Unsteady Crowns E-Book

A.W. Purdue

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 527

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

War and austerity, unrest and revolution: the institution of monarchy has remained stalwart through every challenge levelled at it, but just what is its role and how secure is its future in our modern society? At the beginning of the twentieth century, monarchy was by far the most common form of government: emperors sat on the thrones of Germany, Austria–Hungary, Persia, Japan, China, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, while there were kings of Bulgaria, Serbia, Italy, Romania, Greece, Korea and Cambodia. After he lost his throne in 1952, King Farouk of Egypt predicted that by the end of the century there would be only five kings: the kings of hearts, aces, clubs and spades, and the King of England. That prediction has not come true, for there remain monarchs across the globe. The number of monarchies has appreciably diminished, yet the idea continues to have allure. In Unsteady Crowns, historian A.W. Purdue explores the important role played by monarchies as agents of continuity, guarding and representing the national ethos, and brings the story up to date in a fully revised second edition, exploring the roles of celebrity, rivalry, and much more in monarchies worldwide.

Leseprobe

UNSTEADYCROWNS

About the Author

The late A.W. Purdue was Reader in British History at the Open University. He was the author of sixteen books, including the histories of prominent North-East families. His book publications include The Monarchy and the British People (Batsford, 1998), The Civilisation of the Crowd: Popular Culture in England, 1750–1900 (Sutton Publishing, 1999) and Newcastle: The Biography (Amberley Publishing, 2011).

***

In memoriam

A.W. Purdue 1941–2020

Cover illustration © imageBROKER/Alamy Stock Photo.

First published 2005

This paperback edition first published 2022

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CONTENTS

Introduction: The Power of Kingship

Part One A World Fit for Kings

1 The Far East: Celestial Empires

2 Heirs of the Prophet: Monarchy in the Islamic World

3 Satraps, Vassals and Satellites of Empire

4 The European Cousinhood

Part Two Some Kings Depart

5 Europe’s Monarchies and the First World War

6 Europe: The Survivors

7 The Successors to the Ottoman Empire: The New Monarchies of the Middle East

8 The Far East Between the Wars

Part Three A Further Thinning of the Ranks

9 Monarchies and the Second World War

10 Mixed Fortunes, 1952–1979

Part Four Monarchies in the Contemporary World

11 Anni Horribiles

12 Europe’s ‘English Situations’

13 The Middle and Far East: Monarchy and Religion

14 The Perils of Celebrity

15 Has Monarchy a Future?

Notes

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

THE POWER OF KINGSHIP

At the beginning of the twentieth century, monarchies were the normal form of government and, with the exception of Central and South America, they were to be found throughout the world. By the end of the century, there were fewer than thirty left and many of the remaining monarchs reigned over small states. The form of government that had been universal since early in human history had become a rarity.

It is tempting to see this development as the inevitable result of broad historical forces such as modernisation, industrialisation and secularisation, but in the nineteenth century the institution of monarchy had proved resilient and adaptable in the face of the emergence of sweeping economic and social change. Nor do we find that countries that retain monarchical systems are necessarily the least modern, for Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Japan and Britain are far from synonyms for backwardness.

The twentieth century’s wars were the major reason for the end of so many monarchies. In 1918 three emperors departed, and the Second World War was to see a further cull of kings. Yet few regimes of any sort were able to survive defeat in total war. Only a handful of monarchies with long traditions and sturdy roots were overthrown for other reasons, with only a few disappearing because of popular discontent expressed via the ballot box. The demise of one of the most ancient empires, China, came about largely because of a century of pressure from without, which the imperial system was unable to withstand, and after a succession of humiliations.

The onward march of democracy and the progressive widening of franchises would seem a possible reason for the demise of so many monarchies had such a march taken place, but the twentieth century can scarcely be claimed to have been a heyday for democracy. Regimes far more autocratic and illiberal than most monarchies came and went, and in the early twenty-first century only a fraction of the world’s states can be considered liberal democracies. Most of the surviving monarchies are among them.

This book sets out to consider, within a comparative framework, whether there were structural reasons for the demise of monarchies or whether the end of each has to be explained in terms of national histories and traditions, together with the misfortunes and mistakes of individual monarchs.

It is important at the outset to analyse what is unique about monarchical systems and whether, despite the diversity of monarchies throughout history, we can find common denominators. Were the monarchies of medieval Europe different in essence from their oriental or Arab counterparts, or was monarchy so in tune with universal human needs and instincts that it transcended individual cultural contexts and boundaries? There are many names for monarchs; emperors, ruling princes and dukes, sultans, emirs and even African chiefs are or have been monarchs. The essential characteristic of monarchy is royal authority, with the monarch, at least in theory, exercising ultimate authority by virtue of the special form of legitimacy.

It is conventional to divide modern monarchies into specific types: constitutional, autocratic or theocratic. Such divisions are useful and important, but we must remember that they are not polarities or even discrete, and that monarchies are positioned on a spectrum with the greater or lesser degrees of political power at the extremes, while all monarchies have some religious dimension. The three main characteristics of monarchy are religious sanction, political power and the hereditary principle, and all modern monarchies continue, if only residually, to be defined by them.

The modern British monarchy is often seen as not only constitutional, but largely symbolic and ornamental, yet the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II made clear the importance of its religious and mystical dimension:

Then shall the Queen go to her Throne and be lifted up into it by the Archbishops and Bishops and other Peers of the Kingdom; and being enthroned, or placed therein, all the Great Officers, those that bear the Swords and the Sceptres, and the Nobles who carried the other regalia, shall stand round the steps of the Throne; and the Archbishop standing before the Queen shall say;

STAND firm and hold fast from henceforth the seat and state of royal and imperial dignity, which is this day delivered unto you, in the Name and by the Authority of Almighty God, and by the hands of us the Bishops and servants of God, though unworthy. And the Lord God Almighty, whose ministers we are, and the stewards of his mysteries, establish your throne in righteousness, that it may stand fast for evermore. Amen.1

What is not always recognised is that coronation and consecration divest the monarch of his or her individuality and past identity. The monarch becomes separate from the run of humanity. Most early artistic portrayals of monarchs are iconic and impersonal; they concentrate upon the crown rather than the man. The separation of the person from the office is shown most clearly in the naming of kings. Eastern traditions demonstrate a greater continuity here, with, as in China, the emperor’s former name never mentioned, or, as in Japan, the emperor’s reign being given a special auspicious name, which becomes the monarch’s name after his death. Even in Europe, the monarch chooses the name by which he will be known as king, with, in Britain, Alberts and Davids becoming Georges or Edwards.

