Tool in the Crown
It's all falling apart without Kate, so here's a long read on the British monarchy and a Nazi I saw at the airport
This essay was originally published on the day of King Charles’ coronation last summer and is a considered look at the inherent contradiction of modern monarchy. The British royal family is back in the news this week (not in a good way). Kate Middleton checks out for a bit and the wheels are already falling off. Everything has gone a bit nuts. A very badly photoshopped picture has created a giant headache for people who need more than ever to seem accessible and relatable. If you’re interested in why things have unravelled so quickly and the root of the obsession with the royal family in Britain and beyond, this essay may provide some context. Thanks for your support of Peak Notions. I appreciate every read, share, subscription and word of mouth recommendation!
Conspiracy abounds and Photoshop wouldn’t be blamed for cancelling the palace subscription.
Sometimes, you can guess a person’s ideological position by observing them. It should go without saying that we shouldn’t make such assumptions. We should treat everyone we meet as a unique individual and not make pre-emptive judgements. We do though, all the time. I don’t want to be able to tell how a person votes from their haircut, but certain ways of presenting in the world are heavily associated with particular ideas. Margaret Thatcher’s helmet hair did not bellow ‘legalise heroin’, while a blue asymmetric page boy cut doesn’t usually rest upon the pate of someone who considers marriage the strict union between a man and a woman.
When I saw a guy at Stansted airport with a shaved head, big leather boots, a black jacket covered in German flags and Nordic runes and an actual swastika tattooed on his neck, I felt safe in the assumption that I could guess where he stood on issues like immigration, or on the state of Israel. I could confidently surmise how he might feel about my relationship with my husband and others like us, who may look different from one another on the outside but have precisely the same fight on every Ikea trip that all other couples have. Why? Because skin tone does not determine our ability to love, value or connect with one another, and it does not preserve any of us from the deep and abiding conflict prompted by shuffling to the centre of an Ikea without reaching an agreement on a mattress and knowing how much further you have to go to get to the exit. Love, human connection and having a fight in Ikea are universal.
Evidently, airport security felt they had the same uncanny ability to determine this guy’s ideological affiliations because they hauled him in for a quick chat. He was a curious sight indeed. I couldn’t help but imagine that if I were a card-holding fascist trying to get on a flight, I might find a sensible pair of prim beige chinos, adopt a simpering expression and tie a jaunty little cravat over my swastika neck tattoo just to throw them off. Just to make my trip a bit smoother. Wearing the sartorial equivalent of a sandwich board reading ‘Enthusiastic nazi attempting to travel internationally… all good?’ really seems like the action of a person who is aching to avoid boarding the flight they’re booked on. Or a person who just deeply wants others to know what he symbolises no matter the cost. Or an academic with a very distasteful press-on tattoo researching airport security response to unbelievably suspicious-looking passengers. I hoped for the latter.
All this is to say that you may not be shocked at the idea of an Irish person who doesn’t care for the British monarchy. ‘Oh how original’, you might think while swigging a glass of gin to steel yourself against what you can only (accurately – I warn you) presume to be the nationally mandated coming tirade. ‘What an individual you are’. You might even dismiss my perspective as an inherited one based largely on postcolonial priggishness and a pathological inability to appreciate Kate Middleton’s penchant for wearing a nude court shoe with almost everything. Certainly, having a British lad on a large horse rock up to your town isn’t great, particularly when he claims all your stuff as his own and then renames the town itself (because the original name was too hard for him to say) to the deep confusion of everyone who has lived there since before that afternoon, while you and the rest of the family look at him in shock, putting your forks down mid-Sunday lunch, and agree with a glance amongst yourselves that his uniform is just a bit much, really. Epaulettes? What is he trying to compensate for?
I happened upon a practice run in London last week
Now clearly that description is not even vaguely historically accurate. I wouldn’t defend it in court and if you saw me at the bus stop and read it back to me, I’d lie and claim never to have written it. However, it does capture the seam of casual resentment Irish people still carry in our now mostly friendly relationship with our formerly handsy neighbours. It helps explain why the higher up you look in terms of British aristocracy, the narrower Irish eyes get. Those in other formerly colonised territories are likely the same. By the time you travel up the line to the king, collective eyes are basically crushed entirely shut. That’s probably for the best – it means that much of Ireland, at least, won’t be watching the coronation ceremony today, when the eldest son of the last British monarch, who was appointed by God himself in a long line of people appointed by God (back enough generations until you arrive at the first guy who grabbed power and was really more of a violent entrepreneur – like an aspiring mobster – than a mere aristocrat), will have a crown buckling under questionably-sourced jewels placed atop his noggin. He will be anointed with holy oils and process about in a ritual that we have ceased to recognise as goofy because it has existed for a sufficiently long time to be considered solemn and culturally important.
