The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy. Tom Nairn. 1988

- King of Belgians
    - R P English
    - working class unemployment [note: his omission of the black side of working class is characteristic of left wing and right wing]
    - 161-2: advanced passenger train
    - Scruton and phone boxes
    - Oddity of expression 'Her Majesty's Stationery Office' occurs to me

- 10-11: '.. There have of course been plenty of 'Them' over the last century. .. courtiers and stage-managers.. media devotees like Lord Reith.. or the Fleet Street proprietors.. that adroit 'shop steward of Royalty' Lord Mountbatten.. an 'Establishment' always conscious of how the Crown's contribution to 'stability' supported its own values and interests.
      Yet.. Such efforts from above would have amounted to little had society not wished to be beguiled, and found some genuine comfort in what was offered. .. Manipulation from above has mattered far less than the lack of opposition from below. It is the absence of Republicanism,.. which counts most. .. the Royal passion-play must be an expression of some underlying structures of Britain's national existence - not just a conspiracy of the rulers..
      'Britons' - a title whose oddity itself expresses the eccentricity of Royal nationalism - have learnt to take and enjoy the glory of Royalty in a curiously personal sense. The view taken below is that the phenomenon implies not mass idiocy but (again) a functional requirement of this solution to national identity. A personalized and totemic symbolism was needed to maintain the a-national nationalism of a multi-national (and for long imperial) entity; and 'the Crown' could effectively translate identity on to that 'higher plane' required by a country (heartland England) which has since the 17th C existed out of itself as much as in. Though profoundly averse to democracy, this version of nationality has of course had to adapt to the popular times: and one mode of such adaptation has been precisely that rapprochement of Royal and 'ordinary' we find so prominent in the daily dosage of British monarchism, where a nationalist emotivity informs the concrete individuality of the Sovereign, and her family has become so all-important.' [Last sentence sic; I checked it carefully; good example of Nairn's inability to avoid once-trendy phrases and words. NB: 17th C an important time for Nairn, because he considers the Restoration blighted, more or less permanently, the ideas of republicanism, which he traces as a 'great tradition' through Plato and Machiavelli. He doesn't seem to have Russell's idea anywhere that democracy was invented by Cromwell's soldiers. NB also: structuralism and functionalism implicitly inserted in his remarks; these terms aren't defined, as far as I know, and I suppose assume his readers share a background in which sociology terms are used, but not defined. This of course rules out most people.]
    - 11: [There's a certain amount of psychological stuff; Nairn assumes a model based on 'psychoanalytical' 'therapy':] 'This sort of thing is often described as a national 'obsession'. So it is, but the metaphor can be taken seriously too. Decipherment of a patient's obsessions would normally be expected to show central aspects of his or her personality-structure - for which, in our case, read the real structure of the nation, as manifested through the ideology of Royalism. Doesn't the latter's increasingly weird combination of worship and lunatic concern with 'what they're really like',.. indicate something important about the society it inhabits? To deny this would be the equivalent of dismissing severe obsessional neurosis as merely a bad habit the patient ought to snap out of. And of course, judgements of this order are constantly made about the Monarchy in Britain (there are plenty of terrifying examples below). ..'
      [Nairn says elsewhere in an endnote: The classical source.. is Ernest Jones's essay 'The Psychology of Constitutional Monarchy', in Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis (1951). This complacent study depicted constitutional monarchy as 'an index of a highly civilized relation.. between rulers and ruled', unobtainable save in 'a state that has attained the highest level of civilization']
    - 12: '.. Ernest Gellner has written about his own work on the general theory of nationalism (much cited below), that nothing can be said 'by simply drawing on the cards already available in the language pack that is in use':
      The pack has been dealt too often, and all simple statements in it have been made many times before. Hence a new contribution.. is possible only be redesigning a pack so as to make a new statement possible in it. To do this very visibly is intolerably pedantic and tedious. The overt erection of a new scaffolding is tolerable in mathematics, but not in ordinary prose..
      There is no easy way round the problem.. it involves a kind of sideways or crab-like insinuation - 'fairly unobtrusively loosening the habitual associations' is Gellner's description..'
      [Endnote gives Gellner, 'Nations and Nationalism' 1983]
    - 13: 'Republicanism has been exorcised from the arena of 'responsible public opinion' for over a century, and it's time it was back. .. the taboo.. did not originate by chance, but because it was always far more of a threat than the Royal-distributive Socialism which the British trade unions pressed for and received in the shape of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Lifting the taboo so that it re-entered the public domain and ceased being a form of nuttery or a closet-conviction ('Personally speaking, I've no time for it..' etc) would alter the climate, and before long more than just the climate of United kingdom politics. These are all solemn issues. But one can hardly stay clear of them once a decision is taken to pay the Windsor monarchy the (rare) tribute of regarding it seriously. It is also a farce, of course. .. Since the 1960s we have learned to titter more openly.. But a Republican.. also has to say: if they are absurd, we are the more so, for their glamour is no more than our collective image in the mirror of the State. .'
    - 28: '.. libel laws.. one time [in 20th C] in 1911, when action was taken against a Republican journalist who claimed that George V was a secret bigamist. Although the action was won, it was realized that this kind of publicity is deeply counter-productive: .. The myth of Equality before the Law may be at the heart of free-born England; but in this particular case, best not insisted upon [sic]. After all, the British sovereign is not even the first among equals: '.. No one in the entire realm is legally her equal. Because legally the Queen is the fountain of all justice ... she cannot be prosecuted or sued.' ..'
    - 28: [Note: Cp trinity idea:] 'Quite unwittingly, the most vulgar joke may connect in this sphere with antique mysteries. [what?] In his exhaustive study of the symbolism of mediaeval Kingship, Ernst Kantorowicz concluded that England's peculiarity had always been recognition of 'the King's two bodies' - that is, a relationship between the corporeal frailty of the man or woman and the undying mystique of the Crown. In this 'Royal Christology' there were always 'two bodies but only one person'; the transient, often absurd earthly creature translated a 'body politic' ('the Dignity which does not die') into visible terms. Thus, 'Charles's secret' is both the bald patch and the fact that here is the personage who will be reborn as King the very second Queen Elizabeth draws her last breath, forty-sixth in line since William of Normandy's conquest;..' ['The King's Two Bodies' 1957]
    - 35: 'Daniel Boorstin gave a famous definition of celebrity in his chapter on 'Human Pseudo-Events' in The Image (1961). .. Associated exclusively with the rise of contemporary media from the mid-19th C onwards, the celebrity 'could not have existed in any earlier age': he or she is 'a person who is known for his well-knownness'. .. This is why (for example) President Roosevelt ... was careful to space out his fireside chats so the citizenry would not tire of him. ..'
