Among our other appetites, there is a hunger to be impressed, and a disposition to feast our eyes on splendour. This is why republics, even great and successful ones such as the United States, so often find themselves aping monarchical forms: a point made with patrician irony by Henry Adams in Democracy: An American Novel, published in 1880. The President of the United States is an elective monarch, who at times also acquires hereditary characteristics. Presidents George Bush I and George Bush II are among the most recent successors of King George III, who managed to lose the American colonies.

The most penetrating recent book on this subject is The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding, by Eric Nelson of Harvard, published in 2014 and reviewed in this magazine’s January/February 2015 issue. I am grateful to Noel Malcolm for pointing me towards this work when I asked him what to read about kingship. Nelson shows that many of the American colonists considered themselves to be rebelling against parliament rather than against the king. As James Wilson of Pennsylvania put it at the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, “The people of America did not oppose the British king but the parliament — the opposition was not against an unity but a corrupt multitude.”

Pregnant words! For many people today — I mean ordinary people, such as one might meet in a downmarket pub, an exercise in which I engaged for several years for various publications — consider our parliament to be irretrievably corrupt.  When the expenses scandal occurred, it occasioned no surprise in the public bar, where the assumption has long been that politicians are “only in it for the money”. I do not say this popular prejudice is correct (in my view it is exaggerated). But it is a prejudice which is difficult to make sense of if you are the kind of columnist who uses the word “democratic” as a multi-purpose term of approval. All you can do, when elected representatives turn out to be corrupt, is express pious rage, inform them that they ought not to be corrupt, and call for regulators who will make it impossible for them to be corrupt. Blind faith in “democracy” makes it very difficult to work out how to guard against the tyranny of the majority, or even to perceive that danger.

In the American colonies which fell out with Westminster in the 1760s and 1770s, a more sophisticated constitutional debate was possible. Those who thought parliament was the problem turned to Charles I as the solution. In 1642, when parliament tried to take control of military appointments, despite not having submitted the militia ordinance to the king for the royal assent, Charles responded with a tremendous defence of his prerogatives, drafted for him by Lord Falkland and Sir John Culpepper:

We call God to witnesse, that as for Our Subjects’ sake these Rights are vested in Us, so for their sakes, as well as for Our Own, We are resolved not to quit them, nor to subvert (though in a Parliamentary way) the ancient, equall, happy, well-poised, and never-enough commended Constitution of the Government of this Kingdom.