Nor do I yield to anyone in my admiration of the greatest writers on democracy, notably Alexis de Tocqueville. But in lesser hands, incessant repetition of the word “democracy” can become a hindrance to understanding how things actually work. Our vocabulary has become too narrow to express whatever thoughts and feelings we may have about other parts of our constitution, including the monarchy. A kind of self-censorship prevails. We suppose ourselves to be more free than any previous generation, but are in fact just as inhibited. Our sense of what we ought to believe obscures our true sentiments even from ourselves.

This leaves the monarchy as an almost incomprehensible anachronism. How, one wonders, has the House of Windsor survived so long? The Bourbons, the Braganzas, the Romanovs, the Habsburgs, the Wittelsbachs and the Hohenzollerns have been swept from the stage. One may feel driven to assume it is by some kind of accident that our royal house has survived, assisted by an astute rebranding exercise in 1917, when it changed its name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor.

Some writers imagine, on observing the dutifulness with which Elizabeth II has conducted herself, that the monarchy has survived because of the virtues of individual monarchs. Their attitude is that of courtiers: they wish to see the best in their sovereign, and in the case of the present queen, they do not find themselves short of material. She has upheld for more than 63 years the conscientious monarchy which her father, George VI, restored after the Abdication crisis.

Other writers go to the opposite extreme. They are determined to mock the monarchy. They wish to indicate that they are too clever and modern to be taken in by this undemocratic anomaly. They are surprised such an absurd mummery has not yet been abolished. Such attitudes are often held by intellectuals and by writers of comedy programmes for the BBC.

Both approaches are wrong, or at best inadequate. Neither the loyal courtier nor the contemptuous intellectual sees to the heart of the matter. The main reason the monarchy survives is that we the people want it to survive. We have a popular monarchy, created, maintained and modified by popular demand. In that sense, it is our most democratic institution. As Eric Hobsbawm, a Communist rather than a monarchist, observed in his essay on the mass production of traditions in Europe from 1870 to 1914: “Glory and greatness, wealth and power, could be symbolically shared by the poor through royalty and its rituals.” By magnifying the monarch, we magnify ourselves. In Obscure Kingdoms by Edward Fox, published in 1993, which is one of the most thoughtful accounts of the subject I have come across, the author observes, during an account of an audience with Sultan Qaboos of Oman:

Rule through splendid display is one of the basic techniques of kingship, for to be impressed is to obey. It arouses an aesthetic appetite in us that can be satisfied only by the continued reign of the king. It turns the king into a cultural force we come to identify with the culture of the nation itself, making him indispensable to it.