      [Thus Boorstin seems to be the source of Warhol's comment about everyone being famous for five minutes. Nairn doesn't seem to know that the use of 'image' in his sense was invented by Graham Wallas (at least according to Wallas)]
    - 37: [In 1985, National Library catalogues showed 137 titles devoted to the Queen's family alone (not counting Dukes etc). Nairn says villains are needed: Margaret, The Tragic Princess (J Brough, 1978); Margaret: Princess Without a Cause (W Fischauer, 1978); Princess Margaret: A Life Unfulfilled (Nigel Dempster, 1981). Nairn says these 'do little more than elaborate one primal image: that provided by the timeless nursery tales of Marion Crawford's The Little Princesses (1950), and .. the even soapier Princess Margaret (1952).. These compilations of mawkish tit-bits made 'Crawfie' into an international legend.' [Sic; this legendary quality certainly seems to have infected Nairn, who seems to assume his readers are familiar with this woman, 'governess to the Royal sisters for seventeen years'; he does however quote one short passage, about Elizabeth worrying about Margaret's antics. 41: For all its artful awfulness, The Little Princesses did say something. [Nairn in a longish passage outlines the traps faced by royal biographers.] This is why it aroused so much distress and remained so influential. Marion Crawford was the Peter Wright of the 1950s Court -.. Its coy cosiness and naiveté [sic] were too perfectly in tune with one aspect of Monarchical relations to be refutable..'
      [Also mentions 'A N Wilson's kitsch epic, Lilibet (1984)' apparently a verse effort based on Crawford. Nairn adds '.. imprint.. of Lord Weidenfeld, Britain's quasi-official Royal publication house..']
    - 39: [Edward VII: (NB: I have a biography by Maurois on this man)] '.. one of Edward's many disagreeable characteristics was gluttony. .. writes historian David Cannadine.. .. he ate anything and everything; and he ate it very quickly. All day, every day, day after day, he ate ... it was altogether appropriate that the man known as "Tum-tum" should have to postpone his coronation because he was suffering from appendicitis. [From 'New Society', 20-27 Dec 1984]
      Sir Sidney Lee's single-phrase rendition .. deeply impressed Harold Nicolson [who 'was to end up as official biographer of George V']. The King-Emperor, he wrote, 'never toyed with his food'.
    - 41: 'Isn't it possible to be both appreciative and 'interesting'? The history of the craft shows it to be, at least, extraordinarily difficult. Edward VIII was an exception.. because the system rejected him like a dud coin.. though.. the practical problems [for less inhibited investigators] proved enormous: half a century after the abdication it is by no means concluded.. a century of padded eulogies has so far produced extremely few volumes approaching the norms of ordinary biography. .. Kenneth Rose's King George V (1983).. [Rose] cannot help noticing the absurdities of both the man and the father-figure role into which he was type-cast more effectively than anyone since.. George III. Yet.. 1936 funeral rites.. 'an order of precedence .. that the reforming zeal of the Prince Consort had failed to sweep away almost a century before.' One may indeed suppose this. Prince Albert was both the first and the last genuine modernizer in British Royal history. But the impulses represented by the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition were exactly what Great Britain was destined not to turn into .. what it refused and down-graded .. to sweep back a world of hierarchy and title, the Crowned subordination of the modern to the traditional.
      .. [Rose says] 'the England which George V bequeathed to his son was indeed a demi-paradise' by comparison with the rest of Europe. .. Thus, a moment of British history now most often classed as politically and socially shameful even by conservative historians, [Note: myths: cp my comments on his treatment of working class Scots; support e.g. for US cruelty not in Nairn's awareness.] is given a retrospective glow by the rosy illumination of George V's passing.. That somebody so grotesque and limited could mean so much simply renders the Royal demi-paradise even more miraculous.'
    - 42: [Smallness fixation? Cp Koestler on the Japanese:] '.. Queen Mary's famous doll's house.. Queen was (Rose notes) 'captivated by the diminutive, a taste shared by most of the crowned heads of Europe'. Her passion for the little was comparable to her husband's absorption with the British Empire postage-stamps bearing his own portrait. Princess Marie Louise (1872-1956..) had the idea of flattering her childhood friend's obsession.. She asked.. Sir Edwin Lutyens to design a doll's house.. At first 'rather taken aback' (he was building New Delhi just then) the great man came round to the notion..
      The result was the celebrated miniature Palladian mansion now shown to the public at Windsor Castle: the country house, anti-Crystal Palace England of 1923..' [Nairn gives examples of the mini-furnishings and bits and pieces of this 'house', e.g. tiny shotguns, bottles of wine, stamp albums, gramophone; he evidently considers it a fixation, and expects readers to share this attitude, though it's not exactly clear why].
    - 60: '.. Laurie Taylor.. [actual book or whatever not given] .. criminals.. regard [Monarchy] as the supreme rip-off artists.. '.. It's marvellous the way they kid people. Honestly, it's incredible. I watched the Duke of Edinburgh the other night talking about the Royal Yacht. Fucking yacht. .. It's an ocean-going liner..'
    - 67: '.. other tongues too have standardized forms.. as a rule.. from one or another [sic] dominant region (e.g. the standard form in Italy is known as 'Tuscan' Italian'
    - 71: 'In the mediaeval times which have not quite vanished.. Monarchs claimed and kept possession of their realms like the most powerful of the beasts, This was the reality of the lion or the eagle who now glare and spit only as heraldic symbols. The King or Queen took possession of the territory through the prostration of all its inhabitants, at the Coronation. Then, armed with the thunderbolts of life and death, he or she constantly reaffirmed Royal authority: 'Making appearances, conferring honours, exchanging gifts or defying rivals, they marked the countryside like some wolf or tiger spreading its scent though his territory, as almost physically part of them..' [From Clifford Geertz, 'Centers, Kings and Charisma' in 'Culture and its Creators' 1977]
      These Royal Progresses were accompanied by much popular fun and ingenious displays and contrivances, as well as by obeisances and the savage punishment of transgressors. [NB: Following long passage has no sources credited to it, rather oddly] The 1559 Coronation Procession of Queen Elizabeth I, for example, as well as the later ones to Coventry, Oxford, and Bristol, all were marked by tableaux and festivities putting the pallid ceremonials of her Windsor successors to shame.
      After passing through Cheapside and the painted likenesses of all her Royal predecessors arranged in chronological order, and receiving two thousand gold marks from the City dignitaries, the Virgin Queen discovered in Little Conduit two artificial mountains, one cragged, barren and stony representing 'a decayed commonweal', and the other fair, fresh and green standing for 'a flourishing commonweal'. On the former stood a dead tree with a tramp slumping disconsolately beneath it; on the latter 'a well-appointed man standing happily', while between the hills was a small cave, out of which a man representing Father Time, complete with scythe, emerged (accompanied by his daughter Truth) to present to the new Queen an English Bible. Elizabeth took the Bible,. kissed it and 'raising it first above her head, pressed it dramatically to her breast...'
      At Bristol some years later, the Royal coming was signalled by a three-day mock siege on Avonside, where the armies of Dissension stormed a specially constructed fort called 'Feeble Policy'. The fort was saved by Royal intervention at the last minute, when all seemed lost. One of the players swam the river bearing 'a book covered with green velvet' to plead for the Sovereign's aid (and to explain to her exactly what was going on). Clowns, allegories, mock battles, gilt dragons, prancing nymphs and (in the background) executioners all underlined the willing servitude of province or town, and deepened the claw-marks of the Crown.
      Executions in the name of the Crown have been suspended for some time now in Britain, .. modern public Progresses .. overall organization and.. diffusion to crowds far greater.. Since this sort of Royal ceremonial came of age with Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887, it has underdone a century of regular development. The sense of reverential continuity has been part-revived and part-created since the 1870s. Timeless spectacles do require some real traditions of course and nobody will deny that post-1688 British history has these to offer. .. the pageantry version.. elevate[s] them into the throat-catching 'Thousand Years' of Orb and Sceptre..
