Why am I not surprised that people who cite HISTORY don't actually know whereof they speak?
Apparently Some US pontificator of whom I have never heard in some organ that I suspect to be Of The Right, claims that 'the monarchy represents: tradition, authority, virtue, duty, love of country, and biblical religion' and the Those Awful Liberals are trying to tear it down.
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the history of the British Monarchy:
Larfs Liek Drayne.
Thinks about seeing whether one could tally up, online, number of aristocratic lines still presently in existence which are the result of wrong-side-of-blanket romps of various monarchs.
Or indeed, the number of ladies over the centuries who are listed in ODNB as 'royal mistress'?
One may point to a robust tradition of criticising the monarchy, such that the censorship of the theatre was introduced in the C18th and the office located within the Royal Household precisely to stop plays satirising the monarch, and vast numbers of sometimes grossly obscene caricatures.
While of course one can point to that particularly egregious example of not embodying duty, virtue or the conduct appropriate to the supposed Head of the National Church, George IV - let us mention the attempt to divorce his estranged wife, Queen Caroline of Brunwick - the monarchy did not, actually, become entirely sanitised following the accession of Her Gracious Maj, Queen Victoria.
Quite apart from the reversion to type of her own successor, Edward the Caresser, she herself had by no means been universally popular throughout her reign. Her extended mourning for Albert was deplored and there was a good deal of snarking at her manifested preference for the ghillie John Brown.
And, on performative patriotism, we feel that a certain Mr Kipling might like a word? We recall the coining of the phrase 'jelly-bellied flag-flapper' by Stalky in Stalky and Co, and his concern for those actually afflicted by the war in The Absent-Minded Beggar:
WHEN you've shouted "Rule Britannia," when you've sung "God save the Queen,"
When you've finished killing Kruger with your mouth
....
Mews or palace or paper-shop, there's someone gone away!
Each of 'em doing his country's work
(and who's to look after the room?)
Pass the hat for your credit's sake, and pay-pay-pay!
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