When Queen Elizabeth II died, a mass hysteria engulfed Britain. News channels were packed with nothing but fawning praise for her 70-year reign. The country ground to a standstill at such a rapid rate that it put the preceding months-long strike wave to shame. Countless mourners lined up around central London, just to catch a glimpse of her coffin.
It was strange for so many of us to be mourning someone that none of us had ever met, but who simultaneously was so omnipresent in our lives. Such an outpouring of societal grief, usually expected of authoritarian states with lifelong dictators, unveiled for the first time in decades the totalitarian cult that lies at the heart of the United Kingdom. It was as though God themselves had died, because to millions of people, they had.
Before Elizabeth’s body had gone cold, the position was immediately handed to her oldest son, as is the tradition. “The Queen is Dead! Long Live the King!” We had been ruled by the same single person for five generations and now, without so much as a moment to adjust to the change, we were ruled by someone else. People that objected to the regime change, or asked for a democratic say over the transition, were attacked, arrested and prosecuted for speaking out. The first act of the monarchy’s latest iteration was a crackdown on freedom of speech.
Soon an old English wizard will present him with a special hat, while he’s sat on a special slab of Scottish sandstone, and his sovereignty over the lives of all Britons will be confirmed. There will be a huge parade through London, guarded by an army of police to ensure it’s not ruined by any dissenters that might interfere and to block any signs of the country’s systemic poverty from spoiling the view from our new King’s golden carriage.
No expense will be spared to ensure the country’s richest and most powerful man finally gets his big special day. While His Majesty’s Government could barely scrape together any money to provide starving children with food, they managed to find enough down the nation’s sofa to provide an estimated £100 million just for the coronation. Bread is literally being stolen from our mouths to pay for an exercise in societally-enforced narcissism.
How did we get to this point? How did we end up at such a dire stage in our existence, that millions of people are starving in the streets while the richest and most powerful few gorge themselves in palaces? And what can we do to stop it?
The Conquest of Inbreds
Until the 9th century, monarchy was quite the foreign idea to the people of these islands. We had experienced the rule of far-away emperors and followed the odd chieftain into battle, but none before had called themselves “King”. That was until the squabbling polities of what we now know as England and Scotland each fell, piece-by-piece, to the rule of one.
In 1066, the problem of rule by one led to catastrophe, as people from distant lands claimed the right to rule England. It was the Normans that won the day and cemented their rule over the country with fire and blood – literally burning down and massacring whole villages until their rule was accepted. Native English rebels, with support from the Scots, Welsh and Irish, attempted to overthrow these new rulers, but to no avail. England was remade into what it is today by conquest, but the conqueror’s blood lust was not sated. As they progressively lost their holdings in their native France, the Norman turned their attention towards the north and west.
Almost immediately, the Normans and their English collaborators in parliament set their sights on subjugating Wales. The English Kings appointed their successors as the “Prince of Wales”, in a sick imperial tradition that continues to this day. Attempts by the Welsh to choose their own leaders and rebel against imperial rule were suppressed, and eventually, Wales was annexed into the English empire. They then moved onto Ireland, colonising its eastern coast and slowly bringing more of its land and people under their thumb. Until this point, the Irish had not known the rule of a monarch, and they had little desire to get acquainted.
But the monarchy’s rule was shaky. None of their new subjects seemed to particularly like them and they couldn’t seem to settle on who was the rightful king. They needed something to unite people behind them, a guiding ideology to stabilise and totalise their rule. This was when they took over the Church, assuming the status of the divine, becoming God-Kings. Anyone that opposed them was no longer just some peasant rebel, but a dangerous heathen, a sinner against the true Christian faith.
Despite a minor constitutional hiccup, during which one of our kings ended his reign shorter than when he started, the monarchy solidified its totalitarian rule over Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England. With the close collaboration of parliament, the nobility and the clergy, finally working together in harmony, they turned their attention to new lands to be exploited, new people to subjugate and murder. Britannia would rule the waves and make millions into slaves.
The British Empire was founded on the monopolisation of the slave trade, under the supervision of the monarchy. It stole millions of people from their homes, shipped them across the ocean to plantations and forced them to work themselves to death for the profits of a few rich men in the home islands. When some uppity colonists in America overthrew the monarchy, it was because they felt they weren’t profiting enough from slavery, that too much of their stolen wealth was going back across the sea.
Like clockwork, the monarchy again turned its attention to other evil outlets they could pursue. They occupied India, pillaged its resources and starved its people. They colonised Australia, destroying its environment and massacring its native populace. Then they finally moved on to Africa, where they carved up the continent between them and their fellow monarchs, causing such horrendous devastation everywhere they went that the scars are still felt to this day.
Of course, like all their evil endeavours, they were eventually overthrown by the people they had oppressed for so long. Despite their best attempts to hold on to power, waging war against any rebels and splitting up the countries to keep them divided and conquered, the sun finally set on the British Empire. Our King Charles III was there himself to witness its long-overdue death.
The Little Prince
From the very first days of his life, Charles Windsor was told by everyone that he would one day rule the world. He was the inheritor of a 1,000-year-old empire, the defender of a 2,000-year-old religion, the living embodiment of a nation. It was his right given by the heavens, he was just better than everyone else, above all but the very God that chose him.
