If the king
only knew

If the king
only knew

Monarchy is so normal that even the gods characteristically have kings. “Kret returns to his audience hall,” reports a Ugarit poet. “He sits in the throne of his kingship, on the dais, on the chair of sovereignty” and order is restored, chaos overcome.[1] The Hellenistic writer Ecphantos explains that God, in order to establish order in the universe, made the king in his own image, and this divinity is shown in the bright light that appears around the person of the monarch, a light so intense that unworthy subjects faint in the royal presence.[2]  In early England, “there was probably little difference between the holy place of the god and the palace of the king.” [3]

 
The value of oneness is self-evident. Dante, in opposing the pope, “exalts to heaven the Colossus of Caesar. Unity is salvation, one monarch, one for the whole earth… the greater this monarch, the more he becomes omnipotent- the more he becomes a god, the less mankind must fear the abuse of his power.”[4]  “There is one sun in heaven and one king on earth,” exclaims Genghis Khan.

 
The monarch possesses what may sensibly be called “star quality.” The pharaohs had their special Ka; latter day Alur royalty possess Ker, the Bunyoro, Mahano and Meru royalty possess Ugwe.[5] As is well known, this royal quality shines through the rags of poverty; a prince raised as a shepherd will grow up to attain his royal destiny.

Anglo_Saxon kingship required Gluck and this Gluck extended to all who served them and bathed the entire community in Heil.  A reigning monarch must also have Raed, the loss of which, as in the case of Aethelred the Unready, takes away his understanding of matters of state and makes him “unlucky” for himself and the kingdom.

There may be more than one person in the realm with the transcendent gift of kingliness. The royal blood of early European kings afforded them only a basic “throne-worthiness.” This royal potentiality was fulfilled by the “election” of the folk.[6]  In the kingdoms of Essex and Sussex, there might be 3 or 4 “kings”  on hand- “presidential timber-“  from which a presiding chief of state could be chosen. The reigning king may have designated his successor from among the candidates.[7]

 
Aristotle recognizes five types of monarchy. Third in order of discussion is the Aesymnetia, which “may be defined generally as an elective tyranny which, like the barbarian monarchy is legal, but differs from it in not being hereditary. Sometimes the office is held for life, sometimes for a term of years, or until certain duties have been performed.” Such a form of monarchy, he tells us, existed among the ancient Hellenes.

 
Indeed, elective monarchy flourished over much of the world. Even under mature, divinely sanctioned monarchies, subjects preserved reminders of the primal election and delegation of sovereign authority. “We who are as good as you, make you king,” said the Catalan nobles to tyro kings. “If you rule according to the law, we will obey you; if not, then not.” An Alsatian monk of the 11^th century observed that the king is bound to his people “like the swineherd to the master who employs him.”[8]  Upon the death of Muhammad, his father-in-law received from the tribe the bay’a- the traditional handclap signifying the making of a contract- as a token of sovereignty. The Byzantine emperor was required to write the coronation oath down like a schoolboy and hand it to the Patriarch- an indelible promise to be “kind and philanthropic… to submit to truth and justice.” The president of an old Swiss canton swore “to protect, defend and assist widows and orphans, as well as all other persons, to the best of his power and as the law and his conscience teach him.” Upon the expiration of his term, he was required to publicly invite any citizens  he had abused to denounce him. The king of the West African Ewe is approved by an assembly of the people and the secret societies are ever ready to remind him, lest he forget, of “the basis and limits of his power.”[9]

 
In the classical world, tyrant implied violence but was often indistinguishable from “king” while “monarch” carried a more derogatory connotation than either[10]  For Solon, sole rulership connoted evil. Aesop’s foolish frogs ask Zeus for a king and he gives them a stork, who devours them. For Aristotle, monarchy is the primitive form of government but when a band equals arises “then men say that to give authority to any one man when all are equal is unjust” and the rule of One passes away. Aristotle, although he was employed by kings, could recommend kingly rule only to barbarians.[11]

 
In the heady period following the overthrow of a pretender to the Persian throne, Otanes, according to Herodotus, spoke for the equals: “I think that the time has passed for any one man amongst us to have absolute power. Even the best of men raised to such a position would be bound to change for the worse. He could not possibly see things as he used to do… excessive wealth and power lead to the delusion that he is something more than a man.”[12]  The first act of the great Junius Brutus at the birth of the Roman republic was to make the people “while the taste of liberty was still fresh upon their tongues, swear a solemn oath never to allow any man to be king in Rome.”[13]

 
Such sentiment was so strong that the Caesars, with power beyond the dreams of all but the maddest kings, kept republican trappings about them. Their title of Princeps merely reflected their position as the principle, chief or highest personage and did not suggest a crown. Imperator was a military and not a royal title. Caesar was Father of his Country but so had been the republican Cicero. As Father of his Country, Augustus was so anxious to avoid suspicions of monarchism that he forbade his children and grandchildren to call him “master” although it was a normal usage; and he rebuked a theater audience for cheering him with “Oh kind and good master.” [14] The emperor sought to be viewed as the saviour, not the exterminator, of the republic.

