Nicholas Thompson reflects on the potential of monarchies to use violence at the expense of service to their people.

The finale of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance (1879) is gloriously silly. The eponymous pirates have defeated a bumbling police constabulary sent to arrest them. But just as the pirates’ triumph seems assured, there’s a plot twist. The vanquished police sergeant commands the pirates to “yield in Queen Victoria’s name". The pirates immediately comply:

We yield at once, with humbled mien,
Because, with all our faults, we love our Queen.

In some productions of Pirates, this is when a ludicrously outsized Union flag drops across the back of the stage. Then, in a further twist, the operetta reveals that the pirates aren’t common criminals but “noblemen who have gone wrong.” The chorus responds with patriotic vigour:

No Englishman unmoved that statement hears,
Because, with all our faults, we love our House of Peers.

In case it’s not already clear, this is satire. As in the other Savoy operas, W S Gilbert’s primary targets are English snobbery and hypocrisy.

Before the pirates are revealed to be noblemen, the police hunt them down; afterwards, the pirates’ crimes are brushed off as adolescent indiscretions: “Peers will be peers, and youth will have its fling.”

Monarchy and the Public

But Gilbert’s skewering of the class system goes deeper still. Despite the pirates’ profession of love for their queen, Gilbert’s audience knew that England’s affection for its monarchs was negotiable.

Two centuries earlier, the English had executed one king and then deposed and exiled another.

The British press had mercilessly lampooned the flaws and excesses of Queen Victoria’s predecessors, George IV and William III.

Not even Victoria was spared. Her retreat from public life after the death of her husband Albert in 1861 drew pointed questions about the usefulness and expense of her monarchy. In an era of political and economic revolution, 19th-century monarchs perched uneasily at the top of their national hierarchies.

Monarchy and Politics

But the British monarchy survived, and part of its success lay in its increasing (if sometimes only apparent) disentanglement from the grubby business of politics.

The British constitutional theorist Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) distinguished between what he called the “efficient” and “dignified” parts of the British constitution.

The efficient part was where the better sort — the landlords, bankers and industrialists — struggled for power.

The dignified part was the public display of the monarchy and House of Peers. Bagehot worried that the efficient part would alienate the common people, but hoped that the pageantry of coronations, jubilees, royal weddings and state openings of parliament would command their loyalty, love and awe.

Monarchy As Spectacle

During the later years of Queen Victoria’s reign and throughout the 20th century, there was a concerted push to embellish the spectacle of the monarchy. This was often achieved by “reviving” rituals that made the monarchy look more ancient and thus more inevitable. Bear this in mind as breathless royal correspondents anatomise the coronation ritual on 6 May.

Augustine's Word on Kings

But back to pirates. In the fourth book of his City of God, Saint Augustine (354-430) tells a story about pirates kidnapping Alexander the Great. The captive Alexander asked the pirate king what he hoped to gain through a life of crime. The pirate king said he was doing the same thing as Alexander, but “because I do it in a little ship, I am called a robber; because you do it with a great fleet, you are called an emperor.” Augustine asks rhetorically: “Take away justice, and what are kingdoms but big criminal gangs, and what are criminal gangs but little kingdoms?”

At first glance, it’s hard to disagree with Augustine’s question. If you take away the rule of law, you have a kleptocracy like Putin’s Russia. But Augustine thought that every human government, even the best one, must take on some of the qualities of a pirate kingdom.

Humans, he argued, were incapable of true justice. Each of us wants everyone and everything to serve our interests; we all want to be autocrats of our own little autocracies. If the opposite ever happens, it’s because grace has broken into the world, turning humans from selfishness to unselfish love of God and neighbour.

But more often, Augustine thought, the violence of little pirate kings is kept in check by the violence of bigger ones.

He was utterly clear-eyed about the violence of his Christian Roman empire: Rome’s boast of bringing peace to the world meant only that it had terrorised everybody more effectively than its predecessors and rivals.

Augustine admitted that it was a blessing for everybody if unselfish people took up public office to serve others; he was genuinely grateful for a good Christian emperor or an honest judge. But he thought that even these rare officials couldn’t wholly exempt themselves from the threat or use
of violence.

No matter how conscientiously they dedicated themselves to the pursuit of earthly justice, good officials would always have to confront pirate kings — be they big ones like Putin or little ones operating in homes, streets, places of work and parliaments. Here, even the most virtuous officeholder might be forced to meet violence with violence, coercion with coercion. As W S Gilbert’s pirate king observes:

But many a king on a first-class throne
If he wants to call his crown his own
Must manage somehow to get through
More dirty work than ever I do.

W S Gilbert’s pirate king bellows that “it is, it is a glorious thing, to be a pirate king!”

I’ll watch the coronation in a more ambivalent frame of mind. As pundits itemise the royal family’s connections with the military, and Britain’s increasingly threadbare political class cloaks itself in the mantle of Bagehot’s “dignified constitution,” I’ll find it hard to forget what Augustine has written about the coercion and self-dealing baked into all human communities, from criminal gangs to Christian empires.

But I’ll also keep an eye out for words and signs that point in another direction: the possibility of grace and the good that can be done when people set aside personal glory to work in the service of others. In a world troubled by dead-eyed tyrants and vainglorious conmen, those would offer a welcome glimmer of hope.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 281 May 2023: 4-5