One of the greatest fears of the Founding Fathers of the United States was the emergence of a new tyranny of a monarchy or oligarchy. A strong independent and republican strain rebelled against the idea of power being concentrated in the hands of the few. They were even more repelled by the idea of nepotistic families dominating politics in the fledgling nation. But America has never […]
Monarchy
In a perfect monarchical system, the king or queen will be the personal embodiment of a country’s sense of identity. If monarchy stands for anything, it is tradition and history – a personal and unbroken link to centuries past. Of course, the reality is often quite different. The House of Windsor has a quintessentially English ring to it, but this was the intentional First World War […]
Strange sovereigns
Monarchy was for centuries the standard form of government in Europe. At the turn of the twentieth century only Switzerland and France had no sovereign as their head of state. Whilst Switzerland had a long and proud tradition of local democracy, France vacillated between republican ideals and monarchical longings, alternating between presidents and kings of either Bourbon or Bonaparte extraction. In the aftermath of the Second […]