Crown & Constitution

"About 11 o'clock," said ex-Paratrooper Jack Greagor in Los Angeles, "a guy pulls in for gas. I filled him up and he leaned out and said, 'Did you hear about the King dying?' I knew right then who he meant. Jeez, I was surprised. And kind of stunned. I remember when he inspected us in England. You can't help feeling sorry for the man. The Princess inspected us too, when she was in uniform herself. She just walked down the line in those god-awful brown stockings, just as big as life, and now she's Queen. It sure is a jolt."

The Quiet Man. Millions of other U.S. citizens felt a jolt, too, at the unexpected news that death had come to George VI, the quiet man who brightened the Crown tarnished by Edward VIII's abdication. Tens of thousands of Americans like Gas Station Attendant Jack Greagor had served in Britain as soldiers and bluejackets; tens of thousands more had visited the British Isles as tourists in the years since. But even those Americans who had never crossed the Atlantic, and never would, knew more about Britain and felt closer to the British than had any other U.S. generation.

This sense of familiarity had come so gradually, and amid so much turmoil, that few had stopped to think much about it before. But in the years since World War II began darkening the earth, U.S. newspapers, radio networks and newsreels had reported the story of Britain more thoroughly than foreign news had ever been reported before. The average American of this decade would have found it hard to name either the Prime Minister of Canada or the President of Mexico, but he knew almost as much about the politics, the economic difficulties and the foreign policy of Great Britain as he did of his own country.

The Link of Legitimacy. The new U.S. feeling of closeness to Britain and Britain's Crown derived most of all from the half-conscious recognition that Britain and the U.S. were among the few nations of the contemporary world which had governments solidly and deeply established in the assent of their people. Such governments, called "legitimate" by Guglielmo Ferrero, depend neither on force nor transitory popular favor. They must show a reasonable consistency between theory and practice, between the way the government is supposed to work and the way it actually works. They must be established long enough for their people to accept the mode of authority as natural for them and to identify themselves with the government.

In Britain, the monarch is the symbol of this continuing legitimacy which persists through administrations which may vary greatly in direction and policy. The U.S. has a more abstract symbol that serves exactly the same purpose: the Constitution.

That is why Americans can still regard monarchy as an institution profoundly alien to the U.S., and at the same time regard the British monarchy as an institution which performs a function profoundly understood and respected by the U.S.

Queen Elizabeth II begins her reign in a perilously shaken world. A point of stability is the firm link of legitimacy between the two great English-speaking commonwealths.

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