      [Then he discusses the 'Royal Touch', 'the last Monarch who attempted the Royal Touch being Queen Anne (who touched among others the youthful Samuel Johnson). No source for this statement, either; evidently it's standard - Russell says the same thing in 'Power'.] .. the last great crescendo of Monarchic therapy had been.. staged by Charles II .. after his Restoration [sic; surely 'the'?] in 1660.. Like William Shakespeare's History Plays.. meant to shore up smashed traditions and a communal sensibility fractured by civil warfare and religious strife. ..'
    - 79: [Etymology of glamour, apparently Scottish:] 'When Devils, Wizards, or Juglers deceive the Sight, they are said to cast Glamour o'er the Eyes of the Spectator', wrote Allan Ramsay in his Poems (1721). The glamour was thought of as residing in the eyes, and the Scottish National Dictionary reports an associated verb, 'to glamour': Salome 'glamour'd Herod', or cast her spell into his eyes. But.. the eyes have to be susceptible: they have lent themselves to enchantment, but may also throw it off. While the spell endures, there is absolute resistance to interruption: the dreamer resents and fears recall to reality. ..'
    - 84: [Nairn quotes a dream of a builder's merchant, from 'Dreams about H.M. the Queen, and other members of the Royal Family' by Brian Masters (1972); Masters says 'Up to one third of the country' has dreamt.. usually coming for a cup of tea and becoming miraculously ordinary or 'hopeless with money' or having to be saved from snarling assassins./ 87: then he quotes, not from real dreams but from a novel by Emma Tennant, 'Hotel de Dream' (1976): 'Miss Briggs dreamed she was at the Royal Garden Party. As always the Queen was quick to notice her in the crowd and, pushing past through the officious and over-protective equerries, made her way through the throng of eagerly waiting subjects to reach Miss Briggs's side..' She is the Queen's 'adviser from the common people', secretly helping her to restore a sense of meaning to life..' The dream mingles with those of other decaying gentlefolk in the Hotel as.. they await the rapidly-approaching end of their existence.']
    - 84-85: '.. Absolute Monarchs.. As long as their immediate vassals (the high nobility and clergy) were kept happy, or cowed, it was of small account what the mass of lower orders thought. Most of them.. almost certainly thought little.. [Note: conflict between monarch and aristocracy, which Nairn is inclined to ignore almost all of the time:] Apart from occasional Royal Progresses like those mentioned above (designed to shatter the finances of the regional aristocracy as much as to display the Royal Person to crowds) the Crown was a remote and God-like notion. Under Louis XIV, the historic epitome of Absolute Rule, most French men and women were in the fortunate position of rarely having to spare a thought for the antics of Versailles.
      Extremely few Great Britons are in that position today. ..' [Nairn seems to think all daily papers bombard the casual observer with news of 'Regal migrations, openings, hand-wavings, speeches, banquets, romances..']
    - 85: [Interesting thing about death; cp some pop singers?] '.. interesting precedent.. The very beginning of the modern elevation of the Monarchy was signalled by a riveting illness. In October 1871 the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) was stricken by typhoid fever emanating from the drains of a Yorkshire country mansion. So dire was his condition that .. 'the bulletins.. caused the nation and empire almost to abandon hope'. Some lines were composed..
      Flash'd from his bed, the electric tidings came,
      He is not better; he is much the same. .. Alfred Austin went on to edit the National Review and.. Poet Laureate (1896-1913), assumed the burden of what Ted Hughes .. called 'the spiritual unity of the tribe'. .. popular reaction.. elemental upsurge of loyal emotion destroyed republicanism overnight as a significant factor in British radical politics'. ..'
    - 87: 'I noticed above the pathological side so often visible in anti-monarchical attitudes. (In effect, people frothing at the mouth at absurdity etc.) It should also be said that no less peculiar behaviour features in a lot of pro-monarchical situations. .. moments where, in the physical proximity of a Royal person, dream and reality dissolve in a hopeless mix-up. .. [extracts follow about the Englishmen's redness increasing, and eyes gleaming with unusual brilliance at the contact or sight of an English Peer, in a book by Gustave Le Bon, 'The Crowd', trans. 1986/ and from a book by Ziegler on 'an eminent man of letters in the 1950s.. '.. Queen's informal lunches. He accepted in a spirit of.. curiosity and ribaldry. .. the Queen appeared and her guests were presented. "Suddenly I felt physically ill.. My legs felt weak, my head swam and my mind went totally blank". "So you're writing about such-and-such, Mr -", said the Queen. "I had no idea what I was writing about, or even if I was writing a book at all. All that I could think of to say was, "What a pretty brooch you're wearing, ma'am!". So far as I can recall she was not wearing a brooch at all. Presumably she was used to such imbecility; anyway she paid no attention to my babbling and in a minute or two I found I was talking sense again.."'
    - 89-90: [Mostly from R W Johnson, 'The Politics of Recession' (1985): '.. 'the peculiar British culture, characterised on the one hand by the imprint of a uniquely powerful and successful state and, on the other, but its non-inclusive conception of the popular interest.. The latter phrase.. derives from the oddest feature of that culture - its lack of any notion of popular sovereignty. The People are 'represented' at the Seat of Majesty but never in actual occupation there:
      It is unthinkable that a state like the British one can be "possessed" by its people. The very institution of the monarchy makes this plain.. (and) the fact of the monarchy is gain critical to this strand of culture.
      .. The history of the British state is like no other, for it has succeeded in a way no other state in the world has done. For nearly a thousand years it has successfully protected the nation against invasion. It created not one but two vast colonial empires, each in their time the biggest humankind has ever seen. It has since 1066 been successful in all wars where its national sovereignty was at stake and has won almost all of its lesser wars too. Other states have Established Churches, but these have resulted either from the church taking over the state, or from a concordat between equals; only in England did the state simply take over the church, prescribing it new doctrines in the interest of the state. The state fathered the world's first industrial revolution. Despite its small size it became the greatest power in the world, both economically and militarily, for a century... At home this state was immune to revolution, even while all others succumbed... For it knew it was not just "the authorities, but Authority itself. It even refused, uniquely, to subject its absolute sovereignty to a constitution. It developed an immense conception of its own dignity and solemnity. And, of course, so majestic a state requires nothing less than a monarchy at its head, even in an age of republics..'
      There is another significant dimension to this quasi-religious nationhood.. a sense of 'State' grandeur and continuity.. has never been the abstract or impersonal apparatus which post-Absolutist Republicanism fostered in Europe (and subsequently in other continents). .. the salience of Monarchy indicates exactly the low profile and prestige of all those aspects of state-life. And this is why *(as Johnson admits) 'the state, its Establishment and its institution have come to be regarded as synonymous with the nation itself. Without its Monarchy, peerage, Houses of Parliament, Britain would literally not be Britain at all for many of its people.' Its awesomeness and 'near-hypnotic impact' depend upon this ostensible identification of State with society: what one could call.. the metaphorical family unity of a Shakespearian (or pre-modern) nationalism.'
    - 91: [What does the following mean?] ''Class', in the oneiric British sense, is both family nickname and curse - a feature of the commanding metaphorical unity inherently open to Royal sublation. The point of its sedulously maintained wounds is revealed by orgasmic moments of communion, the Great Days of the Royal Institution - Remembrances, Thanksgivings, Funerals, Weddings, Visits, and so on - when barriers dissolve into 'the Country' and Who We Really Are. a past-oriented, decorous, semi-divine unison takes over, and the rough of outrageous caste-marks is made smooth.'
