannot get at the character; no doubt never shall. Will men of the future have nothing better to do than to unswathe and interpret the Royal old mummy?
His biographers say that when he commenced house-keeping in that splendid new palace of his, the Prince of Wales had some windy projects of encouraging literature, science, and the arts; of having assemblies of literary characters; and societies for the encouragement of geography, astronomy and botany. Astronomy, geography, and botany! Fiddlesticks! French ballet-dancers, French cooks, horse-jockeys, buffoons, procurers, tailors, boxers, fencing-masters, china, jewel, and gimcrack merchants-these were his real companions.
His natural companions were dandies and parasites. He could talk to a tailor or a cook; but, as the equal of great statement, to set up a creature, lazy, weak, indolent, besotted of monstrous vanity, and levity incurable-it is absurd. They thought to use him, and did for a while; but they must have known how timid he was; how entirely heartless and treacherous, and have expected his desertion. His next set of friends were mere table companions, of whom he grew tired too; then we hear of him with a very few select toadies, mere boys from school or the Guards, whose sprightliness tickled the fancy of the worn-out voluptuary. What matters what friends he had? He dropped all his friends, he never could have real friends. An heir to the throne has flatterers, adventurers who hang about him, ambitious men who use him; but friendship is denied him.
The great war of empires and giants goes on. Day by day victories are won and lost by the brave. Torn smoky flags and battered eagles are wrenched from the heroic enemy and laid at his feet; and he sits there on his throne and smiles, and gives the guerdon of valour to the conqueror. I believe it is certain about George IV, that the had heard so much of the war, knighted so many people, and worn such a prodigious quantity of marshal's uniforms, cocked-hats, cock's feathers, scarlet and bullion in general, that he actually fancied he had been present in some campaigns, and, under the name of General Brock, led a tremendous charge of the German legion at Waterloo.
He is dead but thirty years, and one asks how a great society could have tolerated him? Would we bear him now? In this quarter of a century, what a silent revolution has been working! how it has separated us from old times and manners! How it has changed men themselves! I can see old gentlement now among us, of perfect good breeding, of quiet lives, with venerable grey heads, fondling their grandchildren; and look at them, and wonder what they were once.
What a strange Court! What a queer privacy of morals and manners do we look into! Shall we regard it as preachers and moralists, and cry Woe, against the open vice and selfishness and corruption; or look at it as we do at the king in the pantomine, with his pantomime wife and pantomime courtiers, whose big heads he knocks together, whom he pokes with his pantomime sceptre, whom he orders to prison under the guard of his pantomime beefeaters, as he sits down to dine on his pantomime pudding? It is grave, it is sad: it is a theme most curious for moral and political speculation; it is monstrous, grotesque, laughable with its prodigious littlenesses, etiquettes, ceremonials, sham moralities; it is as serious as a sermon; and as absurd and outrageous as Punch's puppet show.
He the first gentleman of Europe! There is no stronger satire on the proud English society of that day, than that they admired George."
from Thackeray The Four Georges
"The heathen concept of "demigods" persisted in Christian Europe, transposed from mythology into state law. Even far into the modern era, the most important dynasties maintained their claim to descending from Germanic heroes (i.e. heroes from Antiquity), demigods, even pagan gods; indeed, kings had to prove their descent to their own courts and subjects. The genealogies of all medieval German kings and emperors, all English, French, Spanish, and Polish kings, as well as those of the Guelph, Ascanian, Babenberg, Brandenburg, Thuringian, Lorraine and Zahringer families, prove the effectiveness of these unwritten rules of a hereditary European nobility based on bloodline. The family tree of Saint Louis of France (1226-1270) contains only one non-Germanic ancestor in seven generations of 128 ancestors. To understand the exclusivity maintained by this ruling class, we need only follow the genealogical "career" of Saint Louis. He figures over one hundred times as an ancestor of King Henry IV of France (who lived 350 years after him) and approximately 100,000 times as an ancestor of the present head of the now defunct royal house of France. And when we learn that the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian I is listed nearly five hundred times in the genealogy of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, we may understand how the seemingly insurmountable religious barriers were cast aside when a dynastically important marriage was at stake-a phenomenon usually ignored in general studies in history."
Blood: Art, Power, Politics and Pathology
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