Princess Elizabeth visiting a shipyard in Sunderland, 1946.
Princess Elizabeth of the United Kingdom, later Queen Elizabeth II, visiting the shipyard of Sir James Laing & Sons in Deptford, Sunderland, on April 30th, 1946, for the launch of the merchant ship British Princess. Elizabeth had turned twenty just nine days earlier. Richard Cobden (1804-1865), a Manchester manufacturer, had a poor opinion of the aristocracy, especially in government: he wrote of Lord Chandos that he was saved from being appointed as an utterly incompetent minister of State by the fact that he was honest. Yet dismantling Britain’s archaic class ‘system’ would be not only offensive to the public, but counterproductive: Chandos would never lord it so Pharisaically over his social inferiors as the middle-class money-men who would supplant him.
THEY who argue in favour of a republic, in lieu of a mixed monarchy, for Great Britain, are, we suspect, ignorant of the genius* of their countrymen.
Democracy forms no element in the materials of English character. An Englishman is from his mother’s womb an aristocrat. Whatever rank or birth, whatever fortune, trade, or profession may be his fate, he is, or wishes, or hopes to be an aristocrat. The insatiable love of caste that in England, as in Hindostan,* devours all hearts, is confined to no walks of society, but pervades every degree, from the highest to the lowest.*
Of what conceivable use then would it be to strike down the lofty patricians that have descended to us from the days of the Normans and Plantagenets, if we, of the middle class, who are more than any other enslaved to this passion, are prepared to lift up, from amongst ourselves, an aristocracy of mere wealth, — not less austere, not less selfish, — only less noble than that we had deposed.
* ‘Genius’ here (in accord with the original Latin word) means an inborn spirit or instinct.
* Hindostan or Hindustan was originally a Persian term for what is now Pakistan and northwestern India. In English, it was often applied to those areas of British India which were predominantly Hindu rather than Muslim.
* In a footnote, Cobden recalled reading about a Bow Street court case in which a knife-grinder and chair-mender named Solomon Lovell had begged the court to intervene after his wife of just three days, Desdemona Cocks, aged forty-three, was spirited away to a garret in Charles Street, off Drury Lane, because her haughty friends thought she had married beneath her station. They themselves were ‘in the costermongering line’, i.e. they were mobile street vendors selling groceries from a cart.
Précis
Writing in 1835, Richard Cobden warned advocates of republicanism that what so worked well in the USA would not work in England, where everyone from the highest to the lowest is addicted to snobbery of some kind. Any egalitarian revolution would simply create a rather grubby alternative class system based on money rather than family. (54 / 60 words)
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