That went well. In fact, one might say, without a trace of irony, it could have hardly gone better. But then those who wanted the royal US visit to be called off could hardly have anticipated King Charles triggering bursts of applause from Republicans as well as Democrats as they listened to a speech studded with views diametrically opposed to those of the president and his administration.
Some of this warm reception across the aisle was, I think, sheer pleasure at the recovery of institutional dignity: the collective response of a Congress that was paid the unfamiliar compliment of being taken seriously as a forum where thoughtfulness and the public interest could find an attentive hearing, rather than sinking into a mudhole of rancid partisanship, puerile catcalling and vainglorious self-congratulation. “America’s words carry weight and meaning as they have since independence,” the King emphasised towards the end of his speech, flattering the significance of American history as an embodiment of something other than the exercise of raw power. Cue the standing ovation.
The rhetorical cunning of the speech (you could hear Cicero applauding from the tomb) was to couple positions anathema to Trump with glosses from which it would be impossible for a patriotic American to dissent. Thus, praise of interfaith co-operation was prefaced by a profession of Christian faith as “a firm anchor”; the indispensability of Nato and “unyielding resolve” in the defence of Ukraine by remembering the invocation of Article 5, and the allied response following the catastrophe of 9/11; and a call to address climate change by quoting Theodore Roosevelt (one of Donald Trump’s idols) on the “glorious heritage” of the American landscape. If Woody Guthrie can’t persuade Republicans and the president to see that “this land is your land”, then the environmentally crusading British king was there to remind them. The Speaker of the House applauded, while the vice-president remained unmoved.
Following the speech, a CNN commentator remarked on the King’s directness, the obvious regal comparison being his mother’s address to a joint session of Congress in 1991, mindful as she habitually was of never violating the monarchy’s unwritten law of political restraint. But the historical record shows otherwise. Charles was, in fact, following Elizabeth II’s example of speaking truths to Congress that went well beyond the conventional norms of constitutional tact.
The Queen — or whoever was skilfully advising her — had already mastered the art of using Anglo-American history to argue for a shared political inheritance, rather than one permanently divorced by the revolution. King Charles was not the first monarch to present America with a bell symbolising the affinity of the two nations. But while the Trump bell was inscribed with the name of its second world war submarine, a gift designed to cater to the president’s appetite for inserting himself into history, the Queen’s bell was even more artfully calculated.
Presented in 1976 to commemorate the bicentennial of independence, the new Liberty Bell was made in the same Whitechapel foundry from which the original was cast; only weighing in at over 12,000lb, six times heavier than the famously cracked original. Warehoused for many years, it was rededicated last year by the present Duke of Edinburgh in the Benjamin Rush Garden in Philadelphia, where someone, surely, must be planning to make it chime come July 4.
Dressed in an apricot suit and hat, the Queen could assume, in May 1991, that singing the praises of the alliance of free nations would meet with a warm reception. And so it did. Among the many applause lines was her observation that “all our history in this and earlier centuries underlines the basic point that best progress is made [for the stability of the world] when Europeans and Americans act in concert”.
Like her son’s speech, Elizabeth’s took place in the shadow of a Middle Eastern war. Less than three months had passed since the end of Desert Storm, prosecuted by the administration of George HW Bush, the ruthlessness of its military operation matched by the clarity of its strategic goal: the dislodging of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from his invasion of Kuwait. But the Queen warned against any complacency that the matter had been done and dusted. “Experience shows,” she said, “that great enterprises seldom end with a tidy and satisfactory flourish,” a message that Bush Sr was more inclined to heed than the present occupant of the White House.
Nor was the Queen about to indulge callow triumphalism. Much of what she said (written, it is thought, by unnamed staff at the British embassy) anticipated the forthrightness of King Charles. There was anti-isolationism: “We must not allow ourselves to be enticed into a form of continental insularity”; anti-belligerent sobriety; the aim of wise policy being “not domination, but stability”.
“Some people,” the Queen went on, “believe that power grows from the barrel of a gun. So it can, but history shows that it never grows well, not for very long. Force in the end is sterile.” Even likelier, had he been there, to have Vance choking on his still or sparkling was the Queen’s view that the “special advantage” the allied democracies had in “seeking to guide the process of change” was “the rich ethnic and cultural diversity of both our societies”.
It was telling that Donald Trump, usually happiest in a history-free zone, actually dived into it, arguing in a White House welcome ceremony that, centuries before 1776, America had been imprinted with what he called “Anglo-Saxon” qualities, those characteristics being those of “blood”, “noble spirit” and a sense of imperial destiny, which were also the sentiments of Teddy Roosevelt.
King Charles, on the other hand, preferred to stress a legacy of distinctively British political thought and action: the restraints on absolutism imposed by Magna Carta (the barons would not have been pleased by the arbitrary warrants and seizures of ICE); the Declaration of Right of 1689 that was the foundational document of the British constitutional monarchy, to which the writers of state declarations in the spring of 1776, and the subsequent writers of the July Declaration of Independence, looked for inspiration. In some respects, as the King correctly noted, the American Bill of Rights of 1791 drew on the very wording of the British Bill of Rights of 1689.
Framing the core principles of liberal democracy as a common inheritance of both the Founding Fathers and the monarchy against which they rebelled, the King was calling for another America to bestir itself. Better to take Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address as a model than the authoritarianism of Putin and Xi Jinping, much less the busted flush of Viktor Orbán. The cause of constitutionally protected liberal democracy, and that of the fate of planet Earth itself, were not yet lost, unless wilfully surrendered.
Thus, in one of history’s happier paradoxes, a British king came to Washington to speak against absolute monarchy, of the sort on which predecessors bearing the same royal name rested, as they supposed, their own divinely ordained authority; and also to speak, by strong implication, against the great autocrats and kleptocrats of our own age.
John Adams, the second president and the chief editor of the Declaration of Independence (drafted by Thomas Jefferson), might have been pleased by Charles’s words, since he called the British constitution (when properly observed) the best system of government in the world. Dreading his obligation in 1785, as the first American plenipotentiary, to have to present credentials to the king who had been characterised in the Declaration as a tyrant, Adams was utterly disarmed when George III declared that “I was the last to consent to the separation, but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.”
In later years, Adams thought the real peril to democracy might be itself. Having witnessed what Jacobinism and Bonapartism could do, he wrote to a Jeffersonian Republican, John Taylor, that “there never was a democracy that did not commit suicide” and there was bound to come a time when the cry would go up that “we are none of us safe! . . . [that] we must unite with some clever fellow, who can protect us all — Caesar, Bonaparte, who you will . . . Though we distrust, hate, and abhor them all; yet we must submit to one or another of them, stand by him, cry him up to the skies, and swear that he is the greatest, best, and finest man that ever lived!”
But that’s not the sort of thing that even kings dare say to their host at state banquets.
Simon Schama is an FT contributing editor
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