A Woman and the War

by Countess of Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville Warwick

There was a time when it was supposed to be the fountain of honour, but politicians have fouled the waters so much and have bought and sold honours so unblushingly that modern royalty would be a little ashamed to father so large an illegitimate progeny. A business nation, we have a fixed price for everything. We pay our kings so much a year, and if they exceeded their allowance the State would hesitate to make up the deficit. Baronies, baronetcies, knighthoods and the rest have their fixed price, generally, though not invariably, payable to the party whips who consider themselves morally bound to deliver the goods.

When we were on the brink of war in 1914, M. Poincaré wrote a touching letter to King George, such as an old-time king might have sent to a brother sovereign. King George signed a reply that has been published—one would wager that nothing save the signature involved his heart or his pen. It was no more than the letter of a greatly harassed minister who was trying to think while he balanced himself on a high and unstable fence. Here was ample evidence that all who run might read of the final surrender of the monarchy, and incidentally, of the desire of England to maintain peace.

Nobody wants more than the shadow of kingship in this country. Everybody with more than the most perfunctory knowledge of history has realised that half the wars of the world have been fought for the gratification of kings, and most of the others have been waged in the name of religion, i.e. to demonstrate the superiority of one orthodoxy over another. Slowly, and at such a sacrifice as the world may well shudder to contemplate, we have come within sight of the end of religious strife. There remain wars of kingship, the present one is little more than that.

Down to a few years ago the old gates were still standing at Temple Bar to divide the City from Westminster. At Warwick Castle the drawbridge is still raised every night. In some of the cities of Southern Spain watchmen, armed with spears and oil lamps, still proclaim the time of night and the state of the weather. The "Miracle" of the Sacred Fire remains an annual spectacle at Eastertide in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that is in Jerusalem.

The world, as though conscious of the ugliness of so much that is modern, still clings to old customs and institutions even when they are absurd. That is why autocratic kingship survives.

The house of Hapsburg has been ruling in Europe since the thirteenth century; in Germany as well as Austria for part of the time; the rule of the Hohenzollerns dates from 1871. A German, Count Berthold, is said to have originated in the eleventh century the house of Savoy that governs Italy. In Spain we find the ubiquitous Hapsburgs and the Bourbons sharing rule. A Hohenzollern is in Rumania, and on the distaff side in Greece. A Princess of the Hohenzollern house was the mother of King Albert of Belgium; Ferdinand of Bulgaria has Coburg and Bourbon blood.

A system of inter-marriage has retained power in the hands of a few houses, but nature is ill-disposed toward inbreeding and has scourged the cunning of kings with insanity and disease. While democracy has grown in stature and in vision, while it has been claiming its own place in the sun, the small privileged class has diminished physically, mentally, morally, but still clings desperately to place. There are a few brilliant exceptions, Albert of Belgium for example, but Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Coburgs, and Bourbons are, generally speaking, no longer qualified from any standpoint to rule the destinies of free peoples. They are a little better than well-connected anachronisms, avid of the power that is passing from them and ready to offer any sacrifice that their subjects are capable of making in order that their time-tarnished prestige may shine again.

The wishes of their people are the last thing to be considered by autocratic monarchs. They will not stand in the scale against the interests of their relatives, and in the courts of Europe it is hard to find a ruler who is not a cousin of some sort to all his fellow-sovereigns. Jealousy, ambition, ill report, dyspepsia, disease, dementia, any one of these evils if it be backed by greed, may avail to plunge innocent nations into the hell of war. Forces that sway a republic are powerless in an absolute monarchy or in one where servility and orthodoxy strive hand in hand. There are few European rulers who have half the sagacity of the chief advisers whom they may override at will. They are not as a rule men and women of great culture, few if any have ideas that belong of right to the twentieth century, their function has outgrown them, and the reverence they demand and receive is founded very largely upon ignorance and superstition.