    - 92: '.. unease that still clings to any use of the term 'intellectual' in Queen's English: the word jars because it doesn't fit. Ukania-Britain aims (and still largely succeeds) in having what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called a 'clerisy' - a Royal (but not bureaucratic) thought-élite devoted to the brass-rubbing or coining of 'traditions' upholding organic community, rather than an 'intelligentsia' gnawing at its vitals.'
      [Endnote says: see P Gowan, 'The Origins of the Administrative Elite', New Left Review No 162 (March-April 1987). The article deals with Coleridge's influence on political and administrative reform in the 19th C, as the main theorist of non-democratic consent (or 'consensus').]
    - 93: [Passage like Orwell, though Nairn doesn't credit or remember him:] '.. U.K. (or 'Yookay', as Raymond Williams relabelled it), Great Britain (imperial robes), Britain (boring lounge-suit), England (poetic but troublesome), the British Isles (too geographical), 'This Country' (all-purpose within-the-family), or 'This Small Country of Ours' (defensive-Shakespearian). 'Ukania' also has the great merit of recalling 'Kakania', Robert Musil's famous alternative name for the Habsburg Empire in The Man Without Qualities. [No date given for this; only information is it has a volume 1, and one guesses is therefore long.] The königlich und kaiserlich domains of the Habsburg dynasty suffered from a comparable plethora of names, for comparable historical reasons: Austria-Hungary, Austria, the Habsburg Empire, 'the Empire', or even 'Danubia'.
      [A J P Taylor's 'The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918' [1948] is referred to once]
    - 97: [Endnote 51 refers to P Kellner & Crowther-Hunt, 'The Civil Servants' 1980; Pimlott made use of this too.]
    - 108ff: [Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity (1955) 'a surrealist demolition of British delusions':] '.. Royal Co-Warden of the Badgeries.. the great stuffed Badger from the long-vanished Forest of Hertford.. built around the depiction of an estate called Hyde's Mortimer, and cleverly exploits the dual sense of 'estate' in Ukanian mentality. [I.e. it has two meanings.] The 'estates' of mediaeval times were the fixed hierarchy of social divisions which preceded the social classes of contemporary .. society. .. But there is also the sense of traditional landed property or domain, with its accompanying fabric of lordship, deference and 'station' in life. ..'
    - 110: ['stately homes' may have been coined by Dennis, though Nairn doesn't quite say so. However, he does quote Neal Ascherson [in Games With Shadows, 1988, discussing recent re-interpretations of British archaeology, e.g. of Stonehenge:] '.. we have adopted the idiotic term "stately home" for huge buildings which have been centres of power affecting the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, whose function as a "home" has been in comparison trivial.'
    - 111: '.. the great 'Why Not' theory.. Why not keep it forever since people love it and it doesn't really matter? ..
      This is an attitude unerringly identified by Theodor Adorno in Minima Moralia:
      The sense of proportion entails a total obligation to think in terms of the established measures and values. One need only once to have heard a diehard representative of the ruling clique say: "That is of no consequence", or note at what times the bourgeois talk of exaggeration, hysteria, folly, to know that the appeal to reason invariably occurs most promptly in apologies for unreason.'
    - 111ff: [Chapter subdivision called 'Disavowal':] '.. two contradictory views about the real significance of Monarchy coexisting.. it is all-important, and of no real importance whatever. The absurdity is rendered invisible by our British sense of proportion. One finds the two notions (for instance) .. in that article of Henry Fairlie's.. After underlining the sense of insecure personal outrage felt by 'millions of humdrum people' whenever Monarchy is denounced, he goes straight on to say:
      For the life of me, I cannot understand why people should not be allowed to enjoy a prettily-staged wedding, or even a pompously-staged funeral, without someone breathing fire and brimstone down their necks. .. .. Hence, something capable of provoking a nation-wide taboo, frothing hysteria and death-threats is also an innocent, prettily-staged ceremonial no serious British intellect need worry about. The danger of the Crown becoming 'the sole cohesive force in society' is, at the same time, 'just a piece of acceptable nonsense'. It is 'the cherished symbol by which most of us live'. .. Grotesque self-contradiction of this order is so common in both popular and official native commentary that one has to put it down as systematic. ..
      The only plausible explanation is that a defensive machinery is at work, whose very success simultaneously suppresses awareness of the contradiction. The magic emblem is displaced by an accompanying taboo from the sphere of the criticizable, and the act of displacement itself paralyses any critical sense of what has been done. Then, thoroughly protected by redefinition as 'acceptable nonsense', its actual importance can go on being accepted and enjoyed.
      This phoney dismissal of Royalty appears quite close to Sigmund Freud's definition of Verleugnung - 'disavowal' in a psychiatric sense. This is a procedure for retaining belief by appearing to give it up, and he found it to be most marked in the psychology of fetishism .. in situations governed by the fear of male castration. .. The fetishist's 'fixation' on his object keeps him apparently normal. 'It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration' (Freud goes on) 'and a protection against it. It also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, be endowing women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects'.
      .. One aspect of disavowal is not much stressed in the famous 1927 analysis of Fetischismus - the sufferer's pretence of ultra-normality. The neurotic rigidity re-echoes into the machinery of concealment, producing (in effect) a caricature of sober, non-perverse deportment. ...
      114: 'What corresponds to 'normality' in our metaphor of Royal-British nationality? The 'whole' for which the Monarchical fragment is a surrogate can only be normal nation-state existence: the 'boring' standard of contemporary disenchantment upheld by the United Nations: written constitutions supposedly embodying popular sovereignty, Presidents, civil rights rather than the traditional Liberties of Subjects, administrative law as opposed to the supremacy of Parliament - that sort of thing. Fearing the castration of modernity, an 'infantile' (or early-modern) polity has constructed a fetish of its own retarded essence ('our way of doing things') and imposed an instinctive taboo around it. It's bad form, or in bad taste, to question this projection; while more resolute attacks on it can be headed off by disavowal. ...'
    - 115: [Part of chapter; called 'Sociology of Grovelling, Part I' which is an account of a 1956 account of the Coronation by American Edward Shils and Michael Young, and in Part II a reply by Prof Norman Birnbaum, 'a New Left influenced sociologist'; Nairn maintains they both tacitly miss out something important. These sections start:]
      All that remains of the criticism of bourgeois consciousness is the shrug with which doctors have always signalled their complicity with death. Theodor Adorno, 'Minima Moralis' (1951) 'Ego is Id' p 64 '.. we now have a perspective for understanding the absence of intellectual concern about Monarchy. Middle-brow Guardian reflection functions to preserve the national totem-system; the sense of proportion thus expressed is then refracted upwards to the high-brow or academic sphere as simple avoidance - an integrated intellectual elite's chosen form of allegiance. Hence the remarkable result: the British Monarchy, one of the sociological wonders of the contemporary world, Europe's greatest living fossil, the enchanted glass of an early modernity which has otherwise vanished from the globe, has received next to no attention from British social theory. .. such attention as it has got consists mainly in acts of worship rather than examination. [NB: Nairn seems naively to assume this is unique; but what has 'British social theory' to say on public school education, or world empires and arms, or the Church of England, or law, or the military etc?]

