The Monarchical Revolution

The second of Barzun's four revolutions was that of and on behalf of the monarchs.

Or, more strictly, it was of and on behalf of kings and queens, and it is the way in which they made themselves into monarchs properly speaking. Monarchs in the strict sense are monocrats, the only rulers of their realms. Anyone else who exercises authority in a realm is doing so as the agent of the monocrat, or is in rebellion.

That was not true of kings in medieval times. Indeed, King Louis XIV, in a memoir, complains that it still wasn't true enough in his own day. He said that every provincial gentleman feels free to "act the tyrant toward his peasants," and that rather than a single ruler, the people "have a thousand."

If that same King also said, "I am the state," (Barzun doubts it, but the legend is tenacious) he meant it in a rather different sense from the way in which it is usually quoted. It was an aspiration. One could paraphrase it this way: "I aim to be the state, a situation that requires me to contend against those thousand tyrants, because it is best not for me but for France as such."

This was a rather new idea. But that, you will remember, is implicit when Barzun counts it as a revolution. A revolution is a violent shift in power and property in the name of an idea. The new idea of this revolution was the unity and autonomy of the nation state, which was embodied in (came to be seen as the second body of) the King.

Barzun is fascinating on this subject. He is decidedly not an anarcho-capitalist, or any sort of anarchist (or a libertarian) -- but his discussion of the rise of the Nation-State as an idea and for that matter an ideal fits well into my own skeptical views of what I consider the destructive and unnecesary myth of sovereignty.

The monarchical revolution is at the heart of Barzun's sometimes idiosyncratic reading of the works of William Shakespeare. The most common readings of Hamlet, for example, focus on the psychology of the prince. We are sometimes told that the tragic result came about because Hamlet was indecisive.

Barzun sees that as entirely misguided. The play was not really about Hamlet, or not about his "first body." It was about his "second body" as a legitimate monarch. It was, then, about Denmark. Hamlet's soliloquies "show him superior to his barbaric times," Barzun says. A believer in the divine right of Kings would expect that the inheritor of that right would be in a sense superior to those around him, even if he has been cheated of the exercise of that right. Further, the action doesn't show him to be at all indecisive. He was decisive enough to dispense efficiently with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Indeed, Barzun quotes Fortinbras' praise for Hamlet as the play ends. Fortinbras has just conquered Denmark. The country has lost its independence because it had too many kings, and thus no true monarch. And the conqueror thinks that ... well, ... tragic.

But let us leave Denmark. Shakespeare of course wrote several plays about the history of the British isles, among them plays that vividly describe the chaos of the War of the Roses, culminating in that of the reign of Richard III. The essence of these plays is: Thank God the Tudor family has rescued us from all this, by being the true Monarchs they are!

I was expounding this aspect of Barzun's views a bit at our meeting in San Antonio this weekend. Another participant said, quite perceptively: "That sounds like propaganda."

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That is it in a nutshell. Much of Shakespeare (as Barzun reads him, and I concur) is pro-Tudor propaganda, not because Elizabeth was patronizing the Globe theatre, but more likely because Shakespeare was a genuine believer in this revolution of which her grandfather Henry VII had been the forward edge.