The Throne of England has a clear duty to protect British Subjects
The suicide of the West is perhaps nowhere so far advanced as in the West’s one-time flagship nation, Great Britain. Its prime minister, Keir Starmer, stands on the back foot, defending his role in a truly demonic scandal. Over the course of decades, thousands of British girls as young as 11 and 12 have suffered unspeakable sexual abuse at the hands of gangs of largely Pakistani Muslim men in cities like Oldham and Rochdale. It has become clear that town councils and other authorities declined to vigorously pursue justice in these cases, and sometimes punished the desperate fathers of victims, or even the young girls themselves. The ringleader of one grooming gang was a welfare-rights officer on a town council. It has also been documented that the reticence of local government personnel stemmed in part from “nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist.”
The central government was complicit too, with the Home Office initially refusing to release its research into grooming gangs, and whitewashing the report when it finally did. Starmer himself, as Crown Prosecutor from 2008 to 2013, dropped prosecutions of rape gangs even in the face of evidence that later led to convictions. The details of the rape cases themselves are beyond gruesome.
Let us leave aside, for the moment, the concurrent arrests of right-wingers for social media posts, and the enraging comparisons to the light sentences groomers often received. A government that knowingly permits young girls to be raped and tortured for the sake of ethnic comity has failed the most basic test of legitimacy. From a liberal, social-contractarian perspective, how can the state of nature be deemed worse than this? If a government does not offer bare protection, then all citizens get is restraint without benefit.
From the viewpoint of Reformed Protestant resistance theory, “no subjection is due by that text or any word of God, to the abused and tyrannical power of the king.” These are the words of Samuel Rutherford, who in Lex Rex argued that a government can forfeit its God-given authority by ruling unjustly (i.e. tyrannically). Some Reformed thinkers even advocated deposition of wicked rulers, with Cambridge clergyman Paul Baynes maintaining in 1621 that “it was never esteemed as absurd, to say that their people had power in some cases to depose them.”
These theories are difficult to apply to the complexity of particular national situations. However, if one believes the American colonists were justified in throwing off British rule to escape onerous and unaccountable taxation, it is hard to question that complicity in the savage defiling of one’s daughters similarly justifies rebellion. As the normally temperate Miles Smith IV put it on X, “how can I say affirmative things about the American Revolution but act like people have to lie down and take this in the name of the ‘postwar liberal order’?”
The legitimacy of the British government becomes more complicated, however, if one adheres to a more rigidly magisterial view of state authority. A high royalist Anglican, for instance, might maintain that subjects may never resist the lawful ruler. Only divine law, not human law, regulates the actions of the king. The only recourse against an unjust ruler, James I and his clerics claimed, was an appeal to Providence. During the reign of Charles II, the Vicar of Bray taught that “Kings are by God appointed, and damn’d are those who dare resist, or touch the Lord’s anointed.” Even more flexible Reformed thinkers who maintained a right to resist an unjust ruler denied the right of deposition, and those in favor of deposition agreed that only Parliament – not private individuals or associations – could exercise the deposing power. English Protestants of course absolutely rejected the papal deposing power.
Paraphrasing King James I, Charles Howard McIlwain wrote that under divine-right monarchist theory, subjects suffering under a bad king could only turn to “prayers, sighs, and tears.” Are the victims of grooming gangs today, then, left only that desolate recourse: prayers, sighs, and tears?
Absolutist political theory creates this theoretical problem, but monarchism can also solve it. Historically speaking, Parliament derives its authority from the king. His office preceded it, he summoned it originally, he can by law dissolve it. As Edmund S. Morgan noted in his classic work Inventing the People, parliaments were originally convened solely to consent to taxes levied by the king. Representatives were clearly not considered to be participants in ruling; they were mere subjects who had been given the opportunity to ratify the actions of the ruler. They enjoyed power of attorney on behalf of other subjects but were not themselves magistrates. The king, the actual ruler, needed these parliaments to lawfully raise revenues but nonetheless could and did dissolve them when necessary.
