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The Queen is dead. Long live the King!
But how long will Charles III 'live' in New Zealand? Now that the tumult and the
shouting of the Queen's obsequies has died, now that the Captains and the Kings and Prime Sinister Ardern have departed Westminster Abbey, how long will this country remain
in the Commonwealth? Will we become a republic?
Our hard-left Labour Government clearly wants that and so does Opposition leader Chris Luxon, opposed as he is to opposing. And very disquieting facts emerging from the paeans of
praise earned by Her Majesty’s unfailingly gracious public presence might give
even Christian conservatives – especially faithful Catholics – pause for
thought on clinging to the monarchy.
·
QE II was a Druid - she belonged to a pagan
sect which recent evidence shows once upon a time committed cannibalism and ritual child sacrifice.
· Mainstream media told us that when poor,
ridiculous Charles got a bit of skirt she looked the other way. Diana: “So I went to the top lady, sobbing, and I said, ‘What do I do? I’m coming to you, what do I do?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know what you should do. Charles is hopeless.’ And that was it, and that was help." That’s how
royalty has historically managed such things.
 |
| Charles, Diana, the Queen - speaks volumes |
·
She gave her royal assent to abortion and
same-sex marriage.
· And after enjoying over 90
years of excellent health herself, she dragooned her subjects into accepting an
injection which if it didn’t kill them outright would likely cripple them life-long.
Let Theo Howard,
contributing editor at OnePeterFive, give those of you possessed of
mental stamina a thoughtful analysis of QE II’s reign from a conservative, traditional
Catholic perspective. And if – as it seems – that paragon QE II could behave
badly, how will King Charles III, with his track record, turn out as New
Zealand’s head of state? Imagine him, a very useful idiot employed by the WEF,
in combo with Klaus Schwab’s protégé Jabsinda Ardern?
We’re between
the devil and the deep blue sea.
My silence is no proof of malice, as his Majesty can well know by many other tokens, nor is it shown to be any disapproval of your law. Indeed it should be taken rather as a mark of approval than of disapproval, in accordance with the common legal rule [Qui tacet consentit ] ‘he who is silent seems to consent.’ – St Thomas More[1]
A great silence lay across the Realm. On the afternoon of the
19th of September, the late-Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland and of the other fourteen Commonwealth Realms, was laid to
rest in St George’s chapel in Windsor after a magnificently solemn Anglican
state funeral.
onal conduct was seemingly beyond reproach. (Hmmm - ed.) In a
world of increasingly vulgar and unsavoury public figures the Queen has
embodied a regally stoic, quiet duty that seemed to reach to us from another age.
The public enthusiasm for the Queen’s milestone, and the mourning at her
passing is also clear evidence that, deep down, people have great affection for
the medieval forms of public life, and are rather anxious to protect those few
that remain.
Lodged
within the public grief are further emotions still. The mourning was not only
for the Queen. For Britons, she was the last living link with ‘the before
time,’ with the age of world-leading British culture, industry and engineering,
with the ‘national myth’ of the “Finest Hour” during the Second World War
victory – which is so central to our old civil religion – and with the colossal
Empire that once spanned the globe.
The young Elizabeth received the news that
her father King George VI had died, and that she was the new Queen, while
conducting a royal tour of Kenya, just one of many British colonies at that
time. On her return to London Airport, she was met by her first Prime Minister
– Winston Churchill.
All of these national memories have resurfaced following her
death and the country is undergoing a period of reflection on the course of her
reign, and the state of the nation compared to 1952.
I fear that the
ramifications of this inevitable soul-searching will, almost certainly, be bad. In losing such an implacable and seemingly
permanent sovereign and mother of the nation, I fear, there will be a general
sense of unmooring from past ‘certainties.’ In this atmosphere the surviving
medieval forms in the British Constitution may come under grave threat.