Royal authority has been the norm for the greater part of human history, and the idea of the monarch as head of a family, the head of an organic community of which he or she is the expression, remains as true of monarchy today as at its beginnings. The early origins of monarchy lie in literal kinship with the rule of the chieftain, who was the patriarch of the family, the leader in war and the priest. Such relations between ruler and ruled can still be found today in Africa and parts of the Middle East. The chieftain’s office was not necessarily based on primogeniture but was hereditary in that rulers were usually chosen from a leading family. The early monarch was the lawmaker or law interpreter, the general or protector, and the intermediary between the spirits and the living, the past and the present. Early peoples felt perpetually threatened, and, it has been argued, the beginnings of kingship were probably located in their quest for protection ‘against myriad hostile forces – natural, supernatural and human’.2 Among German tribes, as among the African, the whole clan was believed to have a spiritual power, which ensured good crops, victory in battle and the power to cure diseases. Such powers were expressed through the king, but if he failed could he really be a true king?

The magical origins of kingship are demonstrated very clearly by the importance attached to the regalia and treasures of monarchies. The crown, sword and sceptre became standard symbols of monarchy in Europe and have their origins in its earliest history. The stewardship of the three items that comprise the Japanese regalia, the sacred mirror, the jewel and the sword, is essential to legitimate sovereignty. In the Malay sultanates, regalia include musical instruments and weapons; such symbols of greatness have supernatural powers. Thrones may seem to be merely symbols of power or secular authority, setting the sovereign physically above the courtiers, but they also project the spiritual or magical dimension of kingship.

In Burma, the throne in the main hall of audience in the royal palace of Mandalay was placed exactly under the tall spire that surmounts the roof and seems to pierce the heavens, and it was thought to occupy the ‘centre of the world’, like the cosmic mountain on which Indra, the king of the gods, is seated.3

The Golden Stool of the Asante, supposedly a seventeenth-century gift from Heaven, was so sacred that even the king could not sit upon it, but guarding it was an essential condition for his legitimate rule.

An anthropological study of kingship finds that two characteristics stand out:

The first is that the same highly ritualised elements appear consistently, albeit with different permutations, in societies that have no obvious connection. The second is the extraordinary range of monarchical societies – from the smallest Pacific islands to the complex city-kingdoms of South and South-East Asia to modern European democracies.4

The power and authority of early kings were not unqualified. In the very earliest stages of kingship the association between the king and fertility meant that ‘kings must die’ either at the end of a fixed period of power or when they were no longer young and virile.5 Even later, the very breadth of their responsibilities and the extent of their claims as protectors rendered them vulnerable to failures in matters both within and outside their control. Failure in battle, bad harvests or epidemics could suggest that this was not the legitimate king or that the spirits or the divinity had withdrawn approval. Kingship in sub-Saharan Africa exemplifies this well. Kings were associated with divine power, and their priestly functions were crucial to their power, for these were designed to ensure the spiritual and earthly well-being of subjects. Their semi-divine status and closeness to the ancestors of their lineage group were the reason why many did not appear in public. The importance of their religious role and the ceremonies only they could perform meant that old or infirm monarchs could be retired or killed: ‘In the small kingdom of Ankole in East Africa … the ailing monarch was expected to take poison prepared by his own spiritual advisers.’6

The heads that have worn crowns have always been uneasy. Monarchs received the credit for good times and were the scapegoat for the bad times. Essentially, power was lent or exchanged in return for results. Kings exercised charismatic power, but charisma could not long survive successive failures. As Reinhard Bendix has put it: ‘As long as the ruler and his people share the belief in the ruler’s intercession with the spirits on behalf of the community, the exchange relations of authority is sustained.’7 The problem of maintaining charisma, especially in the face of misfortunes or defeats, has troubled monarchs throughout history, while the alternative problem for the ‘loyal’ subject has been when to decide that the ‘bad’, weak or unlucky king has forfeited his mandate.

Monarchy emerged deeply anchored in religious belief. The act of consecration performed by priests who validated the authenticity of the monarch and had special knowledge of the mysteries, ceremonies and ritual by which he was consecrated was crucial to his acceptance as legitimate. This led in many cultures to a sharing of royal power with some sort of priestly order, and everywhere to an ultimate check upon kings who no longer seemed to have the support of divine providence.

In the West, two different patterns developed. In the eastern part of the Roman Empire, there was no real division between Church and State, and ultimate religious and secular authority was lodged in the person of the emperor. In a sense not found in western Europe, the emperor represented God on Earth, the symbol of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Byzantine Empire lasted for over a thousand years. In many ways the position of its emperors was closer to the position of oriental monarchs than to west European counterparts. The Patriarch was clearly subordinate to the emperor, and though he looked after internal Church affairs, the charge of maintaining the Christian nature of the Empire was the Emperor’s. In the western part of the Empire, Germanic tribal traditions and the expanding influence of the Catholic Church came together. On the one hand, there was the tradition of tribal chiefs representing the principle of leadership in war and election by acclamation, while the Church represented principles of hierarchy and law. These two principles merged when Carolingian kings were consecrated by the Pope, but that very act revealed limitations upon royal authority. Whereas the Eastern Church accepted the emperor as the representative of God on Earth, Western kings were expected to rule under God’s laws as interpreted by the Church. Indeed, west European monarchs had constraints on their power from both above and below, for if consecration demonstrated the superior position of the Church, acclamation represented the consent of the nobility. The Carolingian Regent, Pepin, was elected king by nobles and then anointed by Bishop Boniface. Charlemagne managed to elevate his association with the divine by adding to his consecration ceremony the words ‘by the Grace of God’, but it was, nevertheless, by ecclesiastical authority that he was consecrated. Kingship had, however, mystical or religious dimensions. The need to be victorious in battle might be a secular duty, but the power to cure certain diseases pointed clearly to a God-given position.

