Or as Thomas à Becket put it, with subtle intransigence, once he had become Archbishop of Canterbury: “Although the king must be obeyed in many things, he must not be obeyed in those things which cause him not to be a king.” In 973, Dunstan had become the first Archbishop of Canterbury to anoint an English monarch, King Edgar, in a coronation service including the text “Zadok the priest . . . anointed Solomon”, which is used to this day. Becket was reminding Henry II that the Church’s approval is not unconditional.

Successful rulers ally themselves with the zeitgeist. Max  Weber observes that “the king is everywhere primarily a warlord”, and throughout the Middle Ages, that remained the great test. In 1066, at the head of 5,000 knights, a brave, clever, brutal, illiterate Norman warlord made himself the master of a kingdom with perhaps 1.5 million inhabitants. At the end of the middle ages, Richard III lost his throne, and his life, because too few of his subjects were prepared to fight for him.

The Tudors were a new dynasty who allied themselves with new men. Henry VIII exploited widespread anti-clericalism. His younger daughter, Elizabeth I, played at Tilbury the warlord role to perfection, becoming the embodiment of English resistance to the Spanish Armada. She worked without ceasing at the mystique of monarchy, and to carry people and parliament with her, but an important element in her policy was vagueness: rather than define royalty, she projected it.

Her Stuart successors made the error of becoming too definite. Perhaps from some inner sense of insecurity or inferiority (for he cut a pretty feeble figure compared to Elizabeth), James I expounded the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which by the end of the seventeenth century had been replaced by the parliamentary right of kings. We enter the familiar story of prime ministers acting in the name of the crown, but in fact on their own and their parties’ account. Not that this process took place without a certain amount of royal resistance. Here is Queen Victoria, writing to W.E. Forster, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, at a time of tremendous ructions over Gladstone’s Irish policy:

She cannot and will not be the Queen of a democratic monarchy; and those who have spoken and agitated . . . in a very radical sense must look for another monarch; and she doubts if they will find one.

Despite these animadversions, Victoria was, in her impulsive and contradictory way, a profoundly democratic monarch, who expressed her people’s middle-class desire for self-improvement accompanied by imperial grandeur. The royal family adapted itself well to democratic times. Edward VII provided any amount of copy for the Daily Mail, founded in 1896, and saw to it that slipshod standards of royal ceremonial were raised to the almost perfect level needed in an age of photography. In the 1920s, George V extended the hand of friendship to Labour Cabinet ministers, and enabled them to show how respectable they were: an opportunity they embraced with enthusiasm. He also mastered the new medium of radio.