 
The Roman Republic did of course have its elected strong men, the dictators, who were selected by the senate for one year terms in order to deal with “emergencies.” As the republic declined, dictatorships became more frequent and ultimately became permanent in the form of the empire. Elective monarchy gradually turned into divine monarchy and the senate, which under the republic had granted executive powers, was compelled to witness and witness and swear to the ascension of dying chief executives to join the other gods in paradise.                 

   
Despite the grandeur of the Caesars, the early Christian inherited a vestigial republicanism but by the end of the Carolingian period, “the Church could no longer recognize itself in the small communities in the Graeco-Roman cities who had received the letters of Saint Paul, and found the godly kingdom of Israel more suited to the needs of a model.” In the eighth century, the Frankish realm was refounded upon a theory of monarchy drawn from the example of King David.[15]  Divine kingship joined the Nicene Creed as a foundation-stone of the Church. “Almost with one voice, the medieval publicists declared a monarchical to be the best form of constitution.” Nor was the monarchical principle valid only at the sovereign level but “in every Body which is a Member of the Church or Empire, consequently in every human group,” monarchy is seen to be “the normal form of government.”[16]

 
Still, the divine sanction of Christian monarchy never drove out the notion of popular sovereignty. “Medieval doctrine gave to the Monarch a representative character,” wrote Otto Von Gierke. “However highly his powers might be extolled, the thought that Lordship is Office had, as we have already seen, always remained a living thought. Pope and Emperor stood for this purpose on a level with any president of a corporation.”[17]  The Saxon kings were elected and even William the Conqueror followed electoral forms, as did Henry the 4^th when the Lancasters took the throne. The most ambitious royal hopes were dampened at Runnymede and kept within bounds by the Great Charter, which English kings were compelled to “confirm” repeatedly.  Seven monarchs confirmed the Charter 37 times, averaging a confirmation every seven years, and each confirmation was a tacit reminder of the derivative nature of the office of kingship. 

The great Scots scholar George Buchanan in his De Jure Regni apud Scotos of 1579 has his young friend Maitland assert:  “In Scotland, as you know, our kings are not elected, but hereditary... legal authorities declare that by the law affecting kings, which is set up to govern their conduct, all the sovereignty inherent in a people is transferred to them; so that it is obligatory that the king's pleasure be regarded as law. It was on this principle, as a matter of fact, that a certain emperor based his threats to abolish all the legal science, in which legal experts take such enormous pride, by a single order.”

“In citing the worst of men as a doer of great things, you do well to suppress his name,” Buchanan replies. “For the author of this remark was C. Caligula, who expressed the wish that the Roman people had but one neck. The story is that Caligula wished that the Roman people should have but one neck in order that he might behead them all at a stroke.” 

“Had there been aught to gain from it, instead of all to lose,” reflected Robert Louis Stevenson, John Knox “would have been the first to assert that Scotland was elective instead of hereditary- ‘elective as in the days of paganism,’ as one Thevet says in holy horror.”  Buchanan was less timid:

“The old-fashioned Scots, to the present time, as has always been their practice, elect the chiefs of their clans and with these elected chiefs they associate a council of old men. Any person, moreover, who fails to obey this council is deprived of his office. Would persons who are so careful with respect to details neglect the safety of all?...Our kings, when they are publicly consecrated, promise the entire people, with an oath, that they will preserve the laws and usage of their ancestors and our ancient institutions, and will use the same system of justice which they have received from their ancestors. The entire ceremonial and the first entry of a king into every city reflect it. From all of these instances it is easy to understand what sort of authority they have received from their ancestors; namely, that it is just this: Those who are elected by the suffrages of the people swear obedience to the laws. God gave this principle as the correct one for a kingdom to David and to his posterity; and promised that they would continue to reign just so long as they obeyed the laws which He had given them…It is most probable then that this was actually what took place: Our kings received from our ancestors an authority which was not absolute, but which was limited within definite bounds. Confirmation, moreover, is supplied by immemorial usage and by the people's assumption, without objection being made, of certain rights - for no one has challenged this assumption by a public pronouncement.”

The violent rejection of divine kingship in 17^th century Britain led to a compromise between divine monarchy and republicanism in which the limited monarch was to explicitly recognize the derivative nature of his office. Bolingbroke’s “patriot king” would “discern that he can have a right to no more than is trusted to him by the constitution; and that his people, who had an original right to the whole by the law of nature, can have the sole indefeasible right to any part; and really have such a right to that part which they have reserved to themselves. In fine, the constitution will be reverenced by him as the law of God and of man.” But the constitutional monarch of the new British Empire was the man who had overthrown the Dutch Republic.

