Queen Repeats The Coronation Oath She Broke
During the six-minute speech, penned
rarely by her own hand and not by government, she went on to repeat her vow made
on Accession Day in February to 'rededicate myself to the service of our great
country'.
Coronation
Oath, 2nd June 1953.
It includes:-
Archbishop. Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon, and of your Possessions and the other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs?
Queen. I solemnly promise so to do.
Monarchy, Nation-States And The Failed Reign of Elizabeth The Useless
QUOTE
By
Sean Gabb
At the last
Royal Wedding, back in 1981, I spent most of the day in bed, listening to Die
Meistersinger
Well, at least Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were not polluting the event by their presence. If the Mountbatten-Windsors had shown a little more backbone when these wretches were in office, I might think more of them today
Why is the English Monarchy is at once so important to England—I prefer this honest tribal term to the now-obsolescent “Britain”—and recently so disappointing?
Many Americans no doubt looked at all the bowing and kissing and walking backwards, and thought how lucky they were to live in a republic—especially in one where anyone at all, it seems, is able to become head of state. Perhaps they are right.
I, however, have always been very glad to be an Englishman. Among much else, being English brings complete moral security and no need ever to apologize or even explain.
It is the function of the Monarchy both to express and to sustain England’s national identity and all that stands with it. The Monarchy reminds us that our nation is not some recent arrival in the world, and that the threads of continuity between ourselves and our distant forebears—what Abraham Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory”—have not been broken. England and its monarchy exist today, and five hundred years ago, and a thousand years ago, and one thousand five hundred years ago. And, as we go further back, they vanish together, with no sense that they ever began at all, into the forests of Northern Europe.
But what makes the Monarchy nowadays so disappointing is that Her Present Majesty—“Elizabeth the Useless”—has, during the fifty nine years of her reign, been an absolute failure at discharging any of her positive functions.
Her negative functions she has discharged well enough. To do these, however, she has simply needed to occupy the right place in her family tree and know how to smile and wave whenever she appears before us. If, like the Emperor of Japan, she never said or did anything in public, she would still express our national identity.
But she really has never lifted a finger to sustain that identity. She could have done much to slow the transformation of England into a sinister laughing stock. She might well have stopped it. Instead, even before she became a shambling old woman, Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God Queen, Defender of the Faith, chose to sit by and watch.
Let me explain. By law, the Queen is our head of state, and Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and Commander in Chief of all the armed forces. She appoints all the bishops and judges, and all the ministers and civil servants. She declares war, and all treaties are signed on her behalf. The only thing she cannot do is make laws by her own authority and impose taxes. To do either of these, she needs the consent of Parliament.
On the other hand, she can also veto any parliamentary bill she dislikes—and her veto cannot be overridden by any weighted majority vote of Parliament.
These are the theoretical powers of an English Monarch. During the past three centuries, though, the convention first emerged and then hardened, that all these powers should be exercised in practice by a Prime Minister who is leader of the majority party in the House of Commons.
He may be called First Minister of the Crown. He may have to explain himself every week to the Monarch. Where things like Royal Weddings are concerned, he mostly keeps out of sight. But, as leader of the majority party in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister draws his real legitimacy from the people. No Monarch has dismissed a Prime Minister, or tried to keep one in office, since the 1830s. No Monarch has rejected a parliamentary bill since 1708.
Because it is unwritten, and because its various conventions are in continual flux, the English Constitution can be rather opaque to foreign observers. Some of these fail to understand the nature of convention, and assume that the Queen of England is an absolute monarch—though more genteel than the King of Saudi Arabia. Others see the conventions as the only reality, and regard England as an odd sort of republic.
Both are wrong. Our Constitution is based on an implied contract between people and Monarch. This is that, in public, we regard whoever wears the Crown as the Lord’s Anointed. In return, the Monarch acts on the advice of a Prime Minister, who is accountable to us.
But this implied contract has one important limiting term. It holds only so long as politics is other than a cartel of tyrants and traitors. But just such a cartel is exactly what has emerged in Britain as the 1960s radical generation completed its Gramscian "Long March through the Institutions", as I have documented in my pamphlet Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back (free PDF download here). And once the politicians make themselves, as a class, irremovable, and once they begin to abolish the rights of the people, it is the duty of the Monarch to step in and rebalance the Constitution.
The need for this duty to be performed has been apparent since at least 1972, when we were lied into the European Union. The Conservatives did not fight the 1970 general election on any promise that they would take us in. When they did take us in, and when Labour kept us in, we were told that it was nothing more than a trade agreement. It turned out very soon to be a device for the politicians to exercise unaccountable power. The Queen could and should have acted then, beginning by insisting on a General Election after the terms of Britain’s entry were settled.
There have been many times since when she should have acted. At all times, she could have sacked the Government and dissolved Parliament without provoking riots in the street.
But so far as I can tell, the Queen has acted only twice in my lifetime to force changes of policy—typically, on behalf of the emerging Politically Correct consensus. In 1979, she bullied Margaret Thatcher to go back on her election promise not to hand Rhodesia over to a bunch of black Marxists. In 1987, she bullied Margaret Thatcher again to give in to calls for sanctions against South Africa.