This cumbersome psychological weight became too much to bear as he grew, watching as his rightful colonies all over the world declared his family’s rule to be over. He was supposed to be their future King, but they did not respect him as one, nobody did. This wouldn’t do.
As is tradition, he began using his position in the royal family to get what he wanted, what he felt he deserved. Like his father before and his sons after him, Charles was given his own vanity commands in the armed forces. He got to dress fancy and strut about on big ships, telling people what to do, without fear of battling anything more dangerous than a small Icelandic fishing boat.
He then shifted his attention to more important matters than national defence: scalping the poor. Among his long string of royal titles, one of the most important to Charles was his role as the Duke of Cornwall. As the latest colonial overlord to rob the Kernowyon, his vast landholdings in the south-west brought him £612 million in cash.
Of course, our Glorious King never felt it right to declare this income. In fact, as the profits of this enterprise grew exponentially, he halved the amount of tax he paid on it, not wanting to bother the people with more money for public services. But he did make sure to order the Tory government to prevent his subjects from buying their own houses back from him. He was even gracious enough to start paying rent – to himself – for the many mansions he had built with these stolen funds.
By the new millennium, Charles’ empire was largely no longer in his grip. Luckily for him, the British government was determined to keep the imperial dream alive by invading and bombing half of south-west Asia. Charles himself was happy to facilitate this, taking a new job as a personal weapons salesman for his pals in the Saudi royal family, who made him a key part of their mass murder campaign in Yemen.
Despite attempts by assassins and the coronavirus, Charles lived long enough to witness the moment he had always dreamed of: his mother’s death. On 6 May 2023, he will be crowned as our newest King, the third of his name.
The House of the Dragon
The expiration of ol’ Liz has shifted the centre of gravity within the royal household. Before the Queen’s corpse had even gone cold, Charles’s younger brother Andrew quickly positioned himself to retake his position in the royal hierarchy. Anyone that reads his name should rightfully feel a pang of disgust, as the Grand Old Duke of York is now widely known to have been a client of the child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. It was only with his mum’s money and the threat of violence that he managed to see the charges against him dropped.
But now we’re asked to forget about this, to put our rage at this vile excuse for a human aside. Andrew is now back on the public stage, using his own mother’s coffin as a shield from criticism. When one brave soul in Edinburgh rose their voice to call him what he is – a sick old man – they were assaulted by this perverted prince’s white knights and arrested for breaching the peace. Charles’ reign began with a clear message that sexual predators have the protection of the crown.
But that’s just the worst of the bunch, what about Charles’s less controversial relatives? Well his kids sometimes seem even more dedicated to bringing about the collapse of the monarchy than even the most radical republicans. Harry’s spat with his family, as he very publicly comes to understand that all this stuff is a bit weird and horrible, has proved an even greater royal embarrassment than that time he wore a Nazi uniform out in public.
It’s also good to see that our future king William has made such a habit of gallivanting around the globe, keeping the colonial nightmare fresh in our minds. During his most recent holiday to the Caribbean, intended as a reminder to former British colonies of their place, he received a rude awakening as Belize, the Bahamas and Jamaica all told him to get back in the ocean and start paddling. The two big R words he never wanted to hear, Republic and Reparations, were all he heard during those days in the sun.
The picture painted of the Windsor family is not a pretty one, and that’s even before you remove the layer of airbrushing that the Windsor name itself applied. Charles might call himself Windsor but really, through his Nazi father, he’s a member of the German House of Glücksburg. This makes him the fourth reigning monarch to belong to this house, alongside his cousins Harald of Norway, Margrethe of Denmark and Felipe of Spain. The rise of Charles isn’t just the problem for the subjects of the Commonwealth, it’s part of a pandemic.
What if we didn’t have a King?
Right now, it seems as though even the worst Republic would be infinitely better than this United Kingdom. A state where millions can’t afford to eat, while one man clothes himself in gold and jewels, is not fit to exist. It is a failure of our own humanity that we have allowed this decrepit institution to persist for this long.
The monarchy is the rot at the core of British society. Every person murdered by its own government, every person enslaved by rich industrialists, every person subjugated by a red-coated army, has been so at the beck and call of whoever sat on the throne in London. It is the originator of everything wrong with its country and only with its removal can we begin to rebuild.
But it would be naive to suggest that simply removing them from their official positions and replacing them with an elected president would cure Britain’s ills. If the monarchy’s most loyal institutions – from His Majesty’s Government to his Armed Forces, Church and Police – are not done away with along with them, then we will have a republic in name only. If their estates are not dissolved and their property not redistributed to those they have exploited, then they will still be kings in all but name. And if the executive government centralises too much power, as it has in countless republics throughout the world, we could end up with monarchic rule by a different name.
Like his predecessors, Charles probably sees the writing on the wall, the threat to his strong and stable rule. Like his predecessors, he may make some paltry and ultimately meaningless reforms in order to make the monarchy seem more progressive, more modern. But it won’t be enough, none of it will, to undo the damage of one thousand years of devastation. Charles is known to all as the third, but he knows better than anyone that he could also be the last.
The Queen is Dead.
Fuck the King. ■
Audio Reading by Vincent Parsons
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