 
The transatlantic constitutional struggle of the 18^th century continued the British clashes of the previous century. “Is Mr. Burke the disinterested man that Mr. Hampden was?” demanded John Wesley. “And where shall we find twenty noblemen and twenty gentlemen (to name no more) in the present opposition, with whom any impartial man will set on a level with the same number that opposed King Charles and his ministry?” Not that George the 3^rd was to be compared to Charles the 1^st. “There is an obvious difference. The Parliament were then the king’s enemies: now they are his firmest friends.”[18]  Thomas Paine agreed: “The will of the king is as much the law of the land in England as in France, with this difference- that instead of proceeding from his mouth, it is handed to the people under the more formidable shape of an act of Parliament. For the fate of Charles the First has only made kings more subtle- not more just.”

 
In the early American colonies, where the governors were miniature replicas of the imperial monarchy, the rising assemblies assumed the role of the Commons and were not anxious to create gubernatorial power. In Plymouth, the governor merely had a double vote on the Council, and the Pennsylvania Frame of Government of 1682 made the governor a member of the Council with a triple vote but no veto. When independence was declared and the royal governors exiled,  there was considerable sentiment against re-creating the disgraced offices. “It is our opinnium that we do not want any goviner but the goviner of the universe,” went the resolution of Ashfield, Massachusetts. Assemblies named governors of their own choosing and gave them one year terms and few prerogatives. Pennsylvania had no governor at all. But the concept of a continental monarchy superceding both assemblies and governors was put forward by James the 2^nd,  who made Edmund Andros viceroy of New England, New York and the Jerseys until the Stuart dynasty itself went down. The Albany Plan of 1754 had offered a president with an absolute veto.

 
As radicals acted with memories of the Puritan Revolution and the Commonwealth in mind, the more conservative Revolutionaries and those who hadn’t been for Revolution in the first place  looked to the legacy of the Glorious Revolution that had brought William and his successors to the throne, hoping to find a way to bring the best aspects of English monarchy to America. Edmund Randolph would recall that the Confederation was “incompatible with that secrecy which is the life of execution and dispatch. Did ever thirty or forty men retain a secret?... this is what gives that superiority in action to the government of One.”[19]  Governor Henry of Virginia exercised exceptional powers, provoking a breach with his old ally Jefferson, who reminded him that the prize they sought was not an elective despotism. At the end of 1776, with a rumor going about that the governor was to be appointed dictator, Archibald Cary told Henry’s brother that “the day of his appointment shall be the day of his death, for he shall feel my dagger in his heart before sunset.”

 
During the Revolutionary struggle, some expected dictatorship to emerge and others  hoped for it. Had not the Parliament of 1653 delivered all power to Cromwell and dissolved themselves?  “The necessity of appointing General Washington sole dictator of America is again talked of as the only mean under God we can be saved from destruction,” wrote Ezekiel Cornell in 1777. To some, Washington was a dictator despite his punctilious obedience to the Congress and his fury at the officers who conspired to make him dictator.

 
With the British evicted, conservative forces gained ground. “What astonishing changes a few years are capable of producing,” Washington exclaimed. “I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror. From thinking proceeds speaking; thence to acting...But how irrevocable and tremendous!”[20]  Indeed, the Maryland delegation at the Philadelphia convention made a list of over twenty delegates who favored traditional monarchy, and four states initially voted for a life term for the projected constitutional monarch, the president.[21]

 
Advocates of the new presidency, said Patrick Henry, “told us that we had an American dictator in the year 1781- Well we never had an American president! In making a dictator, we followed the example of the most glorious, magnanimous and skillful nations. In great dangers this power has been given. Rome had furnished us with an illustrious example. America found a person worthy of that trust… We gave a dictatorial power to hands that used it gloriously, and which were rendered more glorious by surrendering it up. Where is there a breed of such dictators? Shall we find a set of American presidents of such a breed? Will the American president come and lay prostrate at the feet of Congress his laurels? I fear there are few men who can be trusted on that head.” Henry compared the American presidency to that of the Dutch Republic, which had been created with a remarkable leader in mind and turned to arbitrary rule by his successors.

 
“There is to be a great and mighty president… with the powers of a king!” thundered Henry. Philadelphiensis thought the constitution dangerously placed power “in the hands of one man who is really a king.” That the presidency was supposed to be a constitutional monarchy modeled on the British was obvious; but dissidents thought the copy a good deal worse than the original. “Are there checks in it?” demanded William Grayson in the ratifying convention. “There is an executive fetter in some parts, as an unlimited in others as a Roman dictator!”  The Albany Manifesto pointed out that “the vast executive power vested in one man who, though called president, will have powers equal if not superior to many European kings.” Jefferson thought the office “a bad edition of Polish kingship.”