- 119: [Edward Shils, in 'The Intellectuals and the Powers' 1972, 'British Intellectuals in the Mid-Twentieth Century' quoted and commented on:]
      'In another study Shils himself has commented on the drastic change of climate which war, victory and the Labour government had brought about:
      Deeply critical voices became rare. In 1953, I heard an eminent man of the left say, in utter seriousness, at a university dinner, that the British constitution was "as nearly perfect as any human institution could be", an noone even thought it amusing... Great Britain on the whole, and especially in comparison with other countries, seemed to the British intellectual of the early 1950s to be fundamentally all right and even much more than that. Never had an intellectual class found its society and its culture so much to its satisfaction....The British intellectual came to feel proud of the moral stature of a country with so much solidarity and so little acrimony between classes.
      Hence, the generally semi-religious quality of a Monarchic constitution was reconsecrated by these special circumstances: traditional authority and the basic moral cement of social order were strengthened together, made as one by popular participation in a key ritual celebration. If there was an archaic side to the latter, concluded the authors, we should remember it is not sociologically significant. ..'

- 120: [Sociology of Grovelling, Part 2:] 'In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.' Theodor Adorno, 'Minima Moralis', 'They, the People' p 28
      'The perils of even this modest piece of theory were soon revealed. For all their adulation Shils and Young had been unable to avoid excess: the extrusion of a recognizable and hence attackable idea from the solid corpus of faith and everyday 'good English'. Since 1979 this kind of thing has grown familiar, but in the old times it was unknown. Reaction to such a suspiciously egg-head Loyalism duly came in the shape of 'Monarchs and Sociologists', a reply by Professor Norman Birnbaum. [In 'Towards a Critical Sociology', 1971]
      '.. A socialist linked to the New left movement of the later 1950s, Birnbaum maintained that Shils and Young were poisoned 'by their own strong feeling of adherence to the official morality of Great Britain - and their preference for conformity to such moralities wherever they appear'. ..
      .. Underlying the Shils-Young smugness, Birnbaum claims, is really their conviction that 'The assimilation of the working class into the moral consensus of British society....has gone further in Britain than anywhere else, and its transformation from one of the most unruly and violent into one of the most orderly and law-abiding (of classes) is one of the great collective achievements of modern times'. Society viewed through the royal-left eyeglass always means 'class', in that ambiguous Ukanian sense noted earlier; and Shils and Young were asserting that 'class' was secondary, and of decreasing significance.
      Not so, he continues: visitors to Great Britain are invariably struck by the 'now traditionalized and self-conscious class consciousness' of workers - by their degree of separateness and exclusion, by the glaring proliferation of caste-marks.. Furthermore, it has been their separate struggles (and victories) which have forged the very situation so misunderstood by Shils and Young. Monarchy arrived where it is today via 'a successive series of capitulations to republican demands'; such 'integration' as we see today came about only through a century of Labour's own class battles to 'bring the propertied into the national moral life for the first time'. Civilization has really been made from below, not from above. As for the Royals, .. they 'had to choose between accepting socialism or unemployment'. Hence (he concluded) an alternative explanation might just as well run like this:
      The very absence of shared values in Great Britain accounts for some of the attention paid to the Coronation... (which) provided a measure of surcease from that condition of conflict which is more of less permanent for complex societies of an industrial type... ... the personality of the Queen and her family functioned as the object of various fantasies and identifications in a way not much more "sacred" than the cult of adulation built up around certain film stars.
      Birnbaum's riposte was one of the most concise and magisterial expressions of Left-Ukanian mythology in the post-war era. The tapestry of Whig-Labour belief is all here in miniature: moral/class community, uplift from below, and achievement yet to come. Though couched in the over-respectful tones of the Sociological Review [Note: Nairn has the nerve to make fun of Sociologists' use of English: where Professors accuse one another of 'not entirely escaping ambiguity' and failing to 'present events in scientific terms'] there was real rage in it. ..'
      [Nairn quotes 'tinsel revels' as cp. 'deeply moving' or 'thousand-year history']

- 124ff: [Chapter called 'Enchantment in retrospect']
      'We shall treat the Whig interpretation of history... not as a thing invented by some particularly wilful historian, but as part of the landscape of English life, like our country lanes or our November mists or our historic inns... It is itself a product of history, part of the inescapable inheritance of Englishmen...'
      Herbert Butterfield, 'The Englishman and his History' 1944 'Sociological and empirical theories like these [i.e. presumably Shils & Young, and Birnbaum] do little but rehearse certain underlying Ukanian assumptions. They resemble the gladiatorial rhetoric of the Mother of Parliaments, where all rows really exist to fortify the Crown and not to undermine it. Monarchy and 'society' are counterposed in a phoney and utterly philistine manner as show and reality - a contrast from which all the factors permitting one to make sense of either are wilfully occluded. What are these? In still cryptic form which I will try to decode: pastness and national identity, History and the Nation.
      .. The Coronation.. projected history as the great prop of the performance: a legendary 'thousand years' all somehow alive and watching from the shadows of Westminster Abbey.
      Richard Dimbleby's famed B.B.C. commentary on the Crowning packed the past-is-with-us sentiment into every throbbing syllable: what the hearers were invited to revere was not their collectivity as of that moment in time, but that moment itself as the culmination of a communal collectivity which had endured since....well, the paterfamilias of British cliches, 'time immemorial'. In the cinema film which followed, after a decontaminatory blast from Shakespeare, Sir Laurence Olivier's script.. went on to describe the moment of anointing - 'the hallowing, the sacring' - as so old that 'history is scarce deep enough to contain it'.
      In my own modest collection of Regal memorabilia.. booklet produced by the City of Oxford Secondary Teachers' Association to mark Coronation Year. 'The idea of monarchy is as old as history, and indeed older...' began Mr R S Stanier of Magdalen College School in similar vein. Given by Divine Providence along with upright posture and the faculty of speech, the true function of Kings has always been to speak symbolically 'to the fundamental instincts of the human heart'. There was some trouble when Monarchs went beyond this and dabbled in politics: a King who does this and claims superhuman authority 'will be as unpopular as the man who wants to join in a game of football with special permission to break all the rules'. But when this was put right the Crown carried forward the essential spirituality of our history. All the other booklet items - Music, Heraldry, the Order of Service, - are firmly encased in this historical involucrum where all Britain's post-Neanderthal generations crowd in and explain why 'Today we all, as loyal subjects, feel our welfare, the welfare of the country, curiously bound up with that of the Queen...'
      [125-6 looks at Shakespeare, Tudors, Burke:]
      '.. in Britain solemn moments are nearly always given Shakespearian vestment as their badge of national continuity. Shakespeare's pre-modern attitudes can all too easily be misinterpreted as sage and profoundly-rooted national resistance to the doctrinaire: what is to much democracy but the sort of mob rule which his Monarchs enjoy putting to rights? Against that there stands an apparently more human, concrete perspective. Though in fact it looked back to the middle ages and underwrote Tudor Absolutism, post-1800 apologists have made this retrospect into a 'timeless' (hence forward-looking) view. In the 'Royal Throne of Kings' [1958 book] Wilson Knight observes that-
      There is properly no contradiction between royalty and democracy; rather they supplement and complete each other...Royalty at its best has always functioned in unison with a willing allegiance, and has been to that extent dependent on freedom. Real democracy will exist only when 'every man is, in his own proper self, a king' - when the ordinary has become extraordinary, the humdrum been dissolved in glamour: .. as we've seen, this is the whole content of today's night and daydreams about royalty. Aren't these impossible? Well, that's human nature for you: 'here we are brought up against the tragic inadequacies of mankind...' Shakespeare is all too often credited with the last word on such tragic inadequacies. Best stay with what we've got in the demi-paradise, since a republican democracy would only succumb to these pitfalls of fate.
