Read: One Thousand Years of Whims and Wars

A History of Royal Power in Britain

By Shannon Stockwell

Allison Jean White as Kate, Christopher McLinden as Prince William and Robert Joy as King Charles in the American Conservatory Theater production of King Charles III, directed by David Muse. Photo by Kevin Berne.

With Britain’s recent vote to leave the European Union, constitutional crisis is on the agenda in London. The politicians talk, the market falls and the people don’t know what to believe. While Brexit is different from the predicament in Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III, the play is extremely timely because it explores what would happen if a problem arose to which the British constitution had no answer.

Constitutional crises in Britain are pretty rare events. That’s somewhat surprising, given the state of the constitution itself, which Bartlett discovered when he began to research it in preparation for King Charles III. “The research that came back was that it’s sort of made up,” says Bartlett. “The United Kingdom doesn’t have a constitution. It’s all made up as they go along, which is fascinating in itself, that what you see as a rigid institution is actually totally flexible and subject to whims and changes.”

The United Kingdom has a constitutional monarchy—at all times, the country has a king or queen who abides by the rules of the constitution. In the United Kingdom this is an uncodified constitution, which means that it’s not all written down in one place; rather, it’s made up of a collection of laws, treaties and charters, while some things are not written down at all.

The constitution says that the British monarch actually has quite a bit of power. Queen Elizabeth II, the current monarch, has a number of royal prerogatives. These include the power to give royal assent to bills coming from the Houses of Commons and Lords; to make peace treaties; to declare war; to call, suspend and dismiss Parliament; and to appoint ministers (including the prime minister).

But there’s a catch: it is expected that she will only do these things on the advice of her ministers. The queen can’t just wake up one day and decide to go to war. Rather, she could, but it would be difficult to get the public and the government to go along with a decision like that. (It’s also unlikely, given her personality.) The British monarchy hasn’t always been like this. There was a time when subjects had to do exactly as the reigning king or queen said. But over the course of one thousand years, the monarchy lost power—sometimes in little bits, sometimes in huge chunks. It all began with King John in the thirteenth century.

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The Magna Carta

King John ascended to the throne in 1199 CE and began overtaxing his people. When they couldn’t pay, he would throw them in jail and torture them. His barons finally had enough of his tyrannical rule and presented him with the Magna Carta (Latin for “great charter”), which they forced him to sign in 1215. The Magna Carta outlined certain rights of man, which included the right to a fair trial and the right of noblemen to be consulted before taxes were levied.

Today the Magna Carta is viewed as one of the most important documents in the history of democracy. While it was certainly revolutionary at the time, it also proved to be unenforceable and ineffective. John had the pope annul the document two months after he signed it. The Magna Carta had to be reconfirmed again and again because kings kept flouting its provisions. According to New Yorker journalist Jill Lepore, by the sixteenth century, the great charter was little more than an intellectual curiosity.

By that time, the House of Tudor had taken the throne. The reign of the Tudor family lasted from 1485 to 1603. These were mostly good years for the monarchy. England’s global empire was growing and there was peace at home—a relief after the bloody Wars of the Roses in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Meanwhile, Parliament had grown in size, strength and purpose. Its primary duty was to approve taxes requested by the king or queen. But Parliament still answered to the monarch. When it came to laying down the law, the king or queen had ultimate power of approval.

The English Civil Wars

Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, marking the end of the Tudors’ reign. She had not named or produced an heir before her death so the crown passed to James VI of Scotland, who became James I, King of England and Ireland. He had problems getting along with Parliament, problems he would pass on to his son, Charles I. There were many reasons why Charles I clashed with Parliament. Although he was technically Protestant, like his father he had a decidedly Catholic flavor, which was unpopular among his Protestant subjects. He also found ways to pass unpopular laws without having to go through Parliament. When politicians complained about his tyrannical actions in 1629, Charles I dismissed Parliament and did not call another until 1640.

The question was: how would Charles pay for his expenses without Parliament to approve taxes? The answer: he used old laws and sneaky ways to levy taxes without Parliament’s approval. It was around this time that the government and the people started invoking the Magna Carta again, making it feel like it was more of a critical aspect of British political history. It is because of these invocations that we now view the Magna Carta as the important document it is today.

In 1640 Charles I was finally forced to call a Parliament—after defeat in a war against Scotland, he needed money. Parliament used this opportunity to bargain with him—but when it tried to get him to relinquish control of the army, he refused and declared war on it in 1641.

Over the next eight years England was wracked by civil war, and Charles I’s army ultimately suffered defeat. The king was arrested, put on trial for treason, found guilty and beheaded in January 1649.

For the first and only time in English history, there was no monarch. For more than a decade, the country functioned as a republic, ruled first by Parliament, then by Oliver Cromwell (who had led the army fighting against Charles I), and then for a short time by Cromwell’s son. Eventually, however, Parliament decided to reinstate the monarchy and in 1660 Charles II (son of Charles I) became king.

The Glorious Revolution

But trouble arose again when Charles II failed to sire an heir before his death in 1685 and his brother, James II, took the throne. Like his father, James II had overt Catholic tendencies, which made the Protestant English uneasy. When James II had a son with his Roman Catholic wife, the thought of a Catholic dynasty on the throne compelled many to support the claim of William of Orange (a Dutchman who had been the heir apparent before the birth of James II’s son). William was comfortably a Protestant and a group of prominent English noblemen backed him against James II. In 1688, in what is now called the Glorious Revolution, William and his army advanced on London while James II’s army deserted, causing the king to flee to France. In the king’s absence William called a parliament, which agreed that the king’s flight indicated he had abdicated (renounced the throne). Parliament offered the crown to William and his wife, Mary, along with a Declaration of Rights, which after royal assent, became the Bill of Rights in 1689. This bill barred Catholics from ever taking the throne and decreed that monarchs could no longer suspend or create laws. Alongside the Magna Carta, it has become one of the primary documents that make up Britain’s uncodified constitution.