Queen
Elizabeth II was not the katechon of
2 Thessalonians but I fear that she was (like Benedict XVI) a ‘katechonic
figure.’ It is very possible that, as we enter the new ‘Carolean age,’ the
country will formally complete what she has already undergone in spirit and
become officially secular. If this happens, then it will finally conclude the
long process of formal national apostasy from Christianity that was set in
motion by Henry VIII with his break from Rome.
 |
Henry VIII, Founder of the Church of England
Studio of Hans Holbein the Younger |
Merry England will have
completed its journey from discipled nation of Christ to a “grey and gay”
apostate nation, whose public religion is the same as every other
post-Christian country: materialist idolatry.
Amidst the chorus of praise for Her Majesty in the last few days
I must register a quiet, regretful dissent from this unqualified acclaim. I am a monarchist and regard
Monarchy as supremely fitting for a political community, reflecting as it does,
the monarchy of the family below it, and, ultimately, the Monarchy of Heaven above it. Monarchy is an embodiment of
Edmund Burke’s ‘communion of the living, the dead, and the unborn,’ that
constitutes a well-ordered society.
Although this intergenerational covenant
has been repeatedly violated to the point of near destruction, the contemporary
House of Windsor is still a potent symbol of national continuity, and a living
link to England’s Catholic foundations.
The Crown is a kind of ‘sacred canopy’, where the monarch is
head of society, rather than just head of that limited aspect of society we
call ‘the State.’[2] The monarch is bound to the people
in a fiduciary relationship, where, following Christ’s model of servant
leadership, they are obligated to defend their subjects. The Good Shepherd lays
down His life for His sheep.
Yes, agreed. Monarchy is the ideal model for any nation, including ours in New Zealand.
Along with the funereal and contemplative silence
that has rested across the Realm there was another kind of silence that hovered
over Elizabeth II’s reign. That was, of course, the lifelong, purposeful silence[3] of
the late Queen herself who made this silence her watchword and guiding policy.
Never complain, never explain. It is striking that, given this leitmotif, with
all the hours of media coverage and inches of column analysis that the
late-Queen’s death has occasioned there is a rather apparent and soon-reached
limit of things to say about the Queen herself. Evidently, the Queen considered
pragmatic silence to be the supreme means to fulfil her duty and pass on what
she had received.
Catholic responses to the Queen’s death have tended to cluster
around two opposite poles. Some, among the first, overwhelmingly British pole
have eulogised the Queen as a “defender of the faith,” “the greatest Christian
of our lifetime” and other tendentious excesses. Meanwhile, many American
traditional Catholics have shown an almost revolutionary antipathy towards
monarchy qua monarchy and rushed to blame the late-Queen for nearly every
anti-Christian ill that has ailed Britain and the Commonwealth Realms over the
course of her reign.
There has been some lively debate about the choice of many Catholic churches
in the United Kingdom to organise Requiem Masses for the late-Queen and for the
Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols to even “assist at a
Protestant Service” by reading a prayer at the Queen’s funeral.
Which he certainly should not have done. That was the sin - some would say the heresy - of indifferentism, implying by his act that Anglicanism and Catholicism are equal in the sight of God, when the former is heretical.
In the
meantime, a middle ground evaluation of the late-Queen and her reign seems to have
been lost.
I hope that my moderate criticism and perplexity can stand in the
tradition of the medieval filial petition. Since the King was the ‘father of
the fathers of the realm,’ a good medieval King exercised his authority and
power in a paternal manner. He was the supreme magistrate (hence why his house
was a court) and therefore the fount of justice.
He accepted complaints, requests, and petitions from people of all social
stations who sought his grace and remedy when there was some injustice that was
injuring them. It is in this manner, and not a republican revolutionary one of
attacking the institution itself, that I present my
petition regarding the late Queen Elizabeth.
