But there’s no England now

Watching a bit of the parade on every channel of the TV at the moment, and having Some Thoughts:

(1) I know this kind of a spectrumy question, but what exactly is the legal theory by which the House of Hanover/Saxe-Coburg-Gotha/Throat Warbler Mangrove or whatever it’s currently called has sovereignty over the United Kingdom? I honestly have no idea what the answer is to this question, which is a bit embarrassing given that I teach classes based on the inherent legitimacy of the entire Common Law system, inherited by America from Merrie Olde England.

If somebody asks me why the government of the United States has sovereignty over the territory it possesses, I know the technical answer: Because We the People collectively dissolved the previous government via Constitutional Convention and instituted a new one. This is of course an absurd legal fiction, based on various bits of 18th century metaphysical nonsense — and also flagrantly illegal on the basis of the existing legal rules created by the Articles of Confederation — but at least it’s a theory. What makes Charles the Legitimate King? Is it because Parliament said at the appropriate moment in the appropriate way that the Glorious Revolution was truly glorious? Is it because the Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence etc. etc? I have no idea, but I’m sure LGM, font of all wisdom, knows the answer to this deep and terrible mystery.

(2) Speaking of farcical aquatic ceremonies, I rather like a bit of pomp and circumstance from time to time, but I do worry that all this atavistic frippery has some insidious ideological effects. Here’s Douglas Hay on how, in 18th century England, all the legal pomp and circumstance surrounding criminal trials culminating in death sentences — which were rarely carried out ultimately, which in itself is quite interesting — functioned as an ideological matter:

In the court room the judges’ every action was governed by the importance of spectacle. Blackstone
asserted that ‘the novelty and very parade of … [their] appearance have no small influence upon the
multitude’ scarlet robes lined with ermine and full-bottomed wigs in the seventeenth- century style, which
evoked scorn from Hogarth but awe from ordinary men. The powers of light and darkness were summoned into the court with the black cap which was donned to pronounce sentence of death, and the spotless white glove worn at the end of a ‘maiden assize’ when no prisoners were to be left for execution.

Within this elaborate ritual of the irrational, judge and counsel displayed their learning with an eloquence
that often rivalled that of leading statesmen. . .

Equally important were the strict procedural rules which were enforced in the high courts and at assizes,
especially in capital cases. Moreover, most penal statutes were interpreted by the judges in an extremely
narrow and formalistic fashion. In part this was based on seventeenth-century practice, but as more capital statutes were passed in the eighteenth century the bench reacted with an increasingly narrow interpretation.
Many prosecutions founded on excellent evidence and conducted at considerable expense failed on minor
errors of form in the indictment, the written charge. If a name or date was incorrect, or if the accused was
described as a ‘farmer’ rather than the approved term ‘yeoman’ the prosecution could fail. The courts held
that such defects were conclusive, and gentlemen attending trials as spectators sometimes stood up in court and brought errors to the attention of the judge. These formalisms in the criminal law seemed ridiculous to contemporary critics, and to many later historians. Their argument was (and is) that the criminal law, to be effective, must be known and determinate, instead of capricious and obscure. Prosecutors resented the waste of their time and money lost on a technicality; thieves were said to mock courts which allowed them to escape through so many verbal loopholes. But it seems likely that the mass of Englishmen drew other conclusions from the practice. The punctilious attention to forms, the dispassionate and legalistic exchanges between counsel and the judge, argued that those administering and using the laws submitted to its rules.
The law thereby became something more than the creature of the ruling class—it became a power with its
own claims, higher than those of prosecutor, lawyers, and even the great scarlet-robed assize judge himself.
To them, too, of course, the law was The Law. The fact that they reified it, that they shut their eyes to its
daily enactment in Parliament by men of their own class, heightened the illusion. When the ruling class
acquitted men on technicalities they helped instil a belief in the disembodied justice of the law in the minds of all who watched . In short, its very inefficiency, its absurd formalism, was part of its strength as ideology.

This elaborate ritual of the irrational: And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.

(3) It’s often argued that it’s a good thing to have some sort of essentially non-political head of state who represents the legitimacy of the state, and that this is sufficient reason to retain something as inherently ridiculous as a monarchy. This argument I suppose is related in a perverse way to Juan Linz’s famous thesis that presidential systems along the lines set up by the American constitution are inherently unstable, because they create two often mutually hostile institutions contending for governmental legitimacy: the legislature and the executive (He might have added, in a system with sufficiently aggressive judicial review, the supreme court could well become a third contender for the claim of ultimate sovereignty, as we are seeing at this moment in the USA).

The problem with that argument is that it depends on some sort of Noble Lie, whereby the true guardians of governmental legitimacy themselves know that the monarchy is just the awesome but ultimately imaginary Wizard, while they are the little man behind the curtain, frantically throwing levers to keep the whole spectacle going.