by T. John Jamieson
From THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR October 1983, Vol. 16, No. 10, pp. 40-41. Copyright 1983 The Alternative Educational Foundation.
So far, 1983 has been a very good year to be a monarchist. Queen Elizabeth II drew such an enthusiastic response from Californians during her spring tour of the Pacific coast that one suspects they wouldn't mind having the woman Betty Ford naively called "the real queen" as their queen. Then the new High (and dry) Tory journal The Salisbury Review carried an article by Prof. David Levy, "The Real and the Royal," which faulted British conservatives for their cowardly "defensive royalism" and called for something like an ideological commitment to monarchy. On July 4th, American orchestras, having retired to their outdoor summer havens, played "Wellington's Victory" and the "1812 Overture" because they are noisy pieces, without reflecting that these compositions glorify the triumph of monarchy and include rousing renditions of "God Save the King" and "God Save the Czar" respectively. And in New Hampshire, the state whose revolutionary motto is "Live free or die," over one hundred men and women professing the royal principle as the key to preserving a free Christian civilization met for a "Study Conference on Monarchy."
Officials at the University of New Hampshire must have thought that the conference to be held on its Durham campus would amount only to a dry essay in antiquarianism—a seminar on the two-thousandth anniversary of the Emperor Augustus's ludi saeculares, a mere series of lectures on the historical, theological, and literary aspects of the obviously outmoded institution of monarchy. But when the Constantian Society, the Order of Russian Imperial Union, and the Monarchist League of Canada actually showed up with the double-headed eagle standard and the Union Jack in hand, ready to snap to attention for the royal anthems, and when the speakers began reading congratulatory messages from reigning sovereigns, cited statistics on the prevalence of monarchy in the present, and described the growth of monarchist sentiment behind the Iron Curtain, journalists covering the event were shocked. "These people are serious," they had to admit.
The conference began on Bastille Day and concluded on the anniversary of the murder of Nicholas II at Ekaterinburg; "in my end is my beginning." Prince Alexis Scherbatow, a history professor at Fairleigh Dickinson whose grandmother was lady-in-waiting to Empress Alexandra, gave the controversial keynote address on "Nicholas II as a Man of Strong Will." Dr. Hereward Senior, an authority on Loyalists during the American Revolution who teaches at McGill, spoke on the impracticability of "instant democracy." Movies were shown of the coronations of Elizabeth II in 1952 and of Nicholas II in 1896; a slide show on the wedding of the daughter of HIH Grand Duke Wladimir of Russia to a Hohenzollern prince in Madrid in 1976 provided glimpses of Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, Leka of Albania, the late Umberto of Italy, Juan Carlos of Spain, and his cousin Alfonso, the Duke of Anjou, Head of the House of Bourbon, rightful King of France. Tables were covered with monarchist publications and memorabilia. A memorial service was held for the Russian Imperial Martyrs. Some Russians stayed up late with a young neo-Czarist survivor of Brezhnev's camps who played the guitar and sang songs of the underground.
Attendees included authentic American Tories, Torontonians and Montrealers, Russian émigrés from the West coast, Australia, and Argentina, Iranian exiles from London, and a lone Spaniard: nobles and peasants, lawyers and librarians, Anglican and Orthodox priests, an archimandrite with his silver-headed staff. On the whole, these monarchists were resolute, intelligent, informed, articulate, and hopelessly sane. They were usually realistic about the odds they face in the age of democratic demagogy and the Marxist myth; only occasionally did they indulge in wishful thinking. Belief in the inevitability of vindication by historians, if not by history, is hardly quixotic. They nevertheless hoped for restorations. Anyway, the Canadians have a monarchy to conserve, and they are well familiar with their opposition. The Russians know they have a country to liberate before the Czar can be restored; they know there will be opportunity for neither if the West grows complacent about the evil of Soviet tyranny. The adherents of the several dynasties in the world know that theirs is a common cause against the peculiar superstitions of modernity.
There were only a few suspicious persons. Some alienated, deculturated Americans have adopted Czarism and Russian Orthodoxy as their heritage; they are sincere though anomalous. A white Canadian episcopus vagans wearing leis made of nuts and fruit seeds advocated a constitutional amendment to make the Kawananakoas the hereditary governors of Hawaii; this demagogue monopolized the press and was universally regarded as a nuisance. With the presidents of two nobility associations present, there were no phony titles.
A panel on "Religion and Monarchy" attempted to treat the relations of throne and altar from different denominational perspectives. Dr. Senior and the Rev. Peter Hannan, a Canadian priest prominent in the fight against the ordination of women, presented the Anglican view: "no bishops, no king." The Orthodox got little sympathy for their opinion that Russian caesaropapalism was preferrable to Roman papalocaesarism. Inadvertently no Catholic spokesman had been appointed to call both sides Erastian and describe the Maistrean vision of the Pope as arbiter of international order. Even though the parties divided on these sectarian issues, all could agree that the monarch is the living symbol of personal responsibility before God and that therefore monarchy stands for the divinely willed order of civilization against the secular millenium of gnostic ideologies such as Communism. This was the genius of the conference. Whatever these monarchists came to learn, they really came to stand together and tell the world, "We do not believe that man can save himself through a political faith."
The Russian grand duke, great-grandson of Alexander II and imperial heir, had been expected to attend but unfortunately cancelled at the last minute. Born in Finland in the year of the Russian Revolution, HIH Wladimir lives in Brittany and is a man of imposing mien. His many official statements have contained much wisdom. He has never stopped calling the West back to its senses and away from its persistently wishful thinking about the nature of Soviet Communism. Russia and the USSR are not the same, he says; Russia is a nation that the USSR has been trying to abolish during all sixty-six years of his life. It was a Czar who abolished serfdom; the USSR has designed an empire of slavery for the world. Under Nicholas II, eighty percent of the land was owned by the men who farmed it; today the farmers themselves are owned by a dictatorship.
The conference was not a one-time affair; the new-found solidarity was too pleasurable for that. Next year the monarchists will convene in Toronto on Victoria Day for a conference which will be even bigger and better—now that the organizers have shown that it can be done. As the ancient MacDonald motto has it, "Dh'ain-deoin co theireadh e"— Gainsay who dare.