 
President Washington promptly assumed a proper princely manner. His first choice for his title was “His High Mightiness, the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties.” Madison, in the House of Representatives, snapped that claiming such a title would be “assuming the pre-eminence and omnipotence of the Deity.” Washington settled for “His Excellency.” In the senate, William McLay attacked Adams’s reference to the president’s “most gracious speech-“ a phrase reserved for royal addresses.  Jefferson, arriving in New York to become Secretary of State, expressed “wonder and mortification” at fashionable dinner conversation in which “a preference of kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite sentiment.”

 
In his political theory, John Adams drew a political spectrum that ranged from Empire on the far right through Absolute Monarchy to Limited Monarchy and then Republicanism. An emperor was bound by no law while “altho’ the will of an absolute monarch is law, yet his edicts must be registered by parliaments.” Limited monarchy on the other hand was with republicanism on the leftward side of the spectrum, “much more like a republic than an empire.” Later, he would describe it as a “species of republicanism” and would describe the constitutions of both Britain and America as “limited monarchies.” On the other hand, he regarded the American monarchy as too limited, complaining to Roger Sherman that the president’s treaties required the approval of the senate and that the president would need the approval of Congress to make war.[22]  As second president, Adams did not inspire awe as Washington had. His love of titles only got him labeled as “His Rotundity” and his authoritarian policies got him removed from office.

 
The presidency was infused with a fresh burst of charismatic authority by General Jackson. The Whigs then found a general of their own, electing him with empty slogans and hard cider. A third general soon followed, fresh from the invasion of Mexico, but he showed “good Whig principles,” thought the Whig Lincoln, “that the will of the people should produce its own results, without Executive influence.” Lincoln observed that “the most grave and maturely considered documents” of the Right were “labored arguments” attempting to show that the restraint placed on the rulers by the ruled was “the source of all political evil” adding glumly that “monarchy itself is sometimes hinted at as a possible refuge from the power of the people.”[23]

 
Tocqueville saw that the president as commander-in-chief possessed almost absolute “royal prerogatives,” which he has no opportunity of exercising; and the privileges which he can at present use are very circumscribed.”[24]  The civil war changed that with a vengeance. “We have carefully considered the grounds on which your pretensions to more than regal authority are claimed to rest,” wrote Erastus Corning to Lincoln. “…your claims to have found not outside, but within the constitution, a principle or germ of arbitrary power, which in time of war expands at once into an absolute sovereignty, wielded by one man, so that liberty perishes or is dependent on his will, his discretion or his caprices.”  Corning had on his side the constitutional tradition Lincoln himself revered, but Lincoln had destiny and the army on his side; he assumed extraordinary powers in an extraordinary time but more than that, he imbued the office with an aura of sacral kingship more potent than any since Charlemagne. The terrible figure of the haunted leader, suffering and dying for his people, for the Oneness of the nation and the Oneness of power over the nation, has driven subsequent presidents on toward their own “lonely decisions” and royal tragedies.

 
Lincoln had angrily denounced Polk over the war against Mexico. “Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion… and you allow him to make war at pleasure.” Senator Corwin of Ohio shrewdly analyzed the process by which a war might be hung like an albatross around the national neck: “The president, without asking the consent of Congress, involves us in war, and without reference to the justice or necessity of the war (we are asked) to grant men and money at the pleasure of the president, who they say is charged with the duty of carrying on the war and responsible for its result.”

 
When the Founders “assigned to Congress alone the most delicate and important power- to declare war,” Corwin said, “when they withheld this great prerogative from the executive and confided it to Congress alone, they but consulted in this, as in every other work of their hands, the gathered wisdom of all preceding times… By an abuse of his power as commander-in-chief, the president has drawn to himself that of declaring war, or of commencing hostilities with a people with whom we were on terms of peace, which is substantially the same thing.” But the Founders were not blameless: they had given the presidency power to abuse. St. George Tucker in the early Republic had pointed out that, while the constitution denied the president the power to declare war, it gave him ample opportunity to provoke war.

It was customary for kings to view world affairs as a king-sized game. George the 3^rd sulked over “losing the game” to the Americans, and Bonaparte opined that, had he had an English army, he “should have won the game.” Since Theodore Roosevelt discovered the Monroe Doctrine, American presidents have grown deeply fond of the “great game” of empire and the development of the former American Republic into an empire of Brobdingnaggian proportions has afforded them a truly regal field of play. To Rutherford B. Hayes went the honor of creating the presidential seal- a warlike eagle, recalling Erasmus:  “Of all birds, the eagle alone has seemed to wise men the type of royalty- not beautiful, not musical, not fit for food, but carnivorous, greedy, the curse of all, and, with its great powers of doing harm, surpassing all in its desire of doing it.”