The division of authority in medieval Europe between kings and popes or bishops, and between State and Church, was not general throughout the world, though in Japan an inversion of this developed, with emperors for centuries having a largely mystical, symbolic and priestly role, while secular power was invested in shoguns. In Islamic society, the caliph was not forced to share authority with anyone and had a dual religious and temporal role; he wore the mantle of the Prophet’s authority. In China, the emperor was accepted as the mediator between the Middle Kingdom and the Divine, and had a mandate from Heaven; his position was underpinned by the belief that, with the assistance of learned advisers, he alone could perform the ceremonies and rituals necessary to the continued success of society. China was not a confessional state, but there was acceptance of the emperor’s divine role which was founded on animist beliefs and traditions. There was no Church to support or thwart him, while the Confucian influence that came further to support his authority was not a religion but rather a philosophy that sought harmony and order in the relations between ruler and ruled, authority and subject, and past and present. Although simple subjects might confuse the position of emperors, who had a special sacerdotal role in being able to influence heavenly authority, Chinese and Japanese emperors were not gods.

The two related and overlapping conceptions of kingship, the priest and the warrior, could thus be contained in the one office or be divided into a dualism, sometimes harmonious, sometimes fractious. Even republics were affected by the tension between secular and religious authority with the Roman Republic, after the expulsion of the Tarquins, finding it necessary to maintain a rex sacrorum whose duties were confined to the carrying out of religious rites. The Dalai Lama of Tibet is often cited as coming closest to the early origins of kingship and to theocracy. He is held to possess unlimited spiritual and secular authority, as he is recognised as the reincarnation of Avolokitesvara, the legendary founder of Tibet. The Dalai Lama did not, however, become sovereign of Tibet until the middle of the seventeenth century, and Dalai Lamas shared power with the Panchen Lama and for a while with temporal kings. Such dualism was found in most states under Tibetan influence, such as Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan, where the tradition was to have a spiritual and a temporal ruler. Even after the Gurkha conquest of Nepal and the coming of Hinduism rather than Buddhism as the dominant religion, this division was revived in the nineteenth century with the creation of hereditary Prime Ministers, the Ranas.

Religion reinforced monarchy and legitimised it, but it could also be a brake upon monarchical power. This has been held to be the case in India, where the combination of religion and a priestly caste, the Brahmins, has been seen as effectively limiting secular and kingly power. Even kings regarded as divine depended upon priests for all religious functions, and the social order was ordained by religion, with the result that ‘politics, bereft of much opportunity to organise social life, had such shallow roots that it was fundamentally unstable’.8 Although this view that the state in India was epiphenomenal is longstanding and was held, among others, by Marx and Weber, it has been challenged by Nicholas B. Dirks, who, using the small southern Indian kingdom of Pudukkottai as a detailed case study, has argued that its Kallar kings ruled and that the ideas ‘of royal authority and honor, and associated notions of power, dominance and order’ were well established.9 Nevertheless, most Indian states and monarchies do seem to have been relatively weak and short-lived, and Indian civilisation has been united politically only three times, by the native Mauryans, the Muslim Mughal Empire and the British.

The principle by which a monarch came to be invested in his position was not always a clear-cut case of primogeniture within a hereditary system. The Islamic world came to be divided in the century after Muhammad between the majority view that successors should be chosen from among the companions of the Prophet by a process of acclamation (the view of the Sunni Muslims) and a minority (Shi’ite), which argued for direct hereditary descent within the Prophet’s Umayyad clan. Islamic monarchy had, save under the strongest rulers, an ineradicable tendency to instability, whether under the early Arab caliphs or under the great sultanates which later ruled over the Ottoman Empire, India and Persia. One factor in this was the problem of succession. A hereditary system based upon primogeniture was difficult to establish when rulers had large numbers of wives and vast harems, and even the practice of fratricide by the established heir was unable to prevent challenges from within the dynasty. Indeed, most monarchies where kings were permitted a number of wives and concubines had succession problems. Native Chinese dynasties normally looked to the empress’s eldest son as the heir, but the emperor had the right to nominate whomever he chose, while the Mongols originally chose their leader by election. In Europe, the hereditary principle was a medieval innovation, and even when the king’s son was the heir he had to be acclaimed; Bohemia and Hungary long persisted with the election of kings, and, as late as the eighteenth century, Polish kings were elected. If the hereditary principle had the obvious disadvantage that the heir might make an unsuitable monarch, it had the advantage of being straightforward and of minimising the chances of struggles for the throne. Over time, it added to the charismatic and mystical qualities of kingship, making royalty a special caste above the greatest nobles.

At the core of monarchy as a model of civil authority over the last 1,000 years is the implicit assumption that one individual is somehow privileged over all other members of the population both to formulate and to enforce a vision of communal good, a set of collective values and a concept of social well-being. Often exercising judicial, administrative, legislative, priestly and military command, monarchy implied the existence of an irrevocable chasm between the maturity of the leader and the immaturity and natural incapacity of the subject.10

