The Prince Andrew scandal won’t sink the monarchy

Britain has survived royal scandals before, but the Crown’s days in Canada are fading

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The former Prince Andrew’s arrest is the first time a member of the royal family has been arrested in almost four centuries. And things didn’t end well for the previous arrestee: Charles I was beheaded in January 1649 and the monarchy was abolished. However, this republican experiment didn’t quite suit the English temperament, so the monarchy was restored in 1660.

The dispute with Charles was about much weightier matters than Andrew’s situation.

Charles was a Stuart. The Stuarts believed in the divine right of kings at a time when the English were developing a fancy for domesticating their monarchs.

The Stuart view was simple: if a king’s power came directly from God, it shouldn’t be circumscribed by mortal entities such as parliaments. However, sentiment in England was shifting in a different direction.

When the Stuarts were restored in 1660, Charles II was mindful of his father’s fate and thus kept his throne. But his brother and successor—James II—was a man with two problems.

He was a Catholic in a Protestant country in an age when Europeans took religion very seriously and it was normal for ruler and people to share the same religion. And with the birth of a male heir in 1688, the prospect of a Catholic dynasty compounded the anomaly.

James was also different from his more devious brother. Being principled and stubborn, it was harder for him to conceal his absolutist tendencies.

So, in what came to be known as the Glorious Revolution, James was replaced by his Protestant daughter, Mary, and her Dutch husband, William of Orange. The Stuart era was over and the process of gradually whittling away at royal power continued.

Andrew’s predicament isn’t on the same history-making scale. The reason for his arrest involves a potential misuse of public office. But were it not for the furore around the Epstein files and the extent to which Andrew is deservedly tainted by his long and unsavoury association with Epstein, I doubt that he’d have been arrested in such a deliberately public fashion.

Andrew presents as a deeply unsympathetic figure, a spoiled boor consumed with a sense of entitlement. Still, the public mood around his arrest has a distinct whiff of the police catering to the mob. And that’s never a good thing.

Before addressing the question of what impact all this might have on the monarchy, I’ll be upfront about my personal perspective on the institution.

As a child in Ireland, I grew up in a decidedly nationalist environment, which I fully embraced. It was everywhere—home, extended family and school. The monarchy most definitely “wasn’t ours.”

However, my childhood ardour cooled as I became an adult. A summer spent working in London was a pleasant experience and my university studies suggested that history was sometimes more complicated than I’d once been led to believe. By the time I immigrated to Canada in 1965, I was pretty much neutral on the subject, even moderately well disposed.

So I found it unreasonable when some of my fellow immigrants were hot to abolish the monarchy and sever Canada’s historic ties with the U.K. We’d all come here willingly with full knowledge of how the country was set up. Now, no sooner than getting our feet in the door, we wanted to upend things. It was as if we were bringing historical baggage with us, importing old quarrels.

One of the common arguments made was that people in other countries couldn’t understand why Canadians allowed themselves to be subservient to the Queen of England. That, of course, represented a complete misunderstanding of how Canada actually worked. And other people’s ignorance wasn’t, and isn’t, a compelling reason for Canada to change.

Looking around the world and its various republics, it isn’t clear to me how Canada would actually be better governed by joining the crowd. Just who is it that we’d be emulating?

So, will Andrew’s travails torpedo the monarchy?

I don’t think so, at least as far as the U.K. is concerned.

The monarchy depends on an implicit bargain between sovereign and people. The monarch represents a unifying, non-partisan link with history and national pride, in return for which the royal family inherits material privilege. This bargain holds as long as public mores, which are themselves a shifting thing, aren’t unduly outraged.

However, Andrew has become sufficiently peripheral that he alone isn’t capable of bringing the whole edifice down. If it were the current King Charles who had the full array of Andrew’s baggage, that would be a different kettle of fish entirely.

As for Canada, I suspect the monarchy will be replaced over the next few decades. The country’s demographic profile has changed dramatically over the last 50 years, so much so that the ancestral ties to the Crown have grown very thin.

And as that process continues and the monarch increasingly sounds “foreign,” the only thing holding it together may be the inability to agree on an alternative. In a society with a fetish for thrashing its history and given to various forms of identity politics/entitlements, finding a non-partisan unifying entity will be quite the trick.

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical – well, perhaps a little bit.