Abstract
‘The Royal House of Britain’, declares Harold Nicolson in his biography of King George V, ‘can claim to be the oldest dynasty in Europe and by far the most ancient of our political institutions’.2 Elizabeth II lies in a direct line of descent from Egbert, King of Wessex in the 9th century; and, except for the brief Cromwellian interregnum between 1649 and 1660, the descendants of Egbert have reigned continuously in Britain for nearly twelve hundred years. It is this remarkable dynastic continuity which differentiates the British monarchy from heads of state in other countries.
I am grateful to the editors of the volume and to Geoffrey Marshall for their comments on this chapter.
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Notes
Quoted in Anthony Sampson, The Changing Anatomy of Britain. London 1982. p. 13.
Quoted in Elizabeth Longford, Elizabeth R. London 1983. p. 260.
Richard Topf, Peter Mohler and Anthony Heath. ‘Pride in one’s country: Britain and West Germany’, pp. 124–5. In Roger Jowell, Sharon Witherspoon and Lindsay Brook, British Social Attitudes. London 1989.
Cited in Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin. London 1979. p.988.
Letter to Sir Godfrey Thomas, Assistant Private Secretary to Edward VIII, end of November 1936. Cited in Helen Hardinge, Loyal to Three Kings. London 1967. p. 154.
The distinction between ‘efficient’ and ‘dignified’ functions derives of course from Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution. First published in 1867.
Bagehot, The English Constitution. (Collected Works, Vol. 5) London 1974. p. 253.
Ivor Jennings, Cabinet Government. 3rd edition. Cambridge 1959. p. 20.
Cited in Richard Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Vol 2. London 1976, p. 195.
Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI: His Life and Reign. London 1958. pp. 131–2.
Quoted in Kenneth Rose, Kings, Queens and Courtiers: Intimate Portraits of the Royal House of Windsor from its Foundation to the Present Day. London 1985. p. 41.
Paul H. Emden, Behind the Throne. London 1934. p. 15.
Sir Martin Charteris in conversation with Tony Benn, 21 January 1974; Tony Benn, Against the Tide. Diaries 1973–76. London 1989. p. 94. See also Jennings, op. cit. p. 41.
Arthur Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria’s Private Secretary, His Life from His Letters. London 1943. p. 186.
Sir Sidney Lee, King Edward VII: A Biography Vol. 1. London 1925. pp. 547–54.
See, inter alia, E.C.W.Wade and A.W.Bradley, Constitutional and Administrative Law. 10th edition. Ed. A.W.Bradley, London 1985. pp. 239–241;
S.A. de Smith, Constitutional and Administrative Law. 5th edition. 1985. pp. 103–05;
Robert Blake, The Office of Prime Minister. Oxford. 1975. pp. 60–62;
and Geoffrey Marshall, Constitutional Conventions. Oxford 1984. Ch. 2.
Baron Stockmar to the Prince Consort, 1854, cited by Robert Blake in ‘The Crown and Politics in the Twentieth Century’, in Jeremy Murray-Brown (ed.), The Monarchy and its Future. London, 1969, p. 11.
Rodney Brazier. Constitutional Practice, Clarendon Press 1988. p. 149.
Harold Laski, Parliamentary Government in England. London, 1938, p.388.
Letter from Sir Martin Charteris, then Private Secretary to the Queen, 14th April 1972, to William Hamilton, MP, reprinted in William Hamilton, My Queen and I. London, 1975, p.230. The late William Hamilton was, perhaps, the only openly republican MP in the Commons in recent years. His book contains a good deal of information on the organisation of the monarchy which was given to him by those working in the Palace in response to his pertinacious inquiries. The fact that someone who had been personally offensive towards members of the Royal Family could receive such detailed and courteous replies, is, perhaps, a revealing indicator of the ethos of British public life. Hamilton was also asked (p.6) if he would accept an invitation from the Queen to one of her lunches given regularly to prominent public figures; but he declined.
Arnold Smith, Stitches in Time: The Commonwealth in World Politics. London, 1981. pp. 236, 268.
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© 1991 David Butler and D. A. Low
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Bogdanor, V. (1991). The United Kingdom. In: Butler, D., Low, D.A. (eds) Sovereigns and Surrogates. Cambridge Commonwealth Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11565-5_2
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