The Young Victoria

Back in March I mentioned my anticipation of the film The Young Victoria, starring Emily Blunt, produced by the Duchess of York and with a cameo by Princess Beatrice as one of her great-great-great-great-grandmother's ladies-in-waiting. One of my royalist friends fortunate enough to live in the UK described the movie as "fabulous," so I am very much looking forward to it finally being released in the US in select cities on December 18. Hopefully this movie, which from the trailer promises to be visually stunning, will help to counter the image of Queen Victoria (who ascended the throne at 18, and actually wasn't all that stuffy even when she was old) as a stuffy old lady.

Always Have, Always Will

Kudos to Australia's new opposition leader Tony Abbott, who in an article that must have been painful for the Sydney Morning Herald to publish, has dashed the hopes of republicans who acknowledge that any renewed republican effort must have bipartisan support. ''I support the monarchy, always have, always will, not because I'm a royal groupie,'' he said. ''It's a terrific system of government and I challenge anyone to come up with a better one.''

Kingdom of Canada

Andrew Coyne defends the Canadian monarchy, while suggesting that its long-term future might be best served by making Prince Harry a resident King of Canada. That's an interesting idea, though I would ask Mr Coyne, what about Her Majesty's fourteen other Commonwealth Realms? Even if Prince Harry himself were agreeable, I am not sure there would be enough other members of the Royal Family prepared to leave Britain to give each of them its own monarch. Why is it more problematic for Canada to share its sovereign with the United Kingdom than, say, St Vincent & the Grenadines, where a republican proposal was recently defeated?

The Queen Mother on Politics and Life

Yesterday I finished reading William Shawcross's excellent official biography of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (1900-2002). This post is not a full review--perhaps I will attempt that later--but I wanted to share two delightful private comments from Her Majesty, one from the beginning of her public life and one from near the end.

"I am extremely Anti-Labour. They are so far apart from fairies & owls and bluebells & Americans & all the things I like. If they agree with me, I know they are pretending--in fact I believe everything is pretence to them." [letter to D'Arcy Osborne, 1924] (412)

In the mid-1990s [Major Michael] Parker [organizer of HM's 80th, 90th, and 100th birthday celebrations] had tea with the Princess of Wales and the Queen Mother. When the Princess of Wales said to her, 'We're all so looking forward to your hundredth birthday,' Queen Elizabeth replied, "Oh, you mustn't say that, it's unlucky. I mean I might be run over by a big red bus." Parker said he thought this was very unlikely, to which Queen Elizabeth replied, "No, no, it's the principle of the thing. Wouldn't it be terrible if you'd spent all your life doing everything you were supposed to do, didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't eat things, took lots of exercise, all the things you didn't want to do, and suddenly one day you were run over by a big red bus, and as the wheels were crunching into you you'd say 'Oh my god, I could have got so drunk last night!' That's the way you should live your life, as if tomorrow you'll be run over by a big red bus.' (912)

Act of Settlement revisited, again...

Once again the Act of Settlement and male primogeniture are under scrutiny, as Gordon Brown reportedly prepares to address what the modern world apparently regards as one of the greatest evils imaginable, "discrimination." It does seem like some journalists and politicians like to get excited about this every few years, [fortunately] without anything actually happening. It's almost a ritual. Perhaps this time they mean it, but all those Roman Catholics presumably traumatized by the fact that the Earl of St Andrews is not considered 25th in line to the throne, and all those women supposedly oppressed by the fact that the Princess Royal is 10th rather than 4th, probably shouldn't hold their breath.

Surrender as false resistance

Recently a number of conservative Christian clergy representing the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant traditions signed something called the "Manhattan Declaration" affirming their common opposition to secularist policies regarding abortion and same-sex marriage. Their efforts have been widely hailed, even by Gerald Warner, as representing a bold orthodox challenge to political correctness. But this document is nothing of the kind. In fact it is a sad reflection of the pathetic tendency of "conservative" Christians to concede entirely too much to the liberalism that has paved the way for the current state of affairs they find so objectionable.

I wouldn't bother posting on this here, though, if I hadn't been irked by, among other concessions to the worldview of those the signers claim to oppose, a completely unnecessary swipe at the European monarchies of the past:

In Europe, Christians challenged the divine claims of kings and successfully fought to establish the rule of law and balance of governmental powers, which made modern democracy possible. And in America, Christian women stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement. The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s were led by Christians claiming the Scriptures and asserting the glory of the image of God in every human being regardless of race, religion, age or class.

Far from a daring challenge to secular leftism, this paragraph is a model of the Progressive interpretation of history that uncritically celebrates the advance of "Democracy" and "Equality" and regards the past four centuries or so as an uplifting struggle of liberal Good against reactionary Evil in which Good so far has usually triumphed, an interpretation with which I vehemently disagree. While some Christians did indeed support the developments this paragraph lists, other Christians opposed them. Did they necessarily sin by so doing? Is there now only one Christian position on all the great political controversies of the past? When did universal suffrage, for example, become Christian orthodoxy?

While no Christian monarch ever claimed divinity in a pagan sense, many pious Christians ardently supported royal claims of divinely based authority, with one of the most tragic defenders of "divine right," Charles I, traditionally regarded as a martyr in Anglicanism. Are he and his supporters to be cast into darkness? I am tired of the way official "conservative" Christianity--Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant (the Orthodox usually not so much)--aligns itself with liberalism on every issue other than sex and abortion.

Contemporary Conservative Christianity too often seems to want to say to its liberal enemies, "we really love all the Liberal Progress that's been made and believe in Democracy and Equality and Human Rights and Religious Liberty just as much as you do, we just don't like abortion and homosexuality." Apparently, God was always on the "progressives'" side in past conflicts, He just isn't today, because now having ruined everything else, they're going after sex, and we can't have that, because sexual peccadilloes are absolutely the worst thing imaginable, and the decline of traditional beliefs about sex is ever so much more intolerable than the decline of everything else people used to believe in. Sarcasm aside, this kind of thinking is simply incoherent. Why leftists should pay attention to those who assure them that they've previously always been right about everything, but please let's just not go any farther, is beyond me. As long as conservatives and Christians refuse to challenge the Left's basic premises, offering it only a pale echo, they deserve to lose.

Hitchens on "comedians" vs the Queen

Peter Hitchens defends the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh against the thoughtless jibes of ignorant so-called "entertainers" like Ben Elton (of whom I had happily never heard), who still ludicrously imagine that they are boldly challenging the "establishment" when in 2009 it actually shows far more independence of mind to declare oneself a monarchist, even in the United Kingdom.