The “glorious” revolution of 1688 and the half-century that followed stripped this power from the monarch de facto, but did not, and can never, take this right from him de jure. One can even maintain the importance of popular sovereignty as an American tradition while admitting that the English king, on the other hand, never received his authority as a grant from below—and certainly not as a grant from the House of Commons. To this day, every monarch is anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in a solemn coronation ceremony. Most, including in Britain, may view this as an interesting act but one devoid of real meaning and power. Serious magisterial Protestants, however, must grant more weight to this biblically inspired consecration. And if the Brits insist on continuing to coronate their kings, let them not startle when someone suggests that this practice has implications. “I solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain,” goes the coronation oath. To govern, last I checked, means to govern.
The inimitable Elon Musk seems to have picked up on this recently as he crusades against the feckless Starmer and his Labour minions. Musk has now urged King Charles III to dissolve Parliament over the travesty of the grooming gangs and call a new election. (Perhaps the founder of Tesla has been perusing the works of Marc’Antonio de Dominis or Roger Maynwaring in his spare time!) This is not, alas, going to happen. King Charles has shown no indication that he would ever consider such a thing. Yet, perhaps we can indulge ourselves by considering how this could be possible and what actions would be justified along the way by private citizens.
Just a week before the death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, neo-reactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin dreamed of a royalist coup in contemporary Britain, in which Charles, determining to be a “costume-king” no longer, would gain personal control over the security forces and begin to rule, not merely to reign. It’s even harder to imagine the UK’s army and police forces going along with this than it is to envision Charles initiating the process. More plausible would be the intervention of a private military company such as that founded by Erik Prince. Or, a concerned foreign leader of a kindred nation – perhaps one with family ties to Britain – could equip the king with the manpower and weaponry necessary to accomplish a full restoration. Surely Ukraine wouldn’t miss a few billion.
Absent such a decision by the king, it would be wrong, even impious, for private citizens to take violent action to overthrow the British state, even in light of the atrocities that are countenanced by it. The Labour scoundrels who wink at rape dungeons are ministers of the king. British subjects ought to passionately plead with the king, understanding, as did English royalists 400 years ago and the American founders more recently, that the regent of God is plagued by corrupt ministers. These Gríma Wormtongues not only lie to the king inveterately but deny him his ancestral right (and more importantly, his duty) to protect his subjects. Charles during his coronation stated that he, like Christ the King, comes not to be served but to serve. He should know that the King he means to imitate commanded thus: “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me.” (Matt. 19:14) The Lord Jesus also said that “whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Matt. 18:6)
If once the king did feel his duty, and dissolved his wicked parliament, this action would not by itself impel the current government to step aside. It would, however, utterly transform the duties of subjects. Unlike in America, Britons owe their highest political loyalty to the king – and not to his parliaments, which are his creatures. Historically, it has been understood that, within the
cycle of regimes, the monarch is aligned with the common people over and against corrupt
oligarchs, for no other recourse is available to the underclass. This helplessness creates a special obligation for a “patriot king” to protect the common folk against the overweening few. Royalist political theorists have also observed that whereas elected representatives often privilege the interests of a local faction (in this case, urban Muslim Labour constituencies) against the broader good of the nation, the king, while he may become a tyrant, is much less vulnerable to such partiality.
If the nation’s parliamentary government were to pit itself against the lawful authority of the king, subjects would find themselves in the same position of their ancestors during the civil war in the 1640s and would bear the same obligation: to support their king against the rebels. The moment Charles III dissolved parliament, the elected British government would become illegitimate, and subjects would have a right and a sacred duty to bring this rebellious body back under the power of its lawful head. To act against such a “government” would then be not to oppose a proper magistrate, but to aid the God-appointed ruler in suppressing an unholy insurrection. The king, moreover, if faced with recalcitrant security forces, would be wholly justified in seeking external aid for his lawful aims.
All earthly rulers shall stand one day before the King of kings, and give account for their stewardship over their subjects. King Charles must consider whether he wants to explain to the perfect Father who uplifts the weak and succors the helpless why, exactly, he suffered vile men to ravage the little children of his realm.
Image Credit: Unsplash
This is an amusing and interesting pseudonymous post. It’s in the name of the philosopher of Royalism better known for getting contested by John Locke. But the moral outrage that occasions this piece brings the British monarchy and the British government into severe question. Simple re-assertion of divine right theories will not make the desperate cry for justice go away. Even more, it cannot wait for a decadent king to wake up to the misery of his people.
IMHO, pseudonym posts should not be allowed on this site. It seems beneath the format of AR.