The last time a British queen passed away, who had reigned for longer than anyone could remember, was incredibly popular, and was thought to have defined her age, it was 1901. Since then, it is an understatement to say that Britain has changed in so many ways, perhaps even in ways that the Victorians could not have imagined. It continues to change.

The Victorians were fearful of the future

So much of Britain’s majesty is thought of as being in the past. We are frequently told that our country is in decline, or has disappeared altogether, that our best days are behind us, and we should be content to watch as the world moves on without us. Worse, this thought comes from both sides: from the “progressives” who herald the passing of nations, and from the “conservatives” who seem ready to heed their call. I am reminded consistently of that G. K. Chesterton quote — that the business of progressives is to go about making mistakes, and the business of conservatives is to prevent the mistakes being rectified. Well, even the conservatives sometimes make it their business to find mistakes to make, and one wonders who will be left to pick up the pieces. 

And yet, the past is remarkably familiar. Indeed, we are not as far from the Victorians as we might like to think: at the turn of the 20th century, questions abounded on the future of the union, Britain’s religious settlement, the place of the monarchy, whether the economy was too global, what to do with increasing numbers of immigration (then, from Eastern Europe), how to deal with rising European and Asiatic competition, whether the United States would be friend or foe to Great Britain et cetera. The late-Victorians would be confronted with questions we no doubt can empathise with. What’s more, their political situation in Parliament was not far from our own. 

As their ageing Queen and Empress passed away, an already-aged Prince of Wales ascended to the throne, with his own seedy past — yet he became an extraordinarily popular monarch who shepherded his people through a time of relative domestic instability. As David Cannadine writes, Prince Albert, the future King Edward VII (who was well into his seventies) was known as “a philistine, a glutton, a gambler, and a rampant and unscrupulous sexual predator”; yet, when Cannadine imagines a time traveller stepping from 1801 to 1906, he remarks that they would have found a country in which monarchy was still an unquestioned reality. 

Whilst the comparisons between Prince Albert and our current King, when he was Prince Charles, are not so substantial, there is no doubt that King Charles’ reputation suffered following his divorce from Princess Diana, and his political activism has alienated many in the political classes. 

Meanwhile, towards the end of more than a decade of Tory rule, the country was governed by a government bereft of intellectual ballast, forgetful of its own principles and simply cycling through Prime Ministers, each intent on undoing his predecessor’s legacy. Likewise, the fractured Left faced a potential decline to irrelevance, as Joseph Chamberlain’s liberal radicalism forced the Liberal Party into factionalism. Of course, there are differences; for one, the Tories were not doing the Left’s job for them back then. 

Yet there are reasons to be hopeful. The Victorians were both fearful of the future of their political settlement and also the most productive, efficient and future-oriented people this nation has ever seen. Confidence played a role, but so did a simple desire to be adventurous, push outward and take great leaps into the dark — sometimes into the risk of mass democracy, but most of the time into the just-as-risky worlds of industry, artistry, literature, culture and architecture. Maybe Britain made the world — but it was the Victorians that made Britain. 

Conservatism and progress need not be opposites

Meanwhile, they were the most conservative people in our history. Even the “political radicals” of the Victorian era were unashamed conservatives on the issues of sex, sexuality, temperance, dress, education and all the great threads of English life. Christianity was an unspoken truth of life, even when formal church attendance declined, and the achievements of Sir Robert Peel’s police force was the template for law and order the world over. We do not need to see conservatism and progress as opposites. Indeed, they cannot be — to be progressive in the true sense is to march forward together, and we can only do so if there is a reason we were together in the first instance. Sir Roger Scruton’s first-person plural, the “we” that he discussed so often, is the basis of a political entity. We — as conservatives, as Britons, as the next generation — have the potential to be what the Victorians were to the Edwardians and our current generation. 

The Royal Funeral was an important reminder: this country is a monarchy. It does not have a monarchy, it is one, though we seem to have forgotten that. But when you see ranks of royal arms, and hear the choristers and the deafening bagpipes, it reminds you that there is a tie between us strong enough to endure the calamities of recession, war and pandemic. Old traditions that stretch back deeply into the past can lead us together into the future. 

This marriage between traditionalism and progressivism has an institution around which it can rally, if it is prepared to do so: the monarchy. Much like the Britain that moved from the Victorian to the Seventh Edwardian Era, the Britain that moves from the Second Elizabethan to the Third Carolean Era retains much of what came before, faces an uncertain future, and is asking many, many important political questions of itself. If the institution of monarchy is respected, however, as it always has been, those questions can be answered. 

There is no reason to be scared of the future, as long as we are the ones to shape it. Besides, we will get there anyway, so I would rather we lived in a future that we had a hand in defining. I often think back to W. H. Auden’s poem, “Epistle to a Godson”, in which he wrote: “In yester times it was different; the old could still be helpful when they could envisage the future as a named and settled landscape their children would make the same sense of as they did.” The future will be here soon. Let us name and settle it, so that we may be helpful for our children.