Yesterday there was (apparently) a 'platinum' Jubilee which was intended to celebrate 70 years since Queen Elizabeth was crowned.
This elicited what strikes me as distinctly tepid (mostly top-down, institutionally-led) celebrations - a half-hearted affair; at least compared with what I recall from the 'silver' (25th) Jubilee of 1977.
And rightly so.
Queen Elizabeth has been about a mediocre a monarch as humanly possible; which - in times as we have experienced over the past 70 years, and given that her primary role ought to be as Head of the Church of England; "defender of the faith" - makes her a Bad, because indifferent, Queen.
She has presided-over, facilitated, and done absolutely-zero to prevent - the extreme corruption and near-annihilation of the third-largest Christian church in the world.
The monarch has even yielded the power to appoint archbishops and senior bishops to... The Prime Minister!
Taken together, The Royal Family have themselves been supreme exemplars of much that is worst in modern life - especially in terms of commercialization, greed, vanity, degradation of position, conformity to leftism, sexual infidelity and perversion.
The Queen never 'spoke-out' against any of the horrendous laws or political principles that have been inflicted on her subjects; she never publicly defended English or UK national sovereignty; she never used her (in theory, extensive) 'veto' powers to deter or block the worst evils and the most harmful appointments.
She passively went-along-with all that was worst in the world.
Against that litany of neglect and self-interest; we are assured that Elizabeth (unlike any others in her family) is privately a devout Christian. If so: well and good, and the least we ought-to expect from a major Christian church leader. But the Queen is a public personage.
But then after all, the Queen is a Norman; a member of that alien class that has (mostly) ruled England (later Scotland and Wales) for a millennium.
In those many hundreds of years of misrule and exploitation, there have been a bare handful of Good monarchs - and none to match the Saxon Alfred.
Instead; there has been a near-continuous procession of mediocrities; and selfish, spiteful, lustful, aggressive, self-indulgent and/or outright psychopathic individuals - nearly-always prepared to sacrifice their people to their ambitions and pleasure, and their nation to their affiliation to power elites.
So long as England (and nowadays, the world) is plagued by the globalist, incompletely-human, Norman-derived Upper Classes; the honest Englishman will seldom have good reason to celebrate the rule of any monarch.
I have to agree. I used to think that at least the Queen exemplified devotion to duty and stood for some kind of Christian belief but really her presence is just bland and anodyne. Obviously, she is now very old but she has been the same throughout her reign, personally good but in an entirely passive way and never seemingly standing up for anything or resisting the downward plunge. She may have spoken behind the scenes but that's not the point. As you say, the only reason for a monarch is the public profile.
ReplyDeleteIt's easy to criticise and I admit that she has been in a very difficult position for the last few decades but still if we are to judge her reign objectively I don't see how we can regard it as anything other than a failure only redeemed by the qualification that it could have been a lot worse with someone else. Her faults are not in what she did but in what she didn't do.
@William - If she had tried and failed - that would be something well worth doing.
ReplyDeleteBut as a public person, as Head of State; she has never tried anything.
And it would have been possible. For example, the Queen's representative in Australia dismissed the Prime Minister in 1975 for acting unconstitutionally.
Interestingly/ paradoxically - the potential power of a popular British monarch was best illustrated in a play by Bernard Shaw: The Apple Cart; which is light and mostly-comic, but worth a look, if you don't know it.
I don't know if you've seen this video on the relationship between Lewis and Tolkien, Dr Charlton, but I thought you'd enjoy it.
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/KCAkaqbUPNI
@Jack - Afraid it's too rambling to keep my attention...
ReplyDeleteI don't have much to say about the Queen, other than I tired of seeing her face everywhere on the currency when I lived in Canada. However, I completely agree about the goodness of Alfred.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, even the two highly-fictionalized, liberty-taking historical television series I have watched about the Viking invasions (I know, I know . . . ) that took place during Alfred's reign were forced to acknowledge him as a good monarch and depict him as such.
If that isn't a testament to Alfred's greatness, then I don't know what is.
Sure, she failed as head of the Church of England, but she should never have been head of any church. Failure is to be expected when a women is given a man's job against explicit teaching of the Bible.
ReplyDelete1 Timothy, chapter 2, verse 12:
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
@Karl - Maybe as a generalization - but that principle is refuted by one of our few Good English monarchs - Elizabeth I: https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-spiritual-role-of-women-as-soul-of.html
ReplyDeleteProof texting from the Bible leads only to incoherence, and nobody genuinely regards it as authoritative (hence nearly all the 'fundamentalist Christians were 100% behind the birdemic church closures - expediently forgetting or ignoring multiple Bible verses to the contrary)
We are individuals - each different, and individual relationships are distinctive (consider any actual good family - each family is unique). There is no reason why we should expect individuals to fit under general rules.
However, equally, we should recognize that women such as Elizabeth I are extremely atypical and rare; and she cannot therefore be used as a precedent for 'women' as a whole.
On the other hand, there is no 'safe' way of organizing Christianity, no adequate laws or rules; and the lesson of 2020 is that All Christian churches (all 'systems' for churches remaining faithful - Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, Evangelical, Mormon etc) have now Failed - and failed *grossly*.
The Royals have not been totally inactive....
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vetted-more-than-1000-laws-via-queens-consent
@K - Of course it is not true - being in the mass media and the Grauniad at that - but if it is broadly accurate, then it makes matters even worse than I knew; i.e. that the Queen was *actively* engaged in drafting the overwhelmingly-evil laws that have been enacted over the past 70 years.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I would (if it was true) find it nauseating that this kind of backstairs, conspiratorial, Norman Establishment kind of practice should be kept secret from the masses, and then unveiled decades later as if this was a virtue. I a real monarchy with a real monarch who was leader of the church - matters would be conducted very differently.
But then I knew that already.