Arthurian Parallels Abound as the Once and Future King Rides Forth to Repair the Special Relationship
Dear Diary,
Britain has sent King Charles III to Washington. I read this and then sat with it for a while, turning it over in my mind the way you turn over a particularly strange stone to see what is living underneath it. Britain, which has a King — an actual reigning monarch with a crown and an orb and the whole arrangement — has dispatched this King to Washington D.C. to repair something called the Special Relationship. And everyone involved seems to think this is fairly normal. I would like to suggest it is not normal. I would like to suggest it is, in fact, mythologically extraordinary.
The King Rides Forth: Arthurian Parallels
In the Arthurian tradition, the king does not merely sit in his castle. The king goes. The king ventures out when the kingdom needs something done that only the king can do. Lancelot and Gawain are excellent knights, but there are moments — diplomatic, sacred, fundamentally symbolic moments — when only the king going in person will carry the necessary weight. Britain looked at its diplomatic situation and sent the king. Not the Prime Minister. Not a Secretary of State. The King. To Washington. On the plane.
This is the Once and Future King in operation. And the papers covered it as if it were logistics.
What Washington Made of It
The United States fought a war specifically to not have a king. This is their founding trauma. And yet when a British king arrives in Washington, Americans respond with a quality of attention and reverence they extend to very few things, including their own head of state. There is something in the American relationship with monarchy that their revolution did not entirely resolve, and that shows itself every time a British royal steps off a plane on American soil.
King Charles, in this context, is doing something no American official can do: he is not representing a party or an administration. He is representing continuity itself. The Historic Royal Palaces account of the monarchy and its constitutional role describes the King’s function as above politics, representing the continuity of the state. In mythological terms, the king is the land. When the king goes to Washington, Britain goes to Washington. Not the government. Britain.
The London Prat’s Take and Why It Matters
I have been reading The London Prat’s coverage of the Washington visit, which notes with characteristic precision that forty-nine percent of Britons opposed the trip and that the King arrived in America with more opposition at home than the average NHS car park charge. This is funny and also mythologically correct. The king’s quests are never universally popular. Lancelot had enemies. Gawain had his detractors. The meaningful quest is always contested. The easy diplomatic trip does not require a king. You need a king precisely for the moments when the situation is sufficiently complex and symbolically weighted that the institution itself must be deployed.
Charles as the Living London Legend
Charles III is himself a piece of British mythology in a way that is easy to miss when you are focused on the logistics. He was born in Buckingham Palace. He has been a public figure for seventy years, longer than most people reporting on him have been alive. He is the most observed private individual in British history, which is a paradox the mythology handles better than the journalism does. The English Heritage overview of the British monarchy’s historical development traces the evolution of royal authority from the medieval period to the constitutional present — an institution that has survived and continued by operating in a register beyond the purely political. Charles going to Washington is a chapter in a very long story. The Special Relationship is not a modern diplomatic construct. It is the latest version of an Atlantic connection that began when the first British settlers crossed the ocean and took their myths with them. The king going to see the descendants of those settlers is, in mythological terms, a homecoming and a reckoning simultaneously.
The myth endures. The king rides. The ravens watch from the Tower and consider their employment terms. And in SW1X, as always, we observe and take notes.
Yours, Paige Shiver
More satire at waterfordwhispersnews.com.
What This Means for Knightsbridge Specifically
My neighbours have views. Venetia says she hoped Charles packed warmly; she saw the Washington weather and it looked unpleasant. Piers said the optics were “managed,” which is the highest praise he offers for anything he did not personally arrange. My friend Arabella, who had an ancestor at Runnymede in 1215 and reminds you of this at appropriate intervals, said that if Magna Carta meant anything then Charles was doing exactly what a constitutional monarch should do, which is provide symbolic weight at moments of genuine national need.
I think Arabella is right, in the way that people with ancestors at Runnymede tend to be right about constitutional matters. The king went. The legend moved. Britain, for all its procedural origami and its plague pits and its Egyptian gods and its spectral dogs in Barbour jackets, is still a country whose king riding forth means something. I consider this a great comfort. You should too.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
