There’s an old story that the British never tire of telling. There was this rich American tourist visiting Magdalen College at Oxford, and getting bowled over by the sight of the finest, freshest, and greenest lawn he had ever seen. There he spots an ancient gardener tending the greens, and asks how he had got the lawn so flawless. “It is simple, sir, really,” says the gardener, scratching his head. “First you prepare the ground, then you sow your seed, and then you roll it and mow it and roll it and mow it for 300 years.”
Much the same was the message delivered last week by Charles Rex Tertius to America, a land that claims to be the world’s oldest democracy, but as the king put it in good humour, since just “the other day”. For full four days he made them forget their war worries, gas prices and foul-smelling presidential texts, and transported them to a fairy-tale world of king’s English, courtly manners and royal refinement. A day more around, and—who knows?—he would have made them ask for tea-and-scones.
For full four days, the world also witnessed the irony of a hereditary monarch warning the world’s oldest democracy of the dangers of elected tyranny. And irony of ironies—he cited a document of liberty that a bunch of barons had wrested from an ancestor of his 800 years ago, and one that many an ancestor had tried to violate and obliviate.
Only the British could have thought of the idea—of sending a crowned king to preach to an elected president the importance of checks and balances to executive power. Full credit to Keir Starmer and his cabinet, but give the monarch, too, his due. He was there not to champion the cause of kings and crowns; on the contrary, he was there to forewarn the world that democratic liberties need constant guarding. Charles Windsor did it with finesse. He delivered a speech that—who knows?—would have made an Oliver Cromwell spare the crowned head of his another ancestor who had borne his name, and had naively claimed that kings were divinely ordained, three and three-quarter centuries ago.
The British monarchy has once again shown that it can adapt to change while retaining its old world charm. Egypt’s last king Farouk once foretold that England’s would be the only king that would survive into the 21st century along with the kings of Clubs, Spades, Hearts and Diamonds. Looks like he was making an understatement, much like the British. Going by the performance of Charles Windsor in the New World, British monarchy might survive even into the 22nd century. No wonder Barack Obama once said, “The American people are quite fond of the royal family. They like them much better than their own politicians.”
The king employed history and humour to drill in why democracy and liberty need constant vigil. He spoke of how the common legacy of Magna Carta had inspired America to seek representative government, of how the British aided them escape from the Bonapartism of the French, of how they got a ‘white’ house for their president to reside in after an “attempt at real estate redevelopment” by the British in the War of 1812.
Come to think of it, the message was not just to America, but to the entire free world. In the name of enforcing majority will, elected democracies across the world are turning to mild or rigid forms of dictatorial rightism. Unbridled executive power is getting its way around constitutional schemes, and liberties guaranteed in Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights are bypassed for executive convenience.
Kingship may survive centuries, but would the idea of liberty?