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Backing Away from the Political Scene

One of the most important constitutional conventions that arose during the reign of George I (1714–27) was the idea of ministerial responsibility. Because George I did not speak English, he relied heavily on a cabinet to help him rule. But after he began to distance himself from the cabinet, he had almost no role in the development of laws.

The logical conclusion? If George I wasn’t involved in making laws, he couldn’t reasonably be held responsible for the outcomes of those laws. This actually solved one of the fundamental problems of the monarchy: opinions, by their nature, can be wrong, but a monarch was meant to never be wrong. If a monarch had opinions, how could he or she be prevented from making mistakes? The answer was that by disconnecting himself from policy making, George I could never be mistaken; instead, his ministers took responsibility. This convention supported the concept of the infallibility of the sovereign and so it has remained one of the defining elements of Britain’s constitutional monarchy.

The monarch continued losing power—power to influence elections, power to publicly state his or her opinions—but it wasn’t until Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837 that the British monarchy as we know it truly began to take shape. In fact it was largely her husband, Prince Albert, who introduced the idea of a monarch staying above party politics. It’s not that Albert believed the sovereign should be apolitical or uninvolved with politics; he simply believed that if people saw the monarch as a neutral figure, uninfluenced by political bias, he or she would be that much more trustworthy.

The Monarchy Today

In holding this view Albert was trying to strengthen the influence of the monarchy, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. From political neutrality grew the convention that the monarch should never mention his or her political opinions in public and because of this, the public believes that the monarch has no political effect whatsoever.

But that’s not necessarily true. Elizabeth II has weekly private meetings with the prime minister, which no one else is permitted to attend. The meetings are unrecorded and extremely confidential. British constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor says, “It is . . . because relations between sovereign and a prime minister must remain confidential that it is impossible ever to form an accurate estimate of the influence of the current sovereign.”

These days, it is definitely considered unconstitutional for the British monarch to publicly express a political opinion. But there’s no constitutional convention that prescribes how the heir to the throne should behave. Elizabeth II’s son Charles, who is next in line for the crown, is much more openly political than his mother. Because he’s not the monarch this behavior isn’t necessarily considered unconstitutional, but to some political commentators it is worrisome.

It’s possible that when Charles becomes king he will become politically neutral and refrain from expressing his opinions in the way he does now. But some believe the damage has already been done and still others believe that he may actually carry his political extroversion to the throne. If he does, he is in danger of being accused of unconstitutional behavior. And what happens then? No one really knows for sure—given Elizabeth II’s style, it’s not something Britain has had to deal with recently—but considering a thousand years of power struggles between men and monarchs, it might not look good for King Charles III. “History suggests that Britain may be a slavishly monarchical country,” says Guardian journalist Nick Cohen, “but if the monarch goes too far then the monarch goes.”

For now, the royal merry-go-round and political plots of King Charles III remain strictly fictional. But given the recent turmoil and upheaval of Brexit, it’s becoming clear that the strange events of Mike Bartlett’s work of future history are not so far-fetched after all.

King Charles III is produced in association with American Conservatory Theater and Seattle Repertory Theatre. Performances begin February 7. Click here for tickets.

 

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SOURCES Mike Bartlett (playwright), in conversation with Simon Hodgson, June 2, 2016; Vernon Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Robert Booth, “What Kind of King Will Charles III Be?” The Guardian, November 19, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/19/-sp-what-kind-king-will-prince-charles-be (accessed April 26, 2016); John Cannon, ed., Oxford Dictionary of British History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); John Cannon, “The Survival of the British Monarchy: The Prothero Lecture,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 36 (1986) 143–64; Nick Cohen, “Prince Charles, We’ll Not Stomach a Meddling Monarch,” The Guardian, January 3, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/03/prince-charles-meddling-monarch-royal-neutrality (accessed May 12, 2016); David M. Craig, “The Crowned Republic? Monarchy and Anti-Monarchy in Britain, 1760–1901,” The Historical Journal, 46, no. 1 (March 2003) 167–85; Alice Hunt, James McConnachie, Samantha Cook, Rob Humphreys, and Rupert Matthews, The Rough Guide to the Royals (New York: Rough Guides, 2012); Robert Rhodes James, “The British Monarchy: Its Changing Constitutional Role,” RSA Journal, 142, no. 5448 (April 1994) 21–32; Julian Knight and Michael Pattison, British Politics for Dummies (West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2015); Jill Lepore, “The Rule of History: Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and the Hold of Time,” The New Yorker, April 20, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/20/the-rule-of-history (accessed May 5, 2016); Philip Norton, The British Polity (New York: Routledge, 2016); Cele C. Otnes and Pauline Maclaran, “How the British Royal Family Became a Global Brand,” The Atlantic, October 21, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/british-royal-monarchy-queen-elizabeth/411388/ (accessed May 10, 2016); Ralph V. Turner, “The Meaning of Magna Carta since 1215,” History Today, September 9, 2003, http://www.historytoday.com/print/13108 (accessed May 9, 2016); Philip Wilkinson, The British Monarchy for Dummies (West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2006),

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This article by Shannon Stockwell first appeared in American Conservatory Theater’s performance guide series, Words on Plays, in 2016. For more information about Words on Plays, visit www.act-sf.org/wordsonplays.