Vivat Regina

This article appears in the latest issue of Spectator Australia. We thought that CoffeeHousers would like to read it.

The trick to monarchy is not queening it. In The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth’s great novel of the Habsburg twilight, the Emperor Franz Joseph has it down to a tee: 

‘At times he feigned ignorance and was delighted when someone gave him a longwinded explanation about things he knew thoroughly… He was delighted at their vanity in proving to themselves that they were smarter than he …for it does not behoove an emperor to be as smart as his advisers.’ 

At dinner in Melbourne and Sydney, as in Toronto and Montreal, I have sat next to clever, dazzling politicians — the coming men of the coming republic — mimicking Her Majesty’s absurd voice and mocking her dreary stolidity. ‘If people smirked behind his back, he pretended not to know about it,’ wrote Roth of Franz Joseph.