Thankfully for them, God desires this chosen family to dwell in palaces, marry people of a similarly sheltered and elevated background to keep the blood pure and the money close, to cut ribbons and take selfies outside new animal shelters so that we all feel they’re useful and down to earth, and provide a rich colostrum of celebrity stories to keep the immune system of British media robust during the digital winter. This public-facing blandness is their compromise to modernity, given that they lose mystique in the modern age’s refusal to respect their separateness at its traditional distance and elevation. Ribbon cutting is hungry work, and they must earn their morning bread and Fabergé eggs by creating the illusion that they are not so distant really. Not so unlike us.
The aftermath of the rehearsal
The new king, of course, does not inspire fervour in his subjects as his mother did. His pinched, rufescent air of constipated tweed-clad Caligulism cannot approach her dutiful stoicism, forged over seven decades of keeping us in the dark about every political view she held bar one – we can safely presume that she was pro-monarchy. Maybe two; we can also guess with confidence that Queen Elizabeth II probably wasn’t a communist, given her personal assets were estimated at around £430million in 2022. She was at any rate immensely good at her job. Her dutiful approach distracted from the preposterousness of what she represented, and her age and affable expression somehow made the archaism of the institution less menacing. Yes – she symbolised a form of imperialism and radical inequality which is violently at odds with even the fluffiest modern liberal values, but she looked very nice in pastels so that really helped.
Britain’s new king unfortunately does not look his best in pastels. According to his friend and biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, he would find the idea of an oath of allegiance as floated in the press earlier this week “abhorrent”. “Unless” the king’s expression in every photo suggests, “you guys were like, into it. Are you into it? No? Oh okay. Me neither. Gross, right? An ‘oath’ of ‘allegiance’. As if. It would have been so gross. No we’re all totally right to be completely not into it. At all. Like, at all. Right… Right?”
When you’re born into a system that forbids most people from speaking to or standing near you without advance permission and strict protocol, rather more abhorrent than everyone swearing an oath to you is demanding a mass declaration of loyalty only to be answered with a large wave of apathetic silence. Like taking a wet lettuce to the face at speed or being crowned at the Miss World pageant with the sense that everyone would have preferred Miss Ukraine to win, and then taking your victory prance only to be met with a sea of harrowed, disgusted faces and realising that the jig is up. The mass consent to reign has been withdrawn and now you’re going to have to start packing your satin gowns (Barbour jackets and wellies) and get the eff offstage (out of Balmoral). You would not feel, in any meaningful sense, like the most beautiful girl in the world.
Most arguments against today’s coronation in media, or which contextualise the more tepid public response to the event which will cost around £100million (that’s a lot of bunting and holy oil), suggest that such a fuss is inappropriate during a cost-of-living crisis; an insult to the millions of British people struggling to eat and heat their homes. That’s a bad argument. It tends to come vaguely from the left, and rests on the idea that the radical inequality represented by monarchy would be more palatable if we had… less inequality. This makes no sense. I cannot find the principle people making this argument are attempting to base it on or maximise (because there isn’t one – it’s a purely optical position based on emotions and a desire to simultaneously vote Labour and get a selfie with Kate), but it sounds awfully like a suggestion that there are conditions under which radical inequality is fine, or even a good thing, and conditions under which it’s bad PR and should be avoided.
It is also a failure to understand what monarchy is – a form of structural inequality which centres tradition and conceptions of inherited privilege based on genetic, cultural and economic purity and nepotism. The fact that Kate Middleton seems nice and has shiny hair does not change this but serves only to give the situation a stylish (and admittedly shiny) hairstyle. Here is a family set apart by historic claims to superiority and separateness – an organisation whose justification for existence rivals only the Catholic Church in its corruption and dark history. It differs from the Church in that the family’s women are its primary consumer product. It is they who capture and hold the public interest.
I think the whole business of today is quite silly, but despite ripping on the royal family for over a thousand words now, I don’t much mind them really. As a foreigner in Britain, I don’t have skin in the game. I don’t have a say in who wears a crown and sits in the big chair (incidentally neither do British people but we’ll set that uncomfortable reality aside) and I don’t want a say. There is a solid argument for the existence of the monarchy, though it isn’t one being made with much enthusiasm. The royal family is a useful lightning rod for a culture that is riven with confusion. It gives people something to look at. Something ‘nice’ that connects Britain to its past in a sanitised way.
Imperialism is so deep in the heart of British history and identity that here are a nation and culture scrambling to assemble a self-image untouched by the darkness of that imperial history. Untouched by the ideas that led a culture to pitch itself over the earth with such confidence in its own pre-eminence that it considered the action of obliterating and replacing other cultures while plundering natural resources a kindness and a gift. A rising tide lifting all boats. The tide does not consult the boats before deciding where to carry them. The issue is that this action was so central to its identity for so long that now there is shame attached to imperialism rather than status in global popular consciousness in the west at least, Britain must root its culture in institutions and traditions like the royal family, whose current fuzzier iteration might be confused for a band of celebrity philanthropists if we can just refrain from looking too closely at where the money, property and status came from. At what it still represents. If we can just unfetter the symbol from what it symbolises.