The Slow Apostasy
In her public statement following the death of the Queen, Britain’s new
Prime Minister Liz Truss called the Queen “the rock on which modern Britain was
built.” In a certain sense this is an accurate characterisation. As a result of
her public policy of silence the late-Queen was a kind of palimpsest – onto
which could be projected the values, opinions and tastes of whoever chose to do
so. Did silence as a public policy amount to giving tacit consent to all the
policies of her elected governments?
When it can, the Revolution against Christian Civilisation likes to
clothe itself in the remaining legitimate forms of the Christian social order.
Modern history testifies that a slow speed, ‘Fabian strategy’ for the
Revolution has been more effective than a fast speed radical upheaval, which
nonetheless favours the decline towards the same point of arrival.
Consider the
historical success of Anglicanism itself in steadily draining the Christian
substance of the English people as opposed to the radical ‘left wing’ of the
Protestant Revolution, such as the Anabaptists of Münster, whose radicalism
alarmed contemporary public opinion and provoked a violent reaction. Witness
the success of LGBT activists in securing widespread public approval of
homosexuality through campaigning for gay ‘marriage,’ rather than advocating
for the complete abolition of marriage; an unnatural fiction widely ‘sold’ to
the public as a way of domesticating and normalising a ‘problematic’ minority.
It is
quite clear that, once time has passed, emotions have cooled, and future
historians are able to study the ‘New Elizabethan Age’ dispassionately, the
only conclusion they will be able to reach, is that Queen Elizabeth II’s reign
was nearly a completely unmitigated decline for the United Kingdom and the
other Commonwealth Realms. By nearly every measure, be it political, cultural,
economic, social, or diplomatic, the achievements and self-confidence of the
United Kingdom have diminished dramatically in those seventy years.
Yet all these
woeful developments pale in comparison to their shared remote and fundamental
cause; the big
story of Elizabeth’s Reign, which has been the near-total evaporation of the
last vestiges of Christianity in the Realm.
In 1952 most people still had
enough residual Christian sensibility to recognise at least most of the natural
law. For example, in 1955, Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister, Princess Margaret,
was pressured into declining marriage to the divorced Peter Townsend being
“mindful of the Church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble,”
and the public scandal that would result.
Now at the nightfall of the Queen’s
reign nearly all such beliefs, customs, and sensibilities lie in ruins. In 1992
the Queen attended the second “marriage” of her daughter Anne, the Princess
Royal, in a Church of Scotland ceremony (where divorce and remarriage was
permitted). In 2005 the Queen did not attend the civil wedding of her firstborn
son and heir Prince Charles to his long-term mistress but did attend the
Anglican “Service of Prayer and Dedication” that followed.
This
rapid Christian diminution has been both expressed and effected by the culture
of death that has steadily achieved statutory establishment, with the legalisation
of abortion, homosexuality, no-fault divorce, pornography, mandatory sex
education, same-sex “marriage” and every other horror that has assailed the
remains of Christian Civilisation.
Under the British Constitution none of these laws could have
been passed without the granting of Royal Assent; the final stage of the
legislative process. Even if the Queen personally disapproved of any of these
pieces of legislation, they nevertheless would not become law unless, as the
Queen’s emissary pronounced in Parliament, La Reyne le veult (“the
Queen wills it”).
As part of her supposedly ‘apolitical’ exercise of office the
Queen never refused to grant this Royal Assent, knowing that had she done so it
would have precipitated a constitutional crisis and threatened the very
position of the monarchy.
Dr
Alan Fimister has remarked that in conserving some of the empty appearances of
true religion, Anglicanism fulfils the role of assuaging the subconscious guilt
of the English as they steadily apostatise from Christianity. The Queen was
sometimes described as the last believing Anglican, and while we do not know
too much about the late-Queen’s personal religious beliefs there were some
clues.
However, might the Queen have appealed to a higher law than the British
Constitution – namely the Natural Law and Divine Positive Law on which that
Constitution, was originally based? When the Queen made her Coronation Oath on
the 2nd June 1953, she became bound to an oath before Almighty God which rooted
her authority in “the maintenance of the Laws of God… [and] the Protestant
Reformed Religion”:
Archbishop: Will you to your power cause Law and Justice,
in Mercy, to be executed in all your judgements?
