Spectator's Journal / The Year of the Monarchist
Jamieson, T. John
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL
THE YEAR OF THE MONARCHIST
by T. John Jamieson
So far, 1983 has been a very good year to be a monarchist. Queen Elizabeth II drew such an enthusiastic response from Californians...
...As the ancient MacDonald motto has it, "Dh'ain-deoin co theireadh e"- Gainsay who dare...
...this demagogue monopolized the press and was universally regarded as a nuisance...
...They nevertheless hoped for restorations...
...Born in Finland in the year of the Russian Revolution, HIH Wladimir lives in Brittany and is a man of imposing mien...
...Belief in the inevitability of vindication by historians, if not by history, is hardly quixotic...
...And in New Hampshire, the state whose revolutionary motto is "Live free or die," over one hundred men and women professing the royal principle as the key to preserving a free Christian civilization met for a "Study Conference on Monarchy...
...But when the Constantian Society, the Order of Russian Imperial Union, and the Monarchist League of Canada actually showed up with the double-headed eagle standard and the Union Jack in hand, ready to snap to attention for the royal anthems, and when the speakers began reading congratulatory messages from reigning sovereigns, cited statistics on the prevalence of monarchy in the present, and described the growth of monarchist sentiment behind the Iron Curtain, journalists covering the event were shocked...
...This was the genius of the conference...
...Even though the parties divided on these sectarian issues, all could agree that the monarch is the living symbol of personal responsibility before God and that therefore monarchy stands for the divinely willed order of civilization against the secular millenium of gnostic ideologies such as Communism...
...They were usually realistic about the odds they face in the age of democratic demagogy and the Marxist myth...
...Russia is a nation that the USSR has been trying to abolish during all seventy-six years of his life...
...Peter Hannan, a Canadian priest prominent in the fight against the ordination of women, presented the Anglican view: "no bishops, no king...
...Inadvertently no Catholic spokesman had been appointed to call both sides erastian and describe the de Maistrean vision of the Pope as arbiter of international order...
...Officials at the University of New Hampshire must have thought that the conference to be held on its Durham campus would amount only to a dry essay in antiquarianism-a seminar on the two-thousandth anniversary of the Emperor Augustus's ludi saeculares, a mere series of lectures on the historical, theological, and literary aspects of the obviously outmoded institution of monarchy...
...The Orthodox got little sympathy for their opinion that Russian caesaropapalism was preferrable to Roman papalocaesar-ism...
...Tables were covered with monarchist publications and memorabilia...
...Whatever these monarchists came to learn, they really came to stand together and tell the world, "We do not believe that man can save himself through a political faith...
...today the farmers themselves are owned by a dictatorship...
...Russian émigrés from the West coast, Australia, and Argentina, Iranian exiles from London, and a lone Spaniard: nobles and peasants, lawyers and librarians, Anglican and Orthodox priests, an archimandrite with his silver-headed staff...
...He has never stopped calling the West back to its senses and away from its persistently wishful thinking about the nature of Soviet Communism...
...His many official statements have contained much wisdom...
...These people are serious," they had to admit...
...Under Nicholas II, 80 percent of the land was owned by the men who farmed it...
...Prince Alexis Scherbatow, a history professor at Fairleigh Dickinson whose mother was lady-in-waiting to Empress Alexandra, gave the controversial keynote address on "Nicholas II as a Man of Strong Will...
...A white Canadian episco-pus vagans wearing leis made of nuts and fruit seeds advocated a constitutional amendment to make the Kawa-nanakoas the hereditary governors of Hawaii...
...A panel on "Religion and Monarchy" attempted to treat the relations of throne and altar from different denominational perspectives...
...Movies were shown of the coronations of Elizabeth II in 1952 and of Nicholas II in 1896...
...they know here will be opportunity for neither if the West grows complacent about the evil of Soviet tyranny...
...Next year the monarchists will convene in Toronto on Victoria Day for a conference which will be even bigger and better-now that the organizers have shown that it can be done...
...in my end is my beginning...
...Attendees included authentic American Tories, Torontonians and Montrealers...
...only occasionally did they indulge in wishful thinking...
...David Levy, "The Real and the Royal," which faulted British conservatives for their cowardly "defensive royal-ism" and called for something like an ideological commitment to monarchy...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL THE YEAR OF THE MONARCHIST by T. John Jamieson So far, 1983 has been a very good year to be a monarchist...
...Queen Elizabeth II drew such an enthusiastic response from Californians during her spring tour of the Pacific coast that one suspects they wouldn't mind having the woman Betty Ford naively called "the real queen" as their queen...
...a slide show on the wedding of the daughter of HIH Grand Duke Wladimir of Russia to a Hohenzollern prince in Madrid in 1976 provided I glimpses of Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, Leka of Albania, the late Umberto of Italy, Juan Carlos of Spain, and his cousin Alfonso, the Duke of Anjou, Head of the House of Bourbon, rightful King of France...
...Some alienated, decultur-ated Americans have adopted Czar-ism and Russian Orthodoxy as their heritage...
...Russia and the USSR are not the same, he says...
...Senior and the Rev...
...the new-found solidarity was too pleasurable for that...
...The Russians know hey have a country to liberate before he Czar can be restored...
...Some Russians stayed up late with a young neo-Czarist survivor of Brezhnev's camps who played the guitar and sang songs of the underground...
...On the whole, these monarchists were resolute, intelligent, informed, articulate, and hopelessly sane...
...A memorial service was held for the Russian Imperial Martyrs...
...Anyway, the Canadians have a monarchy to conserve, and they are well familiar with their opposition...
...The conference was not a one-time affair...
...they are sincere though anomalous...
...The adherents of the several dynasties in the world know that theirs is a common cause against the peculiar superstitions of modernity...
...On July 4th, American orchestras, having retired to their outdoor summer havens, played "Wellington's Victory" and the "1812 Overture" because they are noisy pieces, without reflecting that these compositions glorify the triumph of monarchy and include rousing renditions of "God Save the King" and "God Save the Czar" respectively...
...With the presidents of two nobility associations present, there were no phony titles...
...Hereward Senior, an authority on Loyalists during the American Revolution who teaches at McGill, spoke on the impracticability of "instant democracy...
...The Russian grand duke, great-grandson of Alexander II and imperial heir, had been expected to attend but unfortunately cancelled at the last minute...
...It was a Czar who abolished serfdom...
...the USSR has designed an empire of slavery for the world...
...There were only a few suspicious persons...
...The conference began on Bastille Day and concluded on the anniversary of the murder of Nicholas II at Ekaterinburg...
...Then the new High (and dry) Tory journal the Salisbury Review carried an article by Prof...
Vol. 16 • October 1983 • No. 10