      That English culture boasted this emblem was a great piece of good fortune. The poet of its early-modern era concocted a fake medieval past for his own Sovereigns; later, when the impact of democracy and industrialization inspired another bout of tradition-inventing, ideologists could evoke this great precedent - romantic pastness and anti-modernism now had their own history to go on, a real continuity of the ersatz solidly implanted in mass consciousness. By the time Edmund Burke and Pitt had finished in the early 1800s, synthetic pastness had turned into a version of national identity. And, as we will go on to see, Monarchy played a vital part in this consolidation. It allowed the formation of a traditionalism quite distinct from mere feudal or folk tradition: an 'ism' in which the past was re-synthesized as contemporary identity. ...
      Theoretical indifference to Monarchy, in other words, is a manifestation of blindness to nationalism. Both the prominence of the Royal in Ukanian life and the virtual absence of explanations for such prominence derive from incuriosity about 'the national' as a specific problematic - a set of questions or dilemmas demanding investigation. No point in that, old chap: we know who we are. It's only foreigners who have to work themselves up over that sort of thing, regularly abandoning all sense of proportion as they do so.'

- 127: [Chapter called 'Monarchy and Nationalism' which begins:]
      'Genuine charismatic domination knows of no abstract legal codes and statutes and of no "formal" way of adjudication. Its "objective" law emanates concretely from the highly personal experience of heavenly grace..."It is written, but I way unto you." Max Weber, Essays in Sociology The Ukanian Monarchy is in essence a heteronomous form of nationalism: that is, a variety 'subject to different laws' from the standard forms of that ideology, and with 'different modes of growth' (O.E.D.) One important aspect of that difference is - as we shall see - that the Monarchy doesn't appear to be nationalist. It defines itself, necessarily, as being precisely above or beyond 'that sort of thing' - a stance which, in the world of nation-states, has comported both weaknesses and remarkable (and frequently under-estimated) strengths. ..'

- 128: 'The crucial point here is that we [sic. Joke: he uses royal 'we'] admit the inevitability of nation-state development as a vehicle of modernity. ..
      .. nationalism is the standard politico-cultural component of the modern order of nation states. That political order itself has been mainly produced and systematized since the 18th C., and can most reliably be dated by reference to the American and French Revolutions (1776 and 1789). What it expresses is the mainstream-process of social and economic development towards today's society: 'industrialization'. As Ernest Gellner puts it in Nations and Nationalism - [1983]
      Patriotism is a perennial part of human life...(while) nationalism is a very distinctive species of patriotism, and one which become pervasive and dominant only under certain social conditions, which in fact prevail in the modern world, and nowhere else.. In other words nationalism, in the systemic sense denoted by the word's ending, only arose through the middle-class revolutions of the 18th C. and later - an accompaniment of 'progress' and continuous economic growth. It was a part of the constellation of new attitudes and ideas which fought or undermined the European Ancien Regimes from 1688 onwards, broke through in the American and French revolutions, and led to their ultimate collapse in 1917-18. By that time the nation-state was established as the 'natural;' model of political development and lodged as such in the ideology of both the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations.
      There were two main causes for this. The first was external: 'Industrialization inevitably comes to different places and groups at different times' (Gellner points out) so that the pioneers can't help gaining an enormous advantage over societies still cast in a feudal or agrarian mould. The advantage leads them into an 'imperial' position.. But the under-developed must attempt to catch up, or fight back.
      As the tidal wave of modernization sweeps the world, it makes sure that almost everyone...has cause to feel unjustly treated, and that he can identify the culprits as being of another "nation". If he can identify enough of the victims as being of the same |"nation" as himself, a nationalism is born..
      ..'

- 144: '.. January morning of 1649. The second Stuart Monarch of Great Britain was led out on to a specially built scaffold in Whitehall, and beheaded. 'The saddest sight that England ever saw', related Thomas Herbert, a member of the disconsolate royal party whose Memoirs were to become the main eye-witness source for Charles's last days. Nothing could have been more appropriate than that the self-serving recollections of this stupendous mountebank and liar should become national moral law on the subject.' [Endnote: See N Mackenzie, 'Sir Thomas Herbert of Tintern: a Parliamentary "Royalist"', Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research (London), vol. XXIX (1956). The author points out that the Herbert Memoirs are essentially 'a skilful re-shaping of facts' to ingratiate Herbert with Charles II.]

- 163ff: [Chapter called 'the Modernization of George III':]
      'You may have seen Gilroy's [sic; Gilray presumably in Thackeray] famous print of him - in the old wig, in the stout old hideous Windsor uniform - as the King of Brobdignag, peering at a little Gulliver, whom he holds up in his hand, whilst in the other he has an opera-glass, through which he surveys the pygmy? Our fathers chose to set up George III as the type of a great king; and the little Gulliver was the great Napoleon...There was no lie we would not believe; no charge of crime which our furious prejudice would not credit.
      W M Thackeray, 'The Four Georges' (1869) 'the Scottish and English Revolutions impacted on a world not yet ready, either theoretically or materially, for the lasting successor to Absolutism; popular sovereignty, with its implications of lower-order power and ethnicity, democracy and nationalism. .. The old British Monarchy was decapitated too soon. ..
      Parliamentary victory therefore was that of one absolutism over another. The constitution of its power was 'the outcome of a competition for sovereignty. In spite of the failure of the royalist quest for sovereignty the absolute stage emerged, the privileges of Parliament came to be substituted for the prerogatives of the King as James I had conceived them...' [Figgis, 'The Divine Right of Kings', 1914] The Parliamentary class seized sovereignty, and legitimized the transfer with a myth of the Crown-in-Parliament. This is what was finally established by the decisive second Revolution in 1688 - a permanent power structure where, .. 'Legally we have no fundamental rights in Great Britain; we trust for their protection to the ordinary constitutional machinery of the state...' [Harold Laski; no reference] Trust, in other words, to the reasonableness of those running the machine, and to their willingness to 'compromise' and heed representations from below. ..