Queen: I will.
Archbishop: Will you to the utmost of your power maintain
the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost
of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion
established by law? Will you maintain and preserve
inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship,
discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will
you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there
committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or
shall appertain to them or any of them?
Queen: All this I promise to do.
Despite much public agonising and waffling, the current position
of the Church of England is that marriage is between a man and a woman and
“combines strong opposition to abortion with a recognition that there can be –
strictly limited – conditions under which it may be morally preferable to any
available alternative.”[4]
Granting Royal Assent to both
legalised abortion and same-sex “marriage” would have presented the Queen with
a dilemma as these articles seem to have clashed with her Coronation Oath.
Under the British Constitution, did fidelity to her oath constitute grounds for
the use of “Dicey’s exception” and the refusal of Royal Assent?
To
the aforementioned argument that the Queen has been in an impossible
constitutional bind – caught between her personal religious commitments, her
position as Governor of the Church of England, and her constitutional role as a
politically-impartial ‘referee’ – we can perhaps consider other European
monarchs who faced similar dilemmas but chose different paths.
Most famously,
King Baudouin of Belgium was confronted with a bill legalising abortion in 1990
and refused to give his Royal Assent. With the agreement of the King the
government suspended Baudouin as head of state for a day while they enacted the
law. The Federal Parliament then reinstated the King the next day.
While some
have described Baudouin’s actions as an empty gesture I would aver that they
did at least signal to the Belgian people that the sovereign disapproved of
this grave and immoral attack on life.
Could
the Queen have at least made such a public testimony against the parliamentary
attack on the Natural Law and maintained her throne? Certainly, public respect
for the Queen would have made it very difficult for the government to abolish
the monarchy over such a principled stand.
More likely, a comparable legal
solution to that of Belgium in 1990 would have been found and the Queen would
have had to surrender the remaining royal prerogatives that she had. Yet it
seems that abortion, to take the most egregious example, was a sufficiently
worthy cause for which to consider making such a sacrifice. Had the Queen
signalled her Christian opposition to the return of child sacrifice then the
consciences of the British people may have been stirred and she might have
conducted a great Christian witness.
It has been said that when Rome sneezes
Canterbury catches a cold. In this dismal age we are in desperate need of
radical and heroic Christianity. When most of the Catholic hierarchy failed to
act against the return of child sacrifice to the West, when abortion was legalised,
the testimony of Christianity to the world was dramatically vitiated and has
been ever since. The world needs reminding that the Gospel is something that
Catholics will die for.
Politicians: Figureheads of the Oligarchs
There is another argument that, by withholding Royal Assent, the Queen
could have initiated a just rebellion against a tyrannical government. The
Angelic Doctor writes:
A tyrannical government is not just, because it is
directed, not to the common good, but to the private good of the ruler, as the
Philosopher states (Polit. iii, 5; Ethic. viii, 10). Consequently there is no
sedition in disturbing a government of this kind, unless indeed the tyrant’s
rule be disturbed so inordinately, that his subjects suffer greater harm from
the consequent disturbance than from the tyrant’s government. Indeed it is the
tyrant rather that is guilty of sedition, since he encourages discord and
sedition among his subjects, that he may lord over them more securely;
Vide, NZ's own home-grown tyrant, Jacinda Ardern.
for this
is tyranny, being conducive to the private good of the ruler, and to the injury
of the multitude (II-II q42 a2 ad3).
This argument clearly hinges on the question of whether the
parliamentary government of the United Kingdom was a tyranny at the time it
legislated the articles of the culture of death. It might be argued that
‘parliamentary democracy’ has long been de
facto abolished, if not de
jure.