If it was, whether by primogeniture or a looser system of inheritance, the blood line that determined the privilege to rule, how was the purity of this line to be assured? Essentially, monarchies that had royal harems or numerous wives or concubines placed the stress upon the male line of descent. The mother of a future king or emperor might well be a slave-girl, and that the child was of the blood line had to be ensured by the close guarding of the king’s wives and concubines by palace eunuchs. The general insistence in the Western world on the necessity for queens to be of royal blood was a more secure system for ensuring that heirs were royal in a general sense. There can be less doubt as to who someone’s mother is than to who the father is, though the care taken to ensure that royal births were public and witnessed by officials and ministers, and the doubts expressed, for example, over the provenance of James II’s son, the ‘Old Pretender’, demonstrate that even the maternal line can be questioned. In much of Africa it was the maternal line that was given priority. The aim in monarchies with kings and queens as in western Europe was, nevertheless, to ensure that an heir to the throne was clearly the offspring of their lawful union. The tale of King Candaules of Lydia, so proud of his queen’s attractions that he exhibited her naked to his trusted general, Gyges, may be mythical, but the consequences – the murder of the King by the favourite, and the subsequent marriage of Gyges and the Queen and ascent to the throne of Gyges – demonstrate the necessity of guarding the sexual mystery of queens. Kings had to be careful that their consorts consorted only with them. By the eighteenth century the ‘off with her head’ fates of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard had given way to less severe penalties for the adultery of queens. George I’s wife, Sophia Dorothea, and George III’s sister, Queen Caroline of Denmark, both of whom were accused of adultery, were confined to the castle of Celle in Hanover; outside western Europe the punishment remained harsher.

The importance of the maternal line in many African societies and the universal importance attached to legitimacy via birth raise the important question of queens who rule, as opposed to queen consorts. Despite the suggestion that it was the priestess rather than the priest who exercised the real power and inspired awe in early human societies and the view that it was the female, she who gave birth, rather than the male, he who impregnated, which best symbolised fertility, the language and practice of monarchy have been predominantly male. If the notion that ‘the king must die’ in order that the fields might flourish and the crops grow while the queen bee continued to rule was ever widespread, it seems to have survived as at best a Jungian collective memory into the times of recorded history. We tend to talk of kingship, even though ruling queens have punctuated lines of male monarchs in many cultures. We have only to consider European history to be aware of the charisma of ruling queens: Queen Elizabeth I of England, Queen Christina of Sweden, Catherine the Great of Russia or Queen Victoria.

In many cultures the possibility of reigning queens was legally impossible, as with much of Europe where Salic law provided for the succession of males alone. Almost everywhere the primacy of male heirs made the accession of a queen an unusual occurrence, generally occasioned by the lack of male heirs, though there are several instances of the rule of widows. The traditional inequality of the sexes within monarchy largely reflected the relations between the sexes within societies and the realities of comparable physical strength where monarchs were expected to fulfil the role of warrior leaders. When a queen married, it would inevitably be to an inferior or a foreigner, and she would presumably come under his influence. Then there was the question of the priestly role of monarchs, which in many cultures ruled out females as less pure or otherwise unfitted for such a religious role. It is surprising in this regard that Japan, where the sacerdotal dimension of monarchy was so central, had eight empresses regnant and that one of the first de facto rulers of the nation as a whole was a woman known to Chinese chroniclers in the third century AD as Queen Himiko; it was not until 1889 that an Imperial House Law provided for the adoption of Salic law. Reigning females are scarce in the history of Islamic societies, but the Muslim Maldives had three women in succession on the throne between 1347 and 1388, while the Muslim port-state of Pasai in South-East Asia had a tradition of powerful queens. Indeed, two other Muslim states in southern Asia seem to have adopted a system of favouring queens, even in defiance of the hereditary system and the Sharia or Holy Law. It has been argued that the appeal of these female monarchs was that they encapsulated the charisma of kingship in the ‘gunpowder empires’ of South-East Asia without the bellicosity and tyranny,11 but peace and order have not inevitably characterised the rule of queens. What seems evident is that queenship usually worked better when the queens were virgins or widows. Mighty male subjects could more easily give allegiance when there was no male consort around. As leaders in war, virgin queens or the widows of charismatic male rulers could be potent indeed. The image of the ‘wicked queen’ parallels that of the ‘bad king’, but it has been seen as more disturbing and is embedded in mythology and popular culture. The tyrannical queen was supposedly an unnatural inversion of femininity, and her transgression aroused fear and psychological antipathy. Whereas ruthlessness could be viewed as a necessary corollary of strength in a king, it could be portrayed as a more sinister quality when it characterised a queen.

As we have seen, the power of monarchs was on the whole greater in the East than in the West. This was true not only as regards the spiritual power of kings but as regards their power in relation to the nobility. Medieval kings were, in western Europe, part of a system based on the concept of mutual obligations, duties and loyalties between kings, nobles and knights. The realms of kings were often scattered, making central control difficult, and the terms on which they ruled might be different in different parts of their kingdoms. The nobility tended to enjoy a long and close association with their estates, which continued when dynasties ended. Towns had special privileges granted them by kings in charters, and if this usually made burghers loyal to the king as opposed to the great nobles of the locality, it also limited royal power. In contrast, the power of landlords was limited in China, in part by multiple inheritance, but also because with a change of dynasty estates were usually reallocated. While west European monarchs relied upon the nobility both for support in war and to maintain order in time of peace, Chinese emperors had what amounted to a vast civil service and bureaucracy to administer their dominions. Islamic states were usually organised upon military lines, with governors or pashas wielding great power, but deriving it personally from the sultan, and with many administrative posts being held by non-Islamic groups.

Throughout the world, all monarchs served in a sacral capacity until at least around AD 1500. Whether they ruled under a direct divine mandate or under spiritual leadership, they held their power as a divine gift. Ironically, in view of the close association of monarchy with religion, it was the decline in the power of the Church and the division of Christendom with the Protestant Reformation that provided the opportunity for west European kings to claim greater power. Kings not only attempted to enforce religious uniformity in their realms but laid claim to a divine right to rule, while some, as with the English monarchy, became heads of national churches. The early modern period saw a tendency for European monarchies to increase their power, not only at the expense of the Church but at the expense of the nobility as well.

