Unsteady Crowns

The Survival of Monarchies in the Modern World

A.W. Purdue

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780752473727
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

War and austerity, unrest and revolution: the institution of monarchy has remained stalwart through every challenge levelled at it, but just what is its role and how secure is its future in our modern society?

At the beginning of the twentieth century, monarchy was by far the most common form of government: emperors sat on the thrones of Germany, Austria–Hungary, Persia, Japan, China, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, while there were kings of Bulgaria, Serbia, Italy, Romania, Greece, Korea and Cambodia. After he lost his throne in 1952, King Farouk of Egypt predicted that by the end of the century there would be only five kings: the kings of hearts, aces, clubs and spades, and the King of England. That prediction has not come true, for there remain monarchs across the globe. The number of monarchies has appreciably diminished, yet the idea continues to have allure.

In Unsteady Crowns, historian A.W. Purdue explores the important role played by monarchies as agents of continuity, guarding and representing the national ethos, and brings the story up to date in a fully revised second edition, exploring the roles of celebrity, rivalry, and much more in monarchies worldwide.

PART ONE

A WORLD FIT FOR KINGS

1

THE FAR EAST: CELESTIAL EMPIRES

As we have seen, all monarchies have had a spiritual or religious dimension. Kings were not just symbolic figures, representative of the peoples and cultures they ruled over, but were held to connect the fate of their peoples with the divinity or the cosmos. Nowhere was this aspect of monarchy more pronounced than in the Far East and in the Chinese and Japanese Empires, yet the two monarchies developed in very different ways. In both the priestly roles of the monarchs were pronounced, with the rituals they alone could perform seen as essential to the prosperity of their realms, but while in China the sacerdotal aspects of the emperors reinforced and went hand in hand with executive authority and autocratic power, in Japan the emperors, for great stretches of Japanese history, were confined to a priestly and cultural role, with executive authority lodged in other hands.

Both imperial systems claimed origins in times before recorded history. China is the world’s oldest civilisation, and its monarchical system was inextricable from its continuous existence over more than 3,500 years. The history of the Chinese emperors can be traced from the times of the Shang dynasty, later named Yin, of northern China, which existed, though the dates are contestable, from the eighteenth to the twelfth centuries BC. There was, however, a misty and largely mythical tradition of powerful rulers existing long before the Shang, the five rulers of 2852–2205.

Japanese claims as to the origins of kingship were more extravagant. The Chronicles of the eighth century tell of the Sun Goddess (Amaterasu Ōmikami) who sent the God-child, Jimmu, to rule Japan. Descending to the island of Kyushu, he conquered the East and established his capital in Yamato. In theory, therefore, Japanese emperors not only enjoyed the mandate of the Gods and were able to intercede with them, but were descended from them.

A significant distinction between the Chinese and Japanese monarchies is that, while the Chinese monarchy had an institutional continuity – dynasties came and went and some of them were dynasties imposed by foreign conquerors – the Japanese have had, theoretically, only one dynasty, an umbilical cord connecting the monarchy to the very origins of the people and the beginnings of time. A second distinction is the greater perseverance among the elite as well as the common people of animist traditions. In Japan Shinto placed an extraordinary emphasis upon purity, and a complementary emphasis upon the removal of impurities, in which the emperor, who could intercede with the spirits, had a unique role.

In China, the symbolic and religious significance of the emperors, who were held to be in communication with divine forces, was crucial to the cohesion of the vast territory and population of the Middle Kingdom. The idealised and sacerdotal position of the ruler was firmly established during the reigns of the later kings of Zhou. This position continued to reflect nature and ancestor worship and the need to keep society in harmony with the universe, the stars and planets. It received further and distinctive support from the teachings of Confucius (traditional dates 551–479 BC), who saw the monarch as reigning under the mandate of Heaven and in accordance with a morality and code of behaviour that made for a stable society.