      The Hanoverians were a constitutional necessity but a popular liability. Their establishment and survival could only have happened in a world where popularity was still fairly unimportant. By 1800.. that world was showing the first signs of general crisis and dissolution. Britain had already been shaken by the American Revolution of the 1770s. Soon every part of the older Europe would be convulsed by the French Revolution and the generation of warfare up to 1815. Through the Revolution, a potentially effective political form was given to equality, literacy and industry. While in the wars, Clausewitz pointed out that 'no one would have believed possible what all have now lived to see realized': through these revolutionary and counter-revolutionary wars the 'absolute character' of warfare (previously associated with religious fanaticism or primitive tribal hatred) had re-emerged. While in the old pre-1789 days 'War was still a mere Cabinet affair, in which the people only too part as a blind instrument; at the beginning of the 19th C. the people on each side weighed in the scale..' [My Penguin edition]
      It was this weight which transformed the context of both nationality and Monarchy. The older insular State now countered the genesis of a new political world. It had done more than any other society to bring that world into the light; yet very quickly it perceived the birth as monstrous, and set out to strangle it. In this gargantuan effort Britain's quasi-modern national identity was first forged, and the function of Monarchy as a popular element within that idea-system, first made clear. As England became the leader of opposition to the revolutionary cause it too had to arouse more widespread popular support. While Upper England found its new anti-revolutionary visage in the discourses of Edmund Burke, the middle and lower ranks were ideologically conscripted by more vulgar means. the Gallic stereotype was concocted, a 'distorted image of revolutionary France' whose chief intellectual components were -
      the ideas of destruction, license, abstract political thought, atheism, and impious mockery. "Philosophy" was perhaps its familiar name. Its face, or faces, were the wizened and triumphantly grimacing countenance of Voltaire, mocker of Christianity and diabolical mastermind of the Revolution, or the face of an ape, which similarly represented destruction and absolute irresponsibility. In either case, a horrible grin appears to have bean central to the image... [Victorian Studies, vol. XVIII (1974-5), section 1, 'Anti-French Propaganda and British Liberal Nationalism in the Early 19th C.'] What in Burke appears as 'quadrimanous' (four-handed or monkey-like [quadrimanous is Nairn's wrong spelling; word is sim. to quadruped]) meddling with tradition turns into the frank racism of caricature and broadsheet: a 'nation of baboons' against which Humanity itself now had to be defended.
      For the first time, incipient Anglo-British nationalism was both defined and hardened by an external threat. It is quite true that in both previous centuries the English State and people had also at times been threatened by invaders (most famously in Elizabeth I's reign, by Philip II's Spain). But these occasions were before the people 'weighed in the scale' of state affairs... it was only the more modern circumstances of post-1789 that would cast them into the mould of a nationalism and (after that) of an enduring popular national identity.
      ...
      Since its 17th C. agonies, the Anglo-British dominant class had ceased to be a closed nobility of the mainland kind. It had turned into a mercantile oligarchy, where landownership was linked to commerce rather than to the exclusive feudal professions of warfare. In his study of Edmund Burke, C B Macpherson ['Burke' 1980] has accurately delineated the features of this patriciate. Burke's impassioned defence of English traditions against French Jacobinism was not really a plea for the immemorial or for 'feudal' honour: that was only rhetorical and emotive colour (of the sort which would eventually become apart [sic] of the reanimated Crown mystique). A wider reading of him shows how the great counter-revolutionary prophet knew perfectly well that by the 1790s 'the capitalist order had in fact been the traditional order in England for a whole century.':
      His [Burke's] genius was in seeing that the capitalist society of the late 18th C. was still heavily dependent on the acceptance of status. Contract had not replaced status: it was dependent on status...Burke saw that, down to his own time, such movement as there had been was not from status to contract but from status to status, that is, from a feudal status differentiation, which rested on military capacity, to what we should now call an internalised status differentiation, which rested on nothing more than habit and tradition, that is, on the subordinate class continuing to accept its traditional station in life.
      In short, a largely synthetic 'traditional' social order had already been built up in Whig Britain. It associated aristocracy with an early-modern form of capitalism, commercial rather than industrial in orientation; and far from demanding a farther rush forward into modernity - a 'bourgeois revolution' - this system was, at least in Britain's favourable conditions, both stable and (within limits) adaptable.
      Until 1745 it had been successfully defended against the past - the return of a Stuart Ancien Régime; now it had to be defended against the future - against the precipitate advance of democracy, egalite and an individualism hostile to all habit and subordination. Later on I will return to the vital status-contract transition, which can be viewed in other and equally telling perspectives. For the moment what matters is the possibility of (in Jeffrey Lant's phrase) the Crown's 'mystically embodying the will' of the entire nation - something that previously would have been mocked out of existence. Yet in Prince Albert's period it was quite conceivable, and by the time of the late-Victorian Jubilee it was almost taken for granted. The key to this mysterious reincarnation lay in 'the nation' itself: in the evolution around 1800 of a popular national identity more compatible with Edmund Burke's traditionalism.
      The British Monarchy seems to have first acquired a distinctly.. 'modern' appearance during the reign of George III. His reign (1760-1820) was the longest of any British Monarch, and its last twenty years are normally skipped over quickly by his many biographers. This was the period of madness.. during the second half of his reign it forced him progressively out of the kind of active meddling in party politics which he had formerly indulged in. The first serious bout occurred in 1788-9 at the very moment of the revolution's outbreak. Thereafter, increasing withdrawal turned him into more and more of an effigy, a remote figure upon whom symbolic meanings could be imposed with little risk that the real, pathetic man might reappear and undermine them.
      In a recent important study of the layer George III Linda Colley [Articles in 'Past & Present' No. 102 (1984) & 113 (1985)] points out how the French Revolution's impact stimulated a reactive nationalism everywhere else in Europe - either liberal (following the trend established in Paris) or 'conservative, state-sponsored nationalism' defying the revolutionaries and trying to arouse popular support for a safe variety of patriotism. In Britain, after some initial uncertainty, it was the second movement that prevailed. The Revolution's effects, explained Sir Samuel Romilly in his Memoirs, 'gave almost every description of persons who have any influence on public opinion an interest to adhere to, and maintaining inviolably, our established Constitution and, above all, the Monarchy, as inseparably connected with, and maintaining everything valuable in the State...' [This quotation also taken from Colley. It seems that Nairn, in doing a period, picks one person he likes, then another, then another, to quote from; no wonder there's an unsynthesised, and indeed unanalysed, patchwork. It's not very clear though how much of Nairn's text is taken from Colley, and how much, if any, is his own; there are certainly several pages from her, credited only vaguely, with Nairn as it were showing off his knowledge of her: 'Later this is developed into a general comment of great interest' he says at one point, meaning by her.]
      The French Revolutionary principles.. would have impelled the established British compromise forward. They promised or threatened another phase of the true 'bourgeois revolution' the Levellers had agitated for the previous century. Faced with the menace of extinction Britain's unique oligarchic polity had to go forward, or back. Nationalism comes most into its own in the shadow of annihilation. The reply could only be quick mobilization of a 'national identity' either ahead of that proclaimed by the Jacobin Montagne, or deliberately behind and against it..
      Only a strong ideological counter-offensive was any use. And in trying to make the Parliamentary oligarchy more popular, grand and immemorial, the Crown was an inevitable instrument. 'The chief beneficiary of this process of state-nationalization of nationalism in Britain was the King', observes Colley. That was why George III's reign brought a sudden invention of traditions - the first [sic; he seems to think monarchic impressiveness is completely new] premonitory ripple of what, at the end of the 19th C., would turn into a great tide of synthesized nostalgia tingeing every aspect of the British Way with Regal inviolability. In 1789, a frantic search of record shad to be conducted in order to establish just how the Nation ought properly to celebrate King George's apparent recovery from illness. Nobody living could recall popular desire to mark such an occasion, and it was feared that the appropriate ritual might have vanished with the Stuarts (eventually some rather meagre clues wee unearthed from Queen Anne's thanksgiving for marlborough's victory at Blenheim in 1704). By 1797 however - when Britain's sea triumphs over the Revolution were celebrated- courtiers and ministers now knew approximately what to do, and thanks could be offered up in time-honour'd style.