And that was it. She is somewhere on record as having said that she regards herself more as Head of the Commonwealth than as Queen of England. Certainly, she has never paid any regard to the rights of her English subjects.
I said that the Queen has not discharged her positive functions. It is actually worse than this. By discharging her negative functions, she has allowed many people to overlook the structures of absolute and unaccountable power that have grown up during her reign. She has fronted a revolution to dispossess us of our country and of our rights within it.
This does not, in itself, make a republic desirable. Americans may be very pleased with an electoral system that has given them so many interesting and even entertaining heads of state. But, from an English point of view, American history is something more enjoyably observed than suffered.
Doubtless, if a Government of National Recovery ever found itself opposed by the Monarch, it might be necessary to consider some change. Such a government would have only one chance to save the country, and nothing could be allowed to stand in its way. But this should only be an extreme last resort.
Symbolic functions aside,
the practical advantage of having a monarchy is that the head of state is chosen
by the accident of birth
and not by some
corrupted system of election; and that the head of state is likely to show a
longer term, more proprietorial interest in the country than someone who has
lied his way to one or
two terms of office. (This is the
essential argument of the
German libertarian Hans-Herman Hoppe’s book Democracy:
The God that Failed
But the very real public interest shown in her grandson’s wedding has not been merely about pretty clothes and music. We have seen our next King but one. We can ask if he will be a Patriot King—or yet another front for revolution.
Dr. Sean Gabb
[ Email
him]
is a writer, academic, broadcaster and Director of the
Libertarian Alliance
in England. His monograph
Cultural
Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back is downloadable for free here; hard copies
can be purchased here,
along with his recent novel
The Churchill
Memorandum
and other works.
For his account of the
Property and Freedom
Society’s 2008 conference
in Bodrum, Turkey, click
here.
For his address to the 2009 PFS conference, “What is the Ruling Class?”,
click
here;
for videos of the
other
presentations,
click
here.
UNQUOTE
Doctor Gabb is very much on the right lines.
Her
Majesty's Powers
HM the Queen seems to believe that she has no powers. I do. I
also believe that she has betrayed England due to extremely bad advice, moral
cowardice & stupidity in some
combination.
The Utilitarian Case For The Monarchy
QUOTE
The utilitarian case for the monarchy is not about
pageantry, deference or the vulgar belief that it is worth keeping because it
acts as a tourist magnet. It is not about the cost of the monarchy compared with
a president. It is not about whether the individual members of the Royal family
are worthy beings or if its very existence is an insult to ideas of politically
correct equality. The utilitarian case is purely political: our monarchy
underpins Parliamentary government.
In resisting the abuse of the many by the few,
Britain begins with the great advantages of a parliamentary system and an in
practice non-executive head of state chosen by a means utterly outside political
manipulation short of the outright criminality of murder, blackmail, illicit
threats and bribery, namely birth. These provide a massive barricade against a
Prime Minister who would be a despot. He cannot act without the support of an
elected parliamentary majority. His cabinet in practice must be overwhelmingly
drawn from elected politicians. He may change his cabinet but he cannot do so
without regard to a cabinet member’s status and popularity within the party on
whose support he depends.
UNQUOTE
Mr
Henderson is on the right lines. Sadly the prime minister has simply taken over
Her Majesty's powers by coercion. She went along with it because she is stupid,
incompetent, extremely badly advised, a moral coward or some combination. One
might have thought that Prince Philip would have had more backbone. In the event
he has not.
Royal Family Suddenly Getting It Right
Documentary-maker Michael Cockerell described Geidt as ‘part of the Golden Triangle, the three crucial figures in British public life, who the public know very little about’. Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell and Jeremy Haywood, the new Permanent Secretary at No10 are the other two. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/07/queen-elizabeth-ireland-trip_n_846268.html
ezinearticles.com/?Has-Her-Majesty-
n the Coronation ceremony of 2 June 1953, one of the highlights was when The Queen made her Coronation Oath (taken from the Order of Service for the Coronation).
The Queen having returned to her Chair, (her Majesty having already on Tuesday, the 4th day of November, 1952, in the presence of the two Houses of Parliament, made and signed the Declaration prescribed by Act of Parliament), the Archbishop standing before her shall administer the Coronation Oath, first asking the Queen,
Madam, is your Majesty willing to take the Oath?
And the Queen answering,
I am willing.
The Archbishop shall minister these questions; and The Queen, having a book in her hands, shall answer each question severally as follows:
Archbishop. Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon, and of your Possessions and the other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs?
Queen. I solemnly promise so to do.
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.
Then the Queen arising out of her Chair, supported as before, the Sword of State being carried before her, shall go to the Altar, and make her solemn Oath in the sight of all the people to observe the premisses: laying her right hand upon the Holy Gospel in the great Bible (which was before carried in the procession and is now brought from the Altar by the Arch-bishop, and tendered to her as she kneels upon the steps), and saying these words:
The things which I have here before promised, I will perform and keep. So help me God.
Then the Queen shall kiss the Book and sign the Oath.
The Queen having thus taken her Oath shall return again to her Chair, and the Bible shall be delivered to the Dean of Westminster.