With the rebirth of the territorial state and the development of the idea of political sovereignty, monarchical authority put an end to political and military feudalism. Claiming the monopoly of coercion, the dynasties presided over expanded standing armies and centralised bureaucracies loyal to the crown. They also secured the fiscal independence needed to pay for this large and growing state apparatus without excessively bending to the nobility.12

The idea of absolute monarchy represented two different developments: an increase in the aspirations of monarchy; and the improved communications, more efficient central administration and standing armies that facilitated these aspirations. The power of the state grew and the power of the monarch over the state grew with it. Absolute monarchy, associated most closely with Louis XIV of France, seems at first sight a simple concept, that there should be no limits to the power of the monarch, but even the proponents of absolute monarchy accepted that there were indeed limits, and drew a distinction between absolute and arbitrary power. Thus Jacques Benigne Bossuet, one of the great theorists of absolute monarchy, wrote that ‘The Prince is accountable to none for what he commands’, but went on to argue ‘but it does not follow from this that the government is arbitrary since, besides everything being subject to the will of God, there are laws in states and anything done contrary to them is legally null’.13

Monarchy in seventeenth-century Europe was essentially a modernising force, anti-feudal and, to a degree, anti-aristocratic, while its opponents’ ethos was a mixture of the defence of traditional and provincial and civic rights, joined, where religious cohesion had broken down, by different forms of protestant dissent. The Civil War in the British Isles and Ireland saw the monarchy challenged by a temporary alliance of these forces and led to the ultimate expression of disloyalty, the execution of a king. It is significant, however, that it was not parliament that demanded the trial of the monarch, still less his execution, but Cromwell and the commanders of the parliamentary army, plus the ‘Rump’ of the House of Commons, while the execution was widely regarded as an illegal and even sacrilegious act. Charles, as Robert Tombs has written, ‘was to be more successful as a martyr than as a monarch’.14

There is an irony in the fact that the European monarchy that moved closest to absolute monarchy was at the end of the eighteenth century to be overthrown by revolution, while the monarchy that saw its efforts to increase royal power thwarted was to be the firm bastion against revolution. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain posited a very different model of monarchy from that of France. British monarchs ruled rather than merely reigned, but did so in conjunction with a powerful aristocracy and with the support of gentry and mercantile interests. What has been called the British ‘military-fiscal state’ had an economic dynamism and a military potential that relative to size and population exceeded that of France.

If an initial effect of the forces that we may loosely summarise as modernisation was to strengthen monarchy, these same forces would in the long run make monarchies in the West adapt to them. Because they resulted in an enormous increase in the power of Europe, these forces would threaten every aspect of civilisation elsewhere in the world, including systems of government. Secularisation, technological development and the relative decline of the importance of agriculture and the countryside as opposed to commerce and towns challenged the existing balances of economies and societies. Inevitably, they also challenged systems of government. Sovereignty and government came increasingly to be seen as contractual rather than divinely ordained within the most economically advanced states. At the same time western Europe moved from being defensive, embattled over centuries facing successive waves of actual or putative conquerors spilling out of Asia, to becoming aggressive and expansionist.

Despite the trauma of the French Revolution, the institution of monarchy proved resilient. Napoleon Bonaparte’s Empire represented a new interpretation of monarchy, which was to prove both successful and influential. His was a truly modern monarchy, which skilfully wove meritocracy and tradition into a potent projection of both the Emperor and France. The Napoleonic Empire demonstrated the capacity of monarchical charisma to dampen animosities and reconcile past and present. If it looked forward to the dictatorships of the twentieth century with its centralism and its harnessing of nationalist feeling, there was also something of the ethos of Louis XIV’s France about the Empire. At his most arrogant when he set up his relatives and generals as the monarchs of subsidiary states, he was at his most conservative when he secured a degree of royal legitimacy in marrying Marie Louise of Austria, joining a Habsburg lineage to a self-made monarchy. The temporary restoration of the Bourbons foundered on the anachronistic view of monarchy of Charles X, but France’s subsequent history demonstrated the degree to which France was in symbolic and psychological disarray, torn between not simply monarchism and republicanism but a variety of pasts and allegiances, Republican, Legitimist, Orleanist and Bonapartist.

From henceforth, however, Western monarchies had to struggle with, adapt to or align themselves with social orders other than aristocracy and with the concept of the nation. Kingship continued to be imbued with charisma but had consciously to project such charisma to a wider audience. It was no longer enough to dazzle and impress small numbers of nobles and courtiers and be a distant if awesome figure to peasants who had a vague if vital image of their ruler. Subjects had to be turned into subject citizens who gave positive and conscious assent to king and state. The notion of its divine ordination did not disappear even in the most urbanised and industrialised societies, but it was increasingly harnessed by the ruler’s bonds with the nation.

Historians have, in recent years, devoted considerable attention to the ways in which monarchies refashioned themselves during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The ceremonies and rituals of monarchy became more magnificent and public, capital cities became great theatres for the projection of kings and emperors and were designed for military reviews and triumphal progresses, while there was a new emphasis upon kings and emperors as the personification of the nation.

David Cannadine drew attention to this phenomenon in his study of the transformation and rituals of the British monarchy, and has been followed by T. Fujitani in his book on the Japanese monarchy and Maurizio Peleggi in his treatment of the refashioning of the Siamese monarchy.15 All concur that this was part of a wider process by which states reached out to secure not just the obedience but the positive commitment of peoples to the nation and nation state. Modern states required such commitment and needed the populace to feel part of the wider community of the nation and to empathise with it through its symbols, rituals and ceremonies. Thus, republics as well as monarchies placed an enormous emphasis upon national flags and anthems, national days that saluted the nation’s past victories and achievements and public buildings and monuments that crystallised the ethos of the state. In monarchies the kings and emperors were the centrepieces of such ritual and pageantry and had the added advantage of standing for continuity and succession, binding the nation’s present to pasts real and imagined. Republicanism occurred when state and nation were seen as new-born and as rejecting what pasts they had, as with the United States and Latin America, or as with Switzerland, where it permitted a loose federation. Its great success was in the USA, where the ghosts of the British constitution became two houses and an elective, albeit transient, monarch, the President. That in general republicanism continued to be aberrant and monarchy remained the normal form of government was demonstrated by the appearance of new monarchies in eastern Europe in the wake of the shrinking Ottoman Empire. Here nations reborn, searching in mists for half-remembered and idealised pasts, found in kingship a suitable institution with which to symbolise their rebirths.