      As well as State occasions the same decades witnessed mammoth growth in popular tokens of loyalty: commemorative pottery, cheap prints and obsequious ballads. .. illuminated 'transparent prints'.. [Colley quoted: '.. with embroidering standards for volunteer regiments, making the transparencies became one of the most widely practised patriotic accomplishments of women of Jane Austen's social status and those who aspired to it.']
      .. Even prior to the anti-revolutionary build-up George's domestic propriety had appealed to ladies of aspiring status: 'The royal family .. acquitted increasing.. popularity' .. The 'middle classes' .. saw something admirable in.. that life-style which later aroused the derision of aristocrats and intellectual cynics; .. middling women, with their responsibility for hearth and children, saw a special tribute to themselves in the model household of 'Farmer George'. .. 'remarkable female investment in royal celebration' of George's later reign.. Wives and mothers and .. (nearly all women) found the investment attractive because the restricted (or 'nuclear') family was far more important to the bourgeoisie than to the reigning aristocracy. That the elite and the intellectuals disdained poor, boring old George was another sound reason for the new passion. .. we are already in the 20th C. .. These attitudes were unknown to earlier reigns: in the world of Absolute Monarchy mistresses and bastards aroused little real censure and were not the business of the lower orders. But in the new conditions.. they had turned into 'the business' of subjects: ..
      ...
      After 1790, George's inability to interfere with Parliament (as he had done so notably in 1783-4 and during the American revolution) was turned to something extremely useful. Just .. when the State.. needed validation as such, in the new, urgently nationalistic sense above party bickering, it became safe to worship the Crown. .. the King's .. madness.. was one of Monarchy's outstanding gifts to England. It occurred in the .. circumstances that demanded.. separation of Crown and State from mere politics; and the result - the rapid compilation of a more conscious, apparently non-controversial national identity - was equally decisive. Now that the Throne was harmless it could be made the focus for a 'pure' patriotism perceiving the existing State as an apolitical foundation for 'everything worth defending' about Britain. .. note Colley..
      ...As some radical journals recognized, this growing distinction in the public mind was potentially an enormous asset to the existing order. For of course the belief that the monarch was in some way politically neutral was profoundly deceptive. The monarchy was the apex of the existing social hierarchy and the formal head of the existing constitution: attachment to it willy-nilly dictated limits to anyone's social or political disaffection...
      it was these 'limits' that counted. Negatively, they drew marks against 'unreasonable', 'impractical' opposition to the régime; positively, they were the lineaments of more consciously affirmed nationality - the image of Great Britain's riposte to arid philosophes and Napoleon Bonaparte. Earlier, patriotism had been something associated with (in our terms) the 'Left' rather than the Establishment. That is why it had been denounced (in one of the most misquoted remarks in British history) as 'the last refuge of a scoundrel' by the Tory Samuel Johnson. [Endnote gives April 7 1775 and a page number in the Everyman Edition, with no further explanation.] But by around 1810 the scoundrels had been chased out of their refuge for good: it was being made into a Royal Palace.
      In reaction against this appropriation of national robes by Throne and Altar, British democrats found themselves automatically threatened with extrusion into a stance of 'internationalism'. It could be claimed, of course, that the Royal, conservative-national identity was fraudulent, that a real Britain was betrayed and disguised by it; but the claim became weaker and more strident as an ever-larger popular majority did show signs of accepting the imposition. The huge crowds and 'spontaneous' enthusiasm for the celebrations for George's 50th Jubilee in 1809, and then for the Centenary of the Hanoverian accession to the British Throne in 1814, showed.. that this could not all be conspiracy and drunkenness.
      By talking of 'the foolish multitude' or asserting that 'the people have no will in the matter... (it) is an act of the government', the radicals Leigh Hunt and William Cobbett were implicitly confessing the victory of the very strategy they deplored. And 'victory' consisted partly in the fact that it was not (or not only) a strategy of 'government' in the limited party sense: the point was that Government as such had been stamped with a new identity, at once more national and more deeply-rooted. ...
      Some still [sic] find it surprising that in the last years of the great battle against the Revolution there were British subjects who had doubts about the patriotic cause, and quite a few who longed for French triumph. Even in the distorted, imperialist form of Napoleonism that seemed preferable to vindication of Hanover and Old Corruption (the 'unacceptable face' of Burke's Constitution of Liberty). Years after Waterloo (which had reduced him to prolonged drunken stupor at the time) William Hazlitt described how Napoleon's defeat had 'thrown him into the pit': [Extract quoted; but no source; perhaps therefore from Colley. NB: Occurs to me that Scotland had a tradition of link with France; perhaps Hazlitt was Scotch?]
      Had Britain not won then (they felt) democracy and equality might eventually have had the chance to find new native expression. As it was, victory was carrying the Old Régime to the centre of the world stage and renewing its soul. .. Thus the reinvented Royal identity inevitably bred a parochial British dialectic of the Left: a special kind of anti-nationalism 'remote from the people', pursued by a determined assertion of democracy's right to at least a share in the national-popular heritage - to resonant and unquenchable traditions of its own (which then had also to be discovered-invented and immemmorialized [sic]).
      [Follows cp with a man he met in 1982 who hoped the Argentinians would do better; he felt had they won Old Corruption might have been wounded enough to retire, 'Old Corruption;' being Thatcher]
      .. Colley's concluding words:
      The accelerating process whereby political and social radicals in Britain vacated the realm of conventional, xenophobic and complacent patriotism, and left it for the state authorities and, crucially, for the monarchy, to occupy. The libertarian, anti-imperialist mode of patriotism was very far from dead in Britain by 1820 - it was voiced, for example, by the Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s... But the second half of George III's reign forced this type of patriotism on the defensive and helped to ensure that, increasingly, the nation would be celebrated in a very different way.'

- 174: 'The discovery was made that England was, after all, an old country with a precious heritage in danger of obliteration...An élite separating itself from the sources of dynamism in existing society and striving to attach itself to another way of life promoted a change in collective self-image from that of a still-young and innovative nation to one ancient and peculiarly stable.' Martin Wiener, 'The "English Way of Life"?' in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980' (1981) 175: '.. The Anglo-Scottish 1707 State - which already incorporated the Welsh and the Irish in different ways - was constituted before the general formulation of modern national consciousness.
      This state of affairs is revealed in the small change of Ukanian conversation... A similar neurosis afflicted Habsburg salons.. Man Without Qualities:
      On paper it called itself the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; in speaking, however, one referred to it as Austria, .. A name that it had, as a state, solemnly renounced by oath, ...
      ...
      'In other countries dynasties are episodes in the history of the people', wrote A J P Taylor, 'in the Habsburg Empire people are a complication in the history of the dynasty'. [Taylor's 1948 book.] Within the British Empire too, both 'people' in the radical, trouble-making sense and 'peoples' in the plural or ethnic sense have figured as adjuncts of the Crown: colourful and loyal complements to the Supremacy of Parliament with an unfortunate tendency to get out of hand. .. 'Great Britain' was a bit of pompous myth-geography foisted upon the English by the Scots at the time of the 1707 Union: belief that the 'Great' part signifies grandeur is confined to political cretins.
      [176-7 talks of Britons etc, quoting Fowler's Modern English Usage and something called English Today ('The International Review of the English Language')]