The Stuff of Dreams

This chapter writes a short history of English monarchy. It will be whimsical, as befits the very idea of monarchy. We will start in the Renaissance with the coronation of King James I. We will also spend some time with his predecessor, the first Queen Elizabeth. Few English monarchs have played the monarchical role better that Elizabeth; few have played it worse than James, except perhaps his son Charles. In the second part of the chapter, we will focus our attention on some more actorly monarchs, this time discovered in the pages of Shakespeare. We will then move forward a couple of centuries to revisit one of the bitterest poems of political protest in the English language, Percy Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy . Shelley, as we shall see, was not much of a monarchist. In fact, he thought it a nonsense, and dangerously so. The chapter will finish with a closer look at the intimation, famously articulated by Walter Bagehot, that the principal purpose of modern monarchy is to guise an ‘elective dictatorship’. It will also wonder the possibility that this guise might just be starting to fray.