Didn’t the British enjoy their Royal Wedding? Much more, I think, than they thought they would. Part of it was a pay-off for 28 years of inoffensiveness by Prince William. But there were other pleasant surprises for the British; the street parties, the international coverage, the rediscovery of half-forgotten tradition, the sound of six Rolls Royce Merlin engines flying overhead, the four day weekend, and the bridesmaid’s derriere – if enjoying that was wrong, who wants to be right? Each major Royal occasion in the UK prompts the obligatory lackluster British republican debate. The traditional image of a republican in Ireland is of a scary individual in a beard with possible access to firearms, explosives and/or the Irish language. In Britain, those identifying themselves as republicans tend to be the kind of pallid figures in corduroys that attend Liberal Democrat party conferences. As with proportional representation, their views are rational and inarguable but fatally flawed by the fact that nobody cares. There’s a time to get rid of your Royal Family and the British, I fear, have missed their opportunity and are stuck with the Windsors. It does prompt the question though, how do you get rid of your Royal Family? It’s not easy, and it requires something more than a clear victory in the Oxford Union debate. You need the correct set of circumstances: a reactionary king, an angry people and someone with the guts to say the world won’t end if we kill the prognathic bloke in the crown married to his cousin (although sometimes the world does end). Despite the lobbing off of the head of Louis XVI in 1793, when Europe went to war in 1914, there were just three major republics in the entire continent. One was the long standing kingless state of Switzerland. There was also France, obviously, although the monarchy had been restored there after the revolution and would have been brought back again in the 1870’s except the royalist dullards couldn’t agree on their candidate for King. The other one was Portugal, which had only become a republic in 1910 following the assassination of the King and for good measure, his heir in 1908. That's the way to do it. Every other major state was a monarchy, although popular movements had secured varying degrees of parliamentary constraint on their monarch’s prerogatives over the course of the 19th Century. Still, for many getting rid of the king was a frightening prospect. The First World War awoke in mainstream public opinion the disturbing but perhaps also thrilling realization that those who ruled over them were at best stupid, at worst criminally insane. The three major monarchs were dethroned at the end of it. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, in 1914 the world’s powerful warlord, was sent to grow vegetables in Holland by a population stunned to be defeated at the end of so costly a war. He blamed the Jews. Karl of Austria-Hungary, a well-meaning mediocrity, was told to leave Austria and so repeatedly asked the Hungarians if he could be their king instead. He was repeatedly turned down and died in exile. Russian communists didn’t do exile. Their emperor was gunned down with his entire family by the Bolsheviks who, true to their creed of equality, would spend much of the next thirty years killing families throughout Russia. Czar Nicholas II had been hopelessly out of his depth, but remains an unsympathic figure. Better men that him died in the First World War. The Balkan states had relatively new royal families, most of them cheap German imports, and as such unreliable and likely to break down. The politically interfering Greek Royal family were on and off the throne more often than a prince with the runs on his wedding day. They were finally given their marching orders in 1974. The Greeks had one popular king, Alexander, but, inevitably perhaps, he died defending his dog from two monkeys. The royal families of Bulgaria and Romania were turfed out by the communists, which, along with the boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest, remains the only truly popular action taken by the communists in their forty years in power. The Serbian Royal family was also abolished by the communists, but they had already felt the wrath of the people in the past. King Alexander of Serbia made all the wrong moves attempting to reverse the tentative liberalism of the emerging state. In 1903, at the instigation of the Black Hand (the terrorist organization that brought you the First World War) he was hunted down by a mob in his palace and stabbed to death with his wife, disemboweled and thrown onto a pile of manure – now who wants to do that to Wills and Kate? Probably the last significant political decision taken by a monarch in Europe was the complete opposite situation, where the king lined up with the democrats against reactionaries. Juan Carlos had only been handed back the throne of Spain by an aging Franco in the hope that he would help maintain the latter's unique brand of Catholic Fascism. Juan Carlos instead allowed democratization. In 1981 the Civil Guard attempted to launch a coup when Juan Carlos told them to cop themselves on. The coup failed and the King was feted throughout Spain. Fair play you might think, but JC had only to look at his eminently more sensible protestant compatriots to the north in Britain, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. They had allowed their political power to atrophy over the centuries to the point where they were too inoffensive to depose. Like a boring dinner guest, people will put up with them as long as they behave and bring the wine, or the case of a royal family, the odd public holiday. For keeping quiet, the royal families of Europe get to lead a fabulously and anachronistically privileged lifestyle. Nice.
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