LONDON LETTER
143
where the people had hung out flags of their own accord and chalked
"Long Live the King. Down with the Landlord" across the roadway.
I think, however, that the abdication of Edward VIII must have
dealt royalism a blow from which it may not recover. The row over
the abdication, which was very violent while it lasted, cut across existing
political divisions, as can be seen from the fact that Edward's loudest
champions were Churchill, Mosley and H. G. Wells; but broadly speak–
ing, the rich were anti-Edward and the working classes were sympathetic
to him. He had promised the unemployed miners that he would do some–
thing on their behalf, which was an offense in the eyes of the rich; on the
other hand, the miners and other unemployed probably felt that he had
let them down by abdicating for the sake of a woman. Some continental
observers believed that Edward had been got rid of because of his
association with leading Nazis and were rather impressed by this exhi–
bition of Crornwellisrn. But the net effect of the whole business was
probably to weaken the feeling of royal sanctity which had been so
carefully built up from 1880 onwards. It brought horne to people the
personal powerlessness of the King, and it showed that the much-adver–
tised royalist sentiment of the upper classes was humbug. At the least
I should say it would need another long reign, and a monarch with some
kind of charm, to put the royal family back where it was in George
V's
day.
The function of the King in promoting stability and acting as a
sort of keystone in a non-democratic society is, of course, obvious. But
he also has, or can have, the function of acting as an escape-valve for
dangerous emotions. A French journalist said to me once that the mon–
archy was one of the things that have saved Britain from fascism. What
he meant was that modem people can't, apparently, get along without
drums, flags and loyalty parades, and that it is better that they should
tie their leader-worship onto some figure who has no real power. In a
dictatorship the power and the glory belong to the same person. In
England the real power belongs to unprepossessing men in bowler hats:
the creature who rides in a gilded coach behind soldiers in steel breast–
plates is really a waxwork. It is at any rate possible that while this
division of function exists a Hitler or a Stalin cannot come to power.
On the whole the European countries which have most successfully
avoided fascism have been constitutional monarchies. The conditions
seemingly are that the royal family shall
be
long-established and taken
for granted, shall understand its own position and shall not produce
strong characters with political ambitions. These have been fulfilled in
Britain, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, but not in, say, Spain or
Rumania.
If
you point these facts out to the average left-winger he gets
very angry, but only because he has not examined the nature of his own
feelings toward Stalin. I do not defend the institution of monarchy in an
absolute sense, but I think that in an age like our own it may have an
