Royal magic fading even in loyal Britain

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): When I was a child growing up in Newfoundland, which was then still a British colony in its head even though it was already a Canadian province in law, we actually used to chant:

The 24th of May

Is the Queen's Birthday.

If we don't get a holiday,

We'll all run away.

As I recall, it always worked. But the royal magic has now died even in Britain: there will be no public celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II's 70th birthday. Which, of course, does not fall on the 24th of May at all.

That's just her official birth date, a concept straight out of Kafka. Her actual 70th birthday was on Sunday, 21 April -- and her loyal subjects in Britain and overseas celebrated it by avoiding any discussion of a republic.

There were no community bonfires, no civic ceremonies, no fawning commentaries on British television, none of the claptrap that would have adorned the event even 10 years ago. The jig is up, not because Elizabeth has failed in her duties, but because the marital problems of her wayward children are too banal for words.

The British monarchy will not vanish tomorrow, but it is unlikely to recover. At some point in the not too distant future, the royal family will either be peremptorily reduced to the humble status of the Scandinavian monarchies, or simply pensioned off. And you wonder why it took so long. Three hundred and fifty years too long, in fact.

One of the enduring puzzles of modern history is why Britain is still a monarchy. This, after all, was the first modern country on the planet. Back in the 1640s, the English became the first mass society in the history of the human race to kill their king and create a republic.

Moreover, Britain stayed out in front, in terms of innovation, for a very long time. At the end of the 18th century, the British were the first people on the planet to have an industrial revolution. Near the end of the 19th century, London became the first city in human history to exceed two million people. And within living memory, the United Kingdom was the first country in the world to launch a regular television service.

And yet, through over three centuries of ground-breaking change, Britain has clung to its anachronistic monarchy. Having carried out the first true revolution of modern times during the Civil War of the 1640s, the English then asked the royal family to come back in 1660. They have not seriously reconsidered their commitment to the monarchy from then until (finally) today.

It was other people who picked up the ideas that the English had pioneered. In 1776, transplanted English people living in the American colonies rebelled against the British crown and founded the first republic that endured.

Fifteen years later, the French followed the American example, killed their own king, and became the first republic in Europe. (They are now on their fifth republic.) Today, the vast majority of countries all over the planet are republics. Where did the British go wrong?

Wrong is definitely where they went, for the restored British monarchy was not a housebroken Scandinavian affair. It was a constitutional monarchy, but even a part-time madman like George III had a huge influence on the way government worked in Britain.

Despite a 150-year head start over everybody else in Europe, Britain did not become a recognizably democratic country until the great Reform Bills of the mid-19th century gave the vote to most ordinary citizens. And the monarchy remained the anchor of a pseudo-feudal social system, large parts of which still survive in contemporary Britain, whose hallmarks were obsequiousness towards one's superiors and snobbishness towards one's subordinates.

So what happened? My guess is that the British, and particularly the English, are still paying the price of having been first. For it must have been absolutely terrifying 350 years ago to be the only republic in a world of monarchies. Especially if you had just killed your king.

Oliver Cromwell and his fellow revolutionaries were mostly brave men, but they were awed by what they were doing. That's why they chose the word "Commonwealth" for their country without a king, leaving the more inflammatory term "republic" for the Americans to pick up over a century later.

They lived in an age when all political action still had to be ratified by religion (in many respects they were in the same situation as Iran's mullahs today), and when kings claimed that they had been anointed by God. There was a palpable fear among them that they had gone too far. When the opportunity arose they scuttled back under the wing of monarchy -- and stayed there for centuries.

"There's such divinity doth hedge a king," Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago, but nobody believes that now. In the increasingly secular 20th century, the British royal family was reduced to seeking popular approval by staging its own version of a nationwide soap opera, complete with fairy-tale marriages. And when that facade collapsed in a welter of divorces and public recriminations, there was nothing left.

Nobody blames Queen Elizabeth, but hardly anybody expects that her son Charles will ever succeed her on the throne. There's talk about trying to save the monarchy by skipping a generation and making Charles's son William the heir to the throne, but his glands will be active too in a very few years. Given the Windsor track record and the rapacious British press, his chances of avoiding scandal must be pretty low.

So it may be curtains at last for the most successful royal comeback in the history of the world. Just remember: if and when the British declare a republic, it should be the Second Republic.