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RoyaltyRoyalty Pictures
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Republicans must find the retention of constitutional monarchies by western European democracies such as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands difficult to comprehend. I suppose it's the arbitrary nature of selection, the risk of all those cousins marrying and the difficulty of ridding ourselves of a wrong 'un (although the French and the English came up with a headless answer to that one, even if the Brits went back on it). Mind you, when I see the chumps that get elected and re-elected in some presidential democracies I wonder whether such a system is any better in practice.
But Kings, Queens and Princes are a major part of our history and a source of rich pictures and images that capture the grandeur and power of royalty, coronations and the like. We start with King John (he of Magna Carta and all that), run through many English monarchs and celebrations. to which we ad a soupçon of Prussians (well our current lot are of German descent - see our section on the Georges I to IV). Anyway, if you wish to know all the Kings and Queens of England in order, try the following: William, William, Henry, Stephen Henry, Richard, John Henry, Edward one, two, three Richard, Henry four, five, six Edward four, Edward five, Richard three That gets us to the end of the Plantaganet Kings and we move into the Tudors Henry seven, Henry eight, Edward six Mary, Liz, James the first and sixth Charles one, interregnum, Charles again James two, William and Mary, Queen Anne Georges one through four, William four then the longest of all - Victoria Edward seven, George five, Edward eight George six Liz two So in that lot you've got Stuarts (from Scotland), the house of Orange from the Netherlands, Hanover, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (for PR reasons changed to Windsor during World War I, prompting Kaiser Bill to express his intention to see Shakespeare's fine play The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha). And for a glittering example of unintentionally perceptive self-delusion, how about this quote from Lord Mountbatten: 'Prince Charles is an absolute Mountbatten. The real intelligence in the royal family comes through my parents to Prince Philip and the children'. As bright as a Toc H lamp. With brains like that it's only a matter of time before the institution falls into complete desuetude. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