There can be little doubt as to the remodelling of monarchy on a world scale in the nineteenth century, but questions arise. Can we speak of it as the invention of tradition or was it merely a refashioning of state and monarchy to meet the needs of the modern age? The concept of invented tradition is supposedly an oxymoron and, as with the headmaster of a Victorian public school who is supposed to have announced that ‘from tomorrow the tradition of the school will be …’, trembles on the brink of absurdity. Yet, all traditions had presumably to have their beginnings. There may be only a fine line between the invention of a tradition and its considerable reworking, but the main innovations in the late modern period were essentially a reprojection of monarchy towards peoples as opposed to small elites. Royal rituals, whether religious or secular, had always been important, but had in sizeable states been witnessed by only the inner circles of power, with glimpses afforded to the populace of capital cities. Modern communications made it possible and modern socio-political contexts made it necessary to project on a grand and national scale. So far as the major ceremonies and rituals of monarchies are concerned, a thoroughgoing reworking of rituals already extant and in some cases revived seems more apposite than invention. Genuinely new rituals did, of course, emerge, especially in the context of royal relationships with the armed forces, as did new orders of chivalry and complex honours systems, and even new ranks of nobility, as with Meiji Japan’s marquises and barons.

If the emergence of mass societies and the need to involve whole populations in the cause of national cohesion was a challenge to Western monarchies, the impact of an administratively, commercially and militarily superior West placed great strains upon states and their monarchies in the rest of the world. The declines of the Ottoman Empire and of imperial China were only the most spectacular examples of this process. It must be noted, however, that, as the power of Ottoman sultans declined, it was not only their erstwhile European subjects who opted for new monarchies, for their Muslim satraps, as in Egypt, sought to become monarchs in their own right. Eastern and African emperors, kings, princes and chiefs did not on the whole meet the spectacular and rapid demise of the Central and South American Aztec and Inca Empires in the sixteenth century. Some did disappear, as with the Kingdoms of Madagascar and Hawaii, the latter essentially deposed by the USA, but African kings and chiefs, like Indian princes and Indo-Chinese kings, retained degrees of autonomy under colonial rule. Others strove, like the Chinese emperors, alternatively to keep the Western powers at bay or to learn selectively from the West in order to defy it. Only Japan, forced out of its isolation by a US naval squadron under the command of Commodore Perry, was able rapidly to transform its economy and armed forces and become a great power on the Western model.

Nationalism posed problems for monarchies. In western Europe monarchy had traditionally been based on a relationship between rulers and subjects, with sovereigns often ruling over a heterogeneous collection of territories and nationalities. For the Habsburg Empire there could be no question of an alignment of monarchy and nation; indeed, the Empire’s survival into the twentieth century was based on the older concept of emperor as above nations. The British, French and Spanish monarchies had, however, increasingly associated themselves with national feeling. The monarchies ruling the new united states of Italy and Germany were products of nationalism, though the German Empire was essentially a federation with the King of Prussia becoming Emperor, while the Kings of Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and Saxony retained their crowns. Everywhere in Europe, save in the Habsburg dominions, monarchs found it necessary to associate themselves with national identity. Elsewhere in the world, monarchy could associate itself with the defence of national culture and tradition in the face of Western hegemony or, as with Japan, be the means of importing Western ways under the mantle of an age-old institution.

Central and South America was the one area where monarchy disappeared, but the rapidity of its demise has been exaggerated. The connection of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies with their Central and South American colonies was interrupted by the French Revolutionary Wars and Spain, much weakened, found control of its Latin American possessions opposed by nationalist movements. It was not at first clear what form of government would be adopted by the number of new states which emerged in the wake of successful revolts. Monarchy and Spanish rule were closely identified, while there was to the north the model of the USA, which, having achieved independence from Britain, had opted for a republic. It was, however, by no means certain that republics would become the normal form of government in Latin America and there were in America several influential proponents of monarchism and examples of attempts to form new monarchies.

Three centuries of Spanish rule had shaped society and government along authoritarian and aristocratic lines, and there was little basis for democratic government or liberal institutions. It was soon apparent that Spanish rule had been replaced by strong personal leadership in the form of either dictatorships or elected presidents, who, once established, tended to rule for extended terms and even, as in Paraguay and Guatemala, establish home-grown dynasties. Such leaders had a flimsy legitimacy, their governments were often unstable and there was usually a crisis of succession. In these circumstances there were many who felt that, if monocratic rule was the only option, monarchy would be the better version, as it would solve the problems of legitimacy and would be in harmony with tradition. General José de San Martin, the Argentinian hero of independence, supported monarchist proposals in Argentina and Peru during the struggle for independence, and even Simon Bolivar was attracted by the possibility of monarchies.16 The problems monarchists faced, however, were that independence had been achieved from a monarchy and that kings were difficult to find. Princes of the Spanish house were tainted by association with the old regime (though overtures were made to them), while Britain discouraged overtures to British royals and, in any case, non-Spanish princes would not fit in culturally.

