Walter Bagehot

A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.

We smile at the Court Circular; but remember how many people read the Court Circular!

Its use is not in what it says, but in those to whom it speaks.

Just so a royal family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty events.

To state the matter shortly, royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.

A Republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions.

Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.

The English Monarchy strengthens our Government with the strength of religion.

Every instructed theologian would say that it was the duty of a person born under a Republic as much to obey that Republic as it is the duty of one born under a Monarchy to obey the monarch.

An undue advantage was given to a part of the Constitution, and therefore the progress of the whole was stayed.

All through the reign of William III. there was (in common speech) one king whom man had made, and another king whom God had made.

The king who ruled had no consecrated loyalty to build upon; although he ruled in fact, according to sacred theory there was a king in France who ought to rule.

As soon as Queen Anne began to reign there was a change of feeling; the old sacred sentiment began to cohere about her.

There were indeed difficulties which would have baffled most people; but an Englishman whose heart is in a matter is not easily baffled.

They were ready and eager to take Queen Anne as the stock of a new dynasty; they were ready to ignore the claims of her father and the claims of her brother, but they could not ignore the fact that at the critical period she had no…

If a king is a useful public functionary who may be changed, and in whose place you may make another, you cannot regard him with mystic awe and wonder; and if you are bound to worship him, of course you cannot change him.

Accordingly, during the whole reigns of George I. and George II. the sentiment of religious loyalty altogether ceased to support the Crown.

The prerogative of the king had no strong party to support it; the Tories, who naturally would support it, disliked the actual king; and the Whigs, according to their creed, disliked the king's office.

Until the accession of George III. the most vigorous opponents of the Crown were the country gentlemen, its natural friends, and the representatives of quiet rural districts, where loyalty is mostly to be found, if anywhere.

The English were ready to take the new young prince as the beginning of a sacred line of sovereigns, just as they had been willing to take an old lady, who was the second cousin of his great-great-grandmother.

If you ask the immense majority of the Queen's subjects by what right she rules, they would never tell you that she rules by Parliamentary right, by virtue of 6 Anne, c. 7.

When her family came to the Crown it was a sort of treason to maintain the inalienable right of lineal sovereignty, for it was equivalent to saying that the claim of another family was better than hers: but now, in the strange course of…

There was so much harm done by it as well as so much good, that it is quite capable of being argued whether on the whole it was beneficial or hurtful.

Whatever he did had a sanctity different from what any one else did, and it perversely happened that he was commonly wrong.

The Monarchy by its religious sanction now confirms all our political order; in George III.'s time it confirmed little except itself.