The same people who identify as largely liberal or left will frequently make bad arguments for keeping the royal family in situ. Financial arguments – ‘they make money’. Child labour is quite profitable but I don’t hear them advocating jamming seven-year-olds up chimneys as we used to for the sake of easing the cost of living crisis. They are often the same people who will suggest that it is moral to remove statues or rename buildings bearing the name of questionable historic figures (like the recent ‘denaming’ of Trinity College Dublin’s Berkeley library in baffling contrast to the very public visit of the now Prince and Princess of Wales to the college three years ago). They’ll advocate pulling down statues erected by and bearing the ancestors and beneficiaries of such people in the name of sensitivity, but also go online to try and buy the jacket they wore to the Chelsea Flower Show.
If equality is something you claim to care about, as many people do (particularly the white, educated middle classes) then the fascination, the decorative plates, the bunting, the divine right of kings and the secret envy of people in palaces doesn’t work. The two are fundamentally and thoroughly incompatible. Even if, when you set monarchy aside, you find a deep cultural rot underneath that you don’t know what to do with and which reveals a bigger and more frightening problem.
Today is a strange day. The veneer of monarchy has never been flimsier. The level of public interest and belief seems never to have been lower, though of course there is still a level of genuine enthusiasm and even more people who will engage passively; those who will go into the centre of London today to be part of and witness what is without doubt an historic event. If the monarchy were abolished tomorrow, the idea that all their wealth would go back into the public system to feed and house the poor and revive the NHS is a complete fiction. Laughable. Coveting the institution’s assets is not a good reason to get rid of it.
As an institution, the British royal family is not kind for all its charitable work, it is not egalitarian, it is not able to modernise or adapt without undermining its justification for existing. It is the last formal link to empire and to that long lingering conception of British might equating to right. It is a living memory of what many British people still quietly consider the nation’s former greatness. People who come from places that have historically felt the fist of empire close around them understand what they are looking at today, and that it is far from harmless. People from Britain understand this too, which is why speaking that reality is taboo. It is why the threats of Jamaica (among others) to cut ties with the crown are all a bit awkward. It makes people uncomfortable and casts a real pall over the party atmosphere. It wilts the floral arrangements and curdles the cream in a Victoria sponge cake. Today, all the tension and dissonance coalesce as we watch a cantankerous aristocrat elevated to a rank just a bit lower than god.
The guy in the airport advertised what he represented so openly that it made everyone around him uncomfortable. No one could reasonably deny what they were seeing; he took pains to represent a particular set of beliefs and way of living in his presentation and demeanour. We should do everyone (yes, even an airport neo-fascist) the credit of believing them when they take pains to tell us what it is that they represent and believe. We should presume them to be sincere, and we should engage with them accordingly. That will be why he was hauled in by security for a chat. He should be.
This morning the head of the UK’s leading republican movement and five other anti-monarchy protest organisers were arrested while engaged in the terrorising act of collecting placards. They should not be. The Met police had announced earlier this week that they would exhibit “low tolerance” for anyone attempting to “undermine” today’s events. Those anti-monarchist protestors will be a small minority amidst a crowd composed mostly of monarchists who are genuine enthusiasts, people with nothing else to do on a Saturday, and people hoping to detach their retinas via the reflected gleam coming from Kate Middleton’s (again, admittedly great) hair. If you do take the time to watch a man crowned today, you cannot reasonably deny the truth of your own eyes. It’s all there in the open. Monarchy tells us frankly what it represents. It has always told us. We just have to find the words to describe it.
Notwithstanding the trauma of my detached retinas from seeing Kate's very shiny hair without the protection of nuclear test googles circa 1943, I remain determined to finish wiping up the coffee which has unceremoniously spewed from my nose as I listened to your unparalleled talent, Laura. As a Yank of Danish and Irish heritage (and a mix of other bright white bits), I give just less than two shits about the royals, so can unemotionally and categorically scratch my not-as-shiny-haired head at all the fuss about a coronation. It is technically a bit of identifiable history happening in the moment, so likely that is of more interest than anything else. Not that I watched any of it, but it is mildly interesting for that reason alone.
Having tossed off a different third-suffixed monarch a couple centuries ago, we have nevertheless retained our own capitalist monarchy, which has run more than amok since the early 1980s with the institutionalization of voodoo as an economic policy. Things have, in fact, trickled down, but as the saying goes, shit runs downhill.
Loved Mabel's contributions to the intro; keep up the great work, both of you! (The other) Kate
As a Canadian, we get our fill of the monarchy and their absurd role of assent but somehow we enthusiastically are adding King Chuck to our currency. My objection is utilitarian - we don't need them, their authorization, or their credibility but acknowledge that as a people we suffer from a powerful inferiority complex that they assuage.
You did poke me with the equality argument. However laudable, the equality story is a naive myth and gradients of inequality seem nonsensical. I recognize the obscenity of flagrant opulence but I only need to see the pink stucco McMansions that circle my city to realize that 4000 sq ft is only a distinction compared to 10000 sq ft and from there, it doesn't seem to make a difference. If I was in the 'eat and heat' group, it doesn't much matter whether Chuck and Cam have 5 castles or 100, none of that is going to trickle down, and maybe it shouldn't.