I'm not a republican. Constitutional monarchies work fine as a system of government, even though on paper they don't make sense.
Like Christopher Hitchens, I thoroughly enjoy Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, a novel where a detective examines the case against Richard III and decides that the duplicitous evil king was a creation of the Tudor spin doctor, Thomas More. His version was later popularised by the brilliant propagandist and jingoist, William Shakespeare. Hitchens called The Daughter of Time a “minor classic” and indeed it is a morality tale of not carelessly accepting the received version of an historical event.
Last night I watched a documentary about the Richard III Society raising the money and employing the archaeological department of Leicester University to dig up a car park in Leicester and – shiveringly for the superstitious – on the first day of the dig they uncovered a skeleton with a curved spine. I am delighted when people who our shallow society dubs “anoraks” or “eccentrics” i.e. people with a private passion for something of no obvious profit, are rewarded, whether it's a couple who stick paua shells on the walls of their house which later turns into a tourist attraction, or a group dedicated to rehabilitating a king who died over five hundred years ago finding his body. It's a mixed triumph for the Society since it contradicts their theory that Richard's misshapen body was a lie of Thomas More's.
But – a service in Leicester Cathedral. Headline news. Trailers on radio and television about live coverage of the burial. Cortege through the city. Heralds and banners and flags. As if this was an event of national importance. I like a good ceremony and will turn up for a Sealed Knot performance but is anyone else going WTRuritanianF about this?
You can follow the mixture of solemnity and derision on #richardreburied.
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Not quite off topic as it deals with how the past impinges on the present, or can be made to do so, a friend has just reminded me that in 1970 the University Library at St Andrews still shelved books on what is now the Czech Republic under Austria/Hungary. But that was St Andrews......
Posted by: Allan Ronald | 02 April 2015 at 06:06 PM
Ah yes, the smallest and most remote of the "posh seven" (all of them, importantly, in places which had already reached their height of importance before the Industrial Revolution).
I always think that a future monarch (even if not necessarily of Scotland, by then - we shall see) in our own time went there as much to shore up the Union, this being just after the modern Scottish Parliament came into being, as because it's too much of a slog for the paparazzi to get there.
Posted by: Robin Carmody | 03 April 2015 at 02:12 PM