Despite the fiasco of the brief reign of Augustin de Inturbide, who had himself crowned Augustin I, monarchism lingered in Mexico; General Mariano Paredes planned a monarchy in the 1840s, and this was followed by the ill-fated reign of Emperor Maximilian in the 1860s, which ended with this Habsburg facing a firing squad, and finally put an end to the aspirations of Mexican monarchists. General Juan José Flores and Garcia Moreno were involved in various clandestine monarchist projects for Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia in the 1840s and 1850s, but the failure of their schemes and the end of Maximilian’s venture in Mexico saw the end of monarchism as a serious option in Spanish America.17

Portuguese America had a different and happier history, for the endurance of monarchy in Brazil until 1889 made for a more harmonious relationship with the colonial past and for relatively peaceful development. The emigration of the Portuguese Regent (later King John VI) and the court to Rio de Janeiro in 1807 in the face of the threat to the monarchy from Napoleon inverted the previous order and made a ‘tropical Versailles’ the centre of the Portuguese Empire.18 This development proved a spur to Brazil’s economic progress. The British Royal Navy had escorted the Regent to Brazil, and under British pressure the country’s ports were open to free trade, thus encouraging trade with Europe and leading to Brazil becoming Latin America’s largest exporter by the mid-nineteenth century. Brazil became an independent monarchy in 1822. John VI returned to Portugal, but his son Dom Pedro became Emperor of Brazil. The continued rule by the royal house did much to ensure that a country with a considerable slave population and with an enormous divide between rich and poor enjoyed a degree of stability. The legitimacy that came with monarchy ensured the qualified support of the Brazilian land-owning elite, but Emperor Pedro abdicated in 1831 after military failure in the war to prevent Paraguay becoming independent and dissatisfaction among the elite at the Emperor’s desire to put an end to the slave trade. It was the attempt by his son, Emperor Pedro II, to abolish slavery without compensation to slave owners that forced his abdication in 1889 after a coup d’état by ambitious army officers and disaffected plantation owners. That there was little opposition to the overthrow of the monarchy suggests that it enjoyed little real support, though it might be more accurate to say that it had lost the support of key elite groups.

Its lack of monarchies, save for the Dominion of Canada, made the American continent the exception in a world dominated by monarchies. Any survey of the world’s governments in 1900 had to begin with monarchy as the first word in the vocabulary. Kingship, which had been common to humanity since the beginning, was still all but universal. Monarchy might be qualified as constitutional or autocratic, but kings reigned throughout much of the world. All the scientific, rational, utilitarian and mechanistic outlook associated with modern Europe had failed to budge monarchy. It flourished amid mass societies with their newspapers and football teams as well as in the peasant economies of Asia. The new century would put it to the test.

PART ONE

A WORLD FIT FOR KINGS

1

THE FAR EAST: CELESTIAL EMPIRES

As we have seen, all monarchies have had a spiritual or religious dimension. Kings were not just symbolic figures, representative of the peoples and cultures they ruled over, but were held to connect the fate of their peoples with the divinity or the cosmos. Nowhere was this aspect of monarchy more pronounced than in the Far East and in the Chinese and Japanese Empires, yet the two monarchies developed in very different ways. In both the priestly roles of the monarchs were pronounced, with the rituals they alone could perform seen as essential to the prosperity of their realms, but while in China the sacerdotal aspects of the emperors reinforced and went hand in hand with executive authority and autocratic power, in Japan the emperors, for great stretches of Japanese history, were confined to a priestly and cultural role, with executive authority lodged in other hands.

Both imperial systems claimed origins in times before recorded history. China is the world’s oldest civilisation, and its monarchical system was inextricable from its continuous existence over more than 3,500 years. The history of the Chinese emperors can be traced from the times of the Shang dynasty, later named Yin, of northern China, which existed, though the dates are contestable, from the eighteenth to the twelfth centuries BC. There was, however, a misty and largely mythical tradition of powerful rulers existing long before the Shang, the five rulers of 2852–2205.

Japanese claims as to the origins of kingship were more extravagant. The Chronicles of the eighth century tell of the Sun Goddess (Amaterasu Ōmikami) who sent the God-child, Jimmu, to rule Japan. Descending to the island of Kyushu, he conquered the East and established his capital in Yamato. In theory, therefore, Japanese emperors not only enjoyed the mandate of the Gods and were able to intercede with them, but were descended from them.

A significant distinction between the Chinese and Japanese monarchies is that, while the Chinese monarchy had an institutional continuity – dynasties came and went and some of them were dynasties imposed by foreign conquerors – the Japanese have had, theoretically, only one dynasty, an umbilical cord connecting the monarchy to the very origins of the people and the beginnings of time. A second distinction is the greater perseverance among the elite as well as the common people of animist traditions. In Japan Shinto placed an extraordinary emphasis upon purity, and a complementary emphasis upon the removal of impurities, in which the emperor, who could intercede with the spirits, had a unique role.

In China, the symbolic and religious significance of the emperors, who were held to be in communication with divine forces, was crucial to the cohesion of the vast territory and population of the Middle Kingdom. The idealised and sacerdotal position of the ruler was firmly established during the reigns of the later kings of Zhou. This position continued to reflect nature and ancestor worship and the need to keep society in harmony with the universe, the stars and planets. It received further and distinctive support from the teachings of Confucius (traditional dates 551–479 BC), who saw the monarch as reigning under the mandate of Heaven and in accordance with a morality and code of behaviour that made for a stable society.

The continuities of a Chinese kingdom or empire were never given. The tensions between imperial rule and centrifugal tendencies were always evident, and the early history of China is one of contending rulers and peoples. The first regime that could claim to be the sole effective authority in China was that of the King of Qin, who by 221 BC had forced all other kings to submit to him and adopted the title Huangdi, usually translated as ‘Emperor’. Under the short-lived Qin and the succeeding Han dynasty, institutions and practices that would continue to mark imperial rule into modern times were developed: cadres of officials; the standardisation of economic practices; the enforcement of imperial laws throughout the land; and the attempt to establish secure frontiers. There followed, however, the ‘centuries of disunity’, a time of competing kingdoms, fragmented authority and internecine warfare, that lasted from the third to the sixth century AD.

