Nor is the view of the insignificance of Royalty borne out by the history of England as a whole.
The story of English Royalty reaches back some fourteen hundred years. In 519, according to the traditional account, Certic and Cynric assumed the kingship of the West Saxons; and the reflexion of the compiler of the Saxon Chronicle, writing probably under Alfred, that ‘the royal house of the West Saxons has ruled ever since that day,’ has, with the exception of the Norman period, remained almost literally true down to the present time. For it was Wessex which grew into England; and the first idea of union, loosely and imperfectly realised under Egbert, was gradually wrought out in many years of suffering. Alfred saved England from the Danes, though at a tremendous sacrifice, and holds in real history the place which romance assigns to Arthur; a Christian king,
‘Scarce other than my own ideal knight,’
who rolls back the tide of heathen conquest from his native land. We call him, and we call him rightly, ‘Alfred the Great.’ But in days nearer his own he was known as ‘England’s Darling.’ Will not the historian of the future see a certain sad appropriateness in the fact that the Queen should have died in the year which is to celebrate the millenary of the death of this, the greatest of her ancestors, the one whom she so much resembled in her unswerving loyalty to duty, her constant labour for the good of her people, her unfaltering allegiance to truth? ‘The most thoughtful provider for the widow, the defenceless, the orphan, and the poor, … most beloved by his people,’ says Florence of Alfred. Asser calls him ‘Alfred the truth-teller’; and we all remember how the great tribune of the people, as he was sometimes called, declared that the Queen was the most truthful person he had ever known.
So too after the fierce suffering of the Norman Conquest, it was Henry II who knit the framework of the country together by an administrative system, under the forms of which we, to a large extent, still live; while Edward I, taking up the idea, which Simon de Montfort seemed to have lighted upon almost by accident, made popular representation the permanent basis of our constitution, on the express ground that ‘what touches all, should be approved by all.’
Once more, in the religious crisis of the sixteenth century, Henry VIII and Elizabeth, whatever their shortcomings, did much to impress upon the English Church that sane and sober character of a via media, which, in spite of extremists on either side, it has kept ever since.
We do not, at this stage of our national history, expect services quite of this kind from the Crown. And yet the services which it has rendered during the late reign have been simply immense. To take only two of the most obvious; two, on which the late Mr. Bagehot was fond of dwelling:—(1) It has been the symbol and sign of our unity, not only as a nation, but as an empire. In every quarter of the globe, millions upon millions of her subjects, who knew little or nothing of the nature of Parliaments, of the theory of constitutional government, of the responsibility of ministers, of the rise and fall of parties, looked up to the Queen as the bond of union between them, the mother and head of a vast family dispersed throughout the whole world; and this feeling had been deepened and strengthened to an extraordinary degree by the events of the last fifteen months.
(2) And closely connected with this is the second point. The experience of more than three-and-sixty years has taught us to look up to the Crown as the head of our home and family life. This has not always, indeed has not often been the case, in English, or in any other history. The feeling in our own case has owed something to the homely virtues of King George III, but almost everything to the unfailing love and sympathy of the Queen. In joy and sorrow, the humblest of her subjects might feel that they had a share in her sympathy and care. And this sympathy was not of that easy kind which stoops from painless heights to look upon the woes of others, but had been won through depths of suffering and sorrow; and the comfort which she gave to others was, in the Apostle’s words, ‘the comfort wherewith’ she herself had been ‘comforted of God[961].’