The Covid tyranny of the last two years was something of a revelation
that our political public leaders seem to be subordinated to global private
interests. These legislators driving through “UN 2030 agenda” policies such as
‘Net Zero,’ “reproductive rights” and mandatory injections seem to act more as
coordinated ‘policy distributors’ rather than ‘policy makers.’ There is
suggestive, but growing evidence of the sexual and financial blackmail that may
be used to effect this control of legislators and maintain the illusion of
‘democracy’ (for example the Epstein scandal).
In Boris Johnson’s eulogy he
described the Queen as a model “figurehead” and it might be the case that this
is exactly what the elected parliamentarians are as well! Nevertheless, it is
beyond the scope of this essay to reach a conclusion on this question.
Hypothetically might the Queen, as legitimate sovereign, have
legitimately determined the legislators of the House of Commons as tyrannical
rulers, seeking the private good of oligarchic interests, and discerned that
her subjects would suffer greater harm from the tyrants’ government than the
disorder of a constitutional crisis provoked by the withholding of her royal
assent? Perhaps such thoughts passed through Elizabeth’s mind in the silence of
her reign. It is also possible that the Queen supported the
legislation contrary to the Natural Law, certainly it seems that her late-husband
was an adherent of Malthusianism and population control.
It seems likely that these kinds of constitutional and moral debates
will multiply as the distance between our own time and the Second Elizabethan
age lengthens and the catastrophic retreat from grace deepens. We are also
likely to discover more about the events and conversations that took place
during the great silence. It may well be that Elizabeth II preserved us from
even worse horrors during her seventy-year reign. Perhaps her restraining
influence was more acute than we have so far conceived.
On every British coin famously appear the letters “F.D.”, standing for
the title of the British monarch; Fidei
Defensor, awarded to King Henry VIII by Pope Leo X in gratitude for his treatise
against the errors of Martin Luther, “Defence
of the Seven Sacraments,” possibly co-authored with St. Thomas More.
What
is less well known is that, in response to Henry’s polemic, Luther gave Henry
the supposedly insulting title of ‘Rex
Thomisticus,” Thomistic King. Not only was he referring to Henry’s scholastic
sacramental theology but also to the ‘Thomistic mixed regime’ of the English
Constitution.
The Kingdom of England was governed by Dominium
Politicum et Regale (Public and Royal Lordship), where everyone, including the King,
was under the rule of law. As this rule of law has been eroded by powerful
elites men have come to yearn for past establishments. We are liable to grieve
a momentous passing such as that of Elizabeth II since, in the process of the
dissolution of Christendom, each revolutionary settlement is less Catholic than
the settlement that preceded it.
As we mourn the late-Queen, who possessed many
natural virtues, let our considerations be governed by reason rather than
simply emotion. It would have been necessary for the Queen to have the clarity
of the doctrine of the Angelic Doctor in order to defend her subjects and yet
where were the Catholic bishops to offer it? Silence.
The trouble with
emphasising the virtues of the ‘settled constitution’ too much is that this can
elide with sentimental notions about the former-Queen, as well as the inherent
desire for comfort and security, that we all have in this all too comfortable
age, and thus the imperative to ‘transform all things in Christ’ can be lost.
Let us be vigilant; not forgetting that we Catholics must never stop working
for a full conversion of the political order and be mindful of the temptation
towards silence where it ought not to be.
I die the King’s good servant, and God’s first.
– St Thomas More
Regina Elizabeth II requiescat in pace
 |
Sir Thomas More
Hans Holbein |
[1] T.
Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of
Sir Thomas More (Dallas: CTMS Publishers at the University of Dallas, 2020), 97.
[2] A.
Nichols, The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on
the Conversion of England (Oxford: Family Publications, 2008),
44.
[3] See
‘Apostolic Majesty’s’ examination here.
[4] “Church of England bishops say
that over 98% of UK abortions are ‘morally wrong.’” Premier
Christian News (2020, February 11).
