Where’s the Queen?

Kilroy M. writes from Australia:

Where is the British Queen in all of this? You’d think she might at least muster the strength to utter some liberal platitude urging restraint, but no, not even this. She’s absent without leave. Her silence is an abdication. Her privileged position is supposed to be paid for by her willingness to risk speaking truth, even if it’s uncomfortable to “her” feckless cowardly Ministers of State. I’m a monarchist, but I am beginning to really hate my Monarch, really hate her.

Incidentally, here is a piece by Theodore Dalrymple from The Australian. He gets it. The riots are a product of the managerial rights based system. The system whose growth the Queen has aided and abetted. I feel sick inside watching all of this unfold.

LA replies:

You wrote:

Her privileged position is suppose to be paid for by her willingness to risk speaking truth, even if it’s uncomfortable to “her” feckless cowardly Ministers of State.

I don’t think that’s true at all. She can only say what the government tell her to say. Her position is definitively not to say whatever she thinks is true.

Kilroy replies:

But she does embody the nation, and in times of national disintegration her silence is more than just symbolic of the spiritual death of her people. Besides, when the nation is on the cusp of total dissolution, to hell with what she officially can and can’t say, to hell with the managerial Parliament, its sensibilities and its impotent institutions of state. Her silence in this time of crisis is the final in a long line of exhibits that prove she has no role to play in the national conscience except being a purely cosmetic archaism decorating a bankrupt political elite. If I understand correctly, the armed forces swear an oath to the Crown. It’s not like she has no influence. By choosing to remain passive, she implicitly acknowledges an acceptance of the status quo. She becomes, therefore, the enemy of those who love the institution of the Crown for the Traditions it carries.

- end of initial entry -

Philip M. writes from England:

Kilroy is quite right to despise the Queen. Here are a couple of quotes from an article in which the historian David Starkey is quoted about his experience meeting the Queen:

When Starkey was showing the Queen round an exhibition he had curated about Elizabeth I in 2003, he found her more preoccupied with the late arrival of her drink (gin and Dubonnet) than the works on display. Her only comment on the exhibition was that one of the objects was hers.

Starkey said that he had read all of her Christmas broadcasts. “It’s quite fascinating, because her frames of reference to the monarchy, despite this 1,500-year history, are entirely her father and grandfather.

“There is a reference to Elizabeth I. It was in the second Christmas broadcast when—I remember vividly—there was all this talk about a second Elizabethan age. Elizabeth turns to this in her broadcast, and says: “Frankly, I do not myself feel at all like my Tudor forebear, who was blessed with neither husband nor children, who ruled as a despot and was never able to leave her native shores.” “

So there you have it. Queen Elizabeth the First is, like, not relevant, coz like, she didn’t take any foreign holidays and dat. Still she’s got one thing right, she is nothing like her Tudor forebear.

The woman is vacuous. Her mind is far closer to that of the rioters than to people such as myself or Kilroy.

James P. writes:

I get the feeling from Kilroy’s cri de coeur that he expected the Royal Family to take a strong stand for “tradition” in the face of leftist anarchy. There is simply no reason to expect this, because the Royal Family has no traditionalist or right-wing inclinations whatsoever. They are members in good standing of the leftist political elite. VFR has discussed this on numerous occasions, and I challenge anyone to cite a single example of them standing up for traditional principles or defying leftist orthodoxy. Those who think the Royal Family are somehow a secret bastion of traditionalism who have been muzzled by their leftist enemies are clinging to vain hope in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The Royals are not hypocrites or puppets—they speak and act in accordance with their genuine beliefs.

August 12

JN writes:

I don’t know that it’s true to say that the Queen has merely been blind and uninvolved in the fall of Britain. She was instrumental in persuading Margaret Thatcher against supporting Ian Smith’s attempt to form a compromise government with the non-Marxist black nationalists in Rhodesia. Cares a lot about having plenty of Commonwealth realms to visit.. not so much about whether they are still viable nations.

Michael S. writes:

If Queen Elizabeth were really a traditionalist, she wouldn’t have knighted all those rock stars.

Kilroy writes:

Thank you to Philip and James, and of course to Lawrence for your responses. I realise that the idea of Monarchy may seem a little counter-intuitive to your U.S. readers and perhaps a little exotic for others. The monarch is of course a product of her time, which is a serious problem. I would recommend the dissertation by Prof. Andrew Fraser which was published by the Samuel Griffith Society in 2005, “Monarchs and Miracles” (Chapter VI), in which he argues for a need of a “patriot King.” To those interested, it would give some insight also into Australia’s traditionalists and their position on these matters.

LA writes:

JC in Houston points out that Elizabeth I was of course not a forebear of the present Queen in the sense of being a biological ancestor. Elizabeth II is a descendant of George I, the German prince of Hanover who was installed as king of Great Britain in 1714 because, when the Stuart line ran out with the death of Queen Anne, he was the nearest Protestant descendant (through the female line) of the first Stuart king, James I, who had died in 1625. The family name of the British royal family changed from Hanover to Saxe-Coburg when Queen Victoria married Albert of Saxe-Coburg. The name was changed again to Windsor during the First World War because of discomfort with a German name, and the name Windsor was even kept when Elizabeth married Philip, whose own family history and name history is far more complicated, but whose surname was Mountbatten at the time he married her.

It’s worth pointing out that twice in history the English or British royal line has run out, and a new line was started by finding a qualified descendant of an earlier king. The Tudor line ran out with the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, and a successor was found in James Stuart king of Scotland, who was a descendant, on the female line, from Elizabeth’s grandfather and the founder of the Tudor line, Henry VII. The Stuart line ran out with the death of Queen Anne in 1714, and, similar to what had happened with the death of Elizabeth, a successor was found by going back to a descendent of Anne’s great grandfather James I, the first Stuart monarch.

Also, I have called for the Windsor line to be replaced. In the December 2010 entry “Queen of Dhimmis, Empress of the anti-Empire, Defender of the Islamic Faith, Head of the Surrender of England,” I wrote in a comment:

I think the answer is that the British royal famly has made a conscious decision to facilitate the Islamization of the West.

Since I support the British monarchy, this raises the question, not of ending the monarchy, but of removing the Windsor dynasty and replacing it. I wonder if there are any qualified descendants of Victoria, Edward VII, or George V who are not hopeless liberal decadents like the Windsors and who could be raised to the throne, just as, when the Tudor line ran out, the English went back to a descendant of the first Tudor king Henry VII, James I of Scotland, and that was the beginning of the Stuart line; and just as, when the Stuart line ran out, they went back to a descendant of the first Stuart king James I, George of Hanover, and made him king. The Windsor line hasn’t run out, but it has become destructive and dangerous to the survival of England, and therefore must go.

I hate referring to the famously staunch and stolid Elizabeth as a “hopeless liberal decadent,” but her kow-towing to Islam is a deal killer as far as I’m concerned.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 11, 2011 09:53 AM | Send