Invasion by non-Chinese peoples was another threat to the stability of China and the continuity of the imperial throne. Under the Tang dynasty, Chinese frontiers grew wider, despite external threats. The population of China was and was to remain overwhelmingly composed of the Han people, but conquests on the perimeter were usually maintained by reliance on non-Chinese regional commissioners and troops who made uneasy subordinates and were a potential source of rebellions. After the deposition of the last of the Tang emperors in 907, there followed a further period of disunity in which short-lived dynasties struggled for power. The Song dynasty (960–1127) proved incapable of holding the north, and though it survived in the south for a further century and a half, non-Chinese rulers held the north-east and north-west. With Mongol invasion came the first foreign invaders capable not only of setting up a northern kingdom but of establishing themselves in the south as well. The Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) set up by Kublai Khan left a permanent impression upon China, a capital in the north-east that was to become Beijing, and territorial and administrative divisions that survive in the People’s Republic. The long period of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), founded in the south, ended with a further invasion from the north. The new invaders, the Manchu, established China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing (‘Pure’) which was to endure into the twentieth century.

What characterised the Chinese Empire through all the centuries of internal division and foreign invasion was a continuity in the essentials of the imperial system. Even foreign dynasties repeatedly reinvented the status, duties and style of the emperor, just as they maintained similar administrative systems and did not seek to disrupt the social order.

The institutions of government and administration were developed and refined. The Song period in particular was one of institutional innovation in which the monarchical state became more centralised, autocratic and professional in its administration. The opportunities for imperial absolutism had been increased by the decline of the aristocracy, which had been much weakened during the wars and rebellions during and after the reigns of the later Tang emperors. The absence of a powerful landed aristocracy facilitated the enhancement of the position of emperors. Their lives became ever more ritualised and formal, and their distance from even the higher classes increased. There was nothing of the primus inter pares about the position of the emperor, no reliance upon feudal vassals, no acclamation by the warriors, no uneasy relationship with a Church and no concept of a law above or separate from the imperial will. The Song, Yuan and Ming periods therefore witnessed the development and refinement of characteristics that were already pronounced, the perfection of a system rather than any radical departures from it.

There were both religious and secular reasons for this persistence. There was a continued belief in the divine appointment of emperors and their enjoyment of a heavenly mandate. The power of the emperor was held to be unlimited, and there was no body of law and no ecclesiastical or secular authority to challenge his power. He was indeed the father of his people, the patriarchal head of a patrilineal society.

Emperors were, in many ways, hardly regarded as persons. In all monarchical systems the symbolic nature of the king or emperor was significant in that the character of his realm was inherent in him and its fortunes entrusted to him, but in China the symbolism almost obscured the living being with his capabilities and weaknesses. There are indeed few biographies of Chinese emperors. The mystical position of the emperor was a source of great strength, for he alone could perform the rituals necessary to ensure fertility and security. The perseverance of animist traditions contrasted with the inability of any organised religion to secure the adherence of the whole of society and establish itself as a counterweight to imperial authority. Religion in China had to be essentially quietist; tolerated so long as it eschewed pretensions to come between emperor and people; sternly chastised when it forgot its place. Confucian beliefs and tenets further buttressed the imperial position, considering submission and obedience to the emperor as part of a moral order in which respect for the head of the family was central.

Unlike Western rulers, Chinese emperors had no turbulent aristocracies to rely on, cater for and fear, and no popes or other prelates to challenge their authority. There was therefore no need to turn to towns or merchants as counterweights to aristocratic or ecclesiastical influence. As Barrington Moore has commented:

Imperial Chinese society never created an urban trading and manufacturing class comparable to that which grew out of the latter stages of feudalism in Western Europe, though at times there were some starts in this direction. Imperial success in uniting the country can be advanced as one of the more obvious reasons for the difference. In Europe the conflict between Pope and Emperor, between kings and nobles, helped the merchants in the cities to break through the crust of the traditional agrarian society because they constituted a valuable source of power in this many-sided competition.1

Moore’s diagnosis may underestimate the degree to which trading skills, particularly in south China, existed and were honed. The success of twentieth-century Shanghai and Hong Kong and the all-too-evident domination of economic life by the Chinese diaspora in parts of South-East Asia suggest a long history of engagement in commerce. He is clearly right, however, in suggesting that commerce was undervalued and even resented in imperial China, that Confucian ethics rather despised the merchant and that the state did little to encourage or protect townsmen and business. There was no tradition of urban or city rights and legal privileges such as characterised the development of towns in Europe.

Landowners owed the titles of their land to the imperial government, and rather than the government being dependent on the support of landowners, it was they who depended on the government. Mandarins bought land with the rewards for their work for government, but those who inherited land usually needed to pass examinations to prove their gentility and could hope to further increase income and landholding by being given an imperial post. Partible inheritance was a further barrier to the rise of mighty landowners.

The very size of China and the problems of its agrarian economy favoured the imperial system, with its ability in good times not only to ensure order but to undertake great public works. The need for water-control systems for transport, irrigation and the prevention of flooding worked in favour of a centralised government and bureaucracy. While European monarchs struggled to free themselves in the early modern period from dependency on mighty aristocratic subjects on whose support their predecessors had relied upon and had their power limited by, Chinese emperors ruled by means of a bureaucracy that penetrated into every corner of the Empire, while, as officials were regularly moved from post to post, there was little chance that they could establish local power bases.

The major problem of all regimes in both East and West was how to raise sufficient money by taxation to maintain the court, expand government and pay armies. The Chinese had devised a more effective system than Western monarchies. The latter might elevate humble subjects – Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell or Colbert – as their administrators and taxation overlords, appoint their tax farmers and find new goods to tax, but the imperial Chinese bureaucracy with its legions of officials was a much more effective instrument.

A class of officials, drawn mainly from the elite with leisure enough to prepare for a complex examination process but open to the occasional bright son of a poor family, had an ethos and identity in which cultural pride, elitism, corporate spirit and loyalty to the font of patronage and the guarantor of continuity and stability provided faithful servants of the regime. This class provided the maintenance of law and order, the implementation of imperial decrees, the architects and administrators of great schemes and the collection of taxes. They were not, for the most part, well paid, and were therefore corrupt, but provided the corruption was retail rather than wholesale, provided the peasants were not squeezed so hard that they would revolt, and provided the tax gatherers handed over sufficient to the imperial treasury, the system worked rather well.