The continuities of a Chinese kingdom or empire were never given. The tensions between imperial rule and centrifugal tendencies were always evident, and the early history of China is one of contending rulers and peoples. The first regime that could claim to be the sole effective authority in China was that of the King of Qin, who by 221 BC had forced all other kings to submit to him and adopted the title Huangdi, usually translated as ‘Emperor’. Under the short-lived Qin and the succeeding Han dynasty, institutions and practices that would continue to mark imperial rule into modern times were developed: cadres of officials; the standardisation of economic practices; the enforcement of imperial laws throughout the land; and the attempt to establish secure frontiers. There followed, however, the ‘centuries of disunity’, a time of competing kingdoms, fragmented authority and internecine warfare, that lasted from the third to the sixth century AD.

Invasion by non-Chinese peoples was another threat to the stability of China and the continuity of the imperial throne. Under the Tang dynasty, Chinese frontiers grew wider, despite external threats. The population of China was and was to remain overwhelmingly composed of the Han people, but conquests on the perimeter were usually maintained by reliance on non-Chinese regional commissioners and troops who made uneasy subordinates and were a potential source of rebellions. After the deposition of the last of the Tang emperors in 907, there followed a further period of disunity in which short-lived dynasties struggled for power. The Song dynasty (960–1127) proved incapable of holding the north, and though it survived in the south for a further century and a half, non-Chinese rulers held the north-east and north-west. With Mongol invasion came the first foreign invaders capable not only of setting up a northern kingdom but of establishing themselves in the south as well. The Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) set up by Kublai Khan left a permanent impression upon China, a capital in the north-east that was to become Beijing, and territorial and administrative divisions that survive in the People’s Republic. The long period of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), founded in the south, ended with a further invasion from the north. The new invaders, the Manchu, established China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing (‘Pure’) which was to endure into the twentieth century.

What characterised the Chinese Empire through all the centuries of internal division and foreign invasion was a continuity in the essentials of the imperial system. Even foreign dynasties repeatedly reinvented the status, duties and style of the emperor, just as they maintained similar administrative systems and did not seek to disrupt the social order.

The institutions of government and administration were developed and refined. The Song period in particular was one of institutional innovation in which the monarchical state became more centralised, autocratic and professional in its administration. The opportunities for imperial absolutism had been increased by the decline of the aristocracy, which had been much weakened during the wars and rebellions during and after the reigns of the later Tang emperors. The absence of a powerful landed aristocracy facilitated the enhancement of the position of emperors. Their lives became ever more ritualised and formal, and their distance from even the higher classes increased. There was nothing of the primus inter pares about the position of the emperor, no reliance upon feudal vassals, no acclamation by the warriors, no uneasy relationship with a Church and no concept of a law above or separate from the imperial will. The Song, Yuan and Ming periods therefore witnessed the development and refinement of characteristics that were already pronounced, the perfection of a system rather than any radical departures from it.

There were both religious and secular reasons for this persistence. There was a continued belief in the divine appointment of emperors and their enjoyment of a heavenly mandate. The power of the emperor was held to be unlimited, and there was no body of law and no ecclesiastical or secular authority to challenge his power. He was indeed the father of his people, the patriarchal head of a patrilineal society.

Emperors were, in many ways, hardly regarded as persons. In all monarchical systems the symbolic nature of the king or emperor was significant in that the character of his realm was inherent in him and its fortunes entrusted to him, but in China the symbolism almost obscured the living being with his capabilities and weaknesses. There are indeed few biographies of Chinese emperors. The mystical position of the emperor was a source of great strength, for he alone could perform the rituals necessary to ensure fertility and security. The perseverance of animist traditions contrasted with the inability of any organised religion to secure the adherence of the whole of society and establish itself as a counterweight to imperial authority. Religion in China had to be essentially quietist; tolerated so long as it eschewed pretensions to come between emperor and people; sternly chastised when it forgot its place. Confucian beliefs and tenets further buttressed the imperial position, considering submission and obedience to the emperor as part of a moral order in which respect for the head of the family was central.

Unlike Western rulers, Chinese emperors had no turbulent aristocracies to rely on, cater for and fear, and no popes or other prelates to challenge their authority. There was therefore no need to turn to towns or merchants as counterweights to aristocratic or ecclesiastical influence. As Barrington Moore has commented:

Imperial Chinese society never created an urban trading and manufacturing class comparable to that which grew out of the latter stages of feudalism in Western Europe, though at times there were some starts in this direction. Imperial success in uniting the country can be advanced as one of the more obvious reasons for the difference. In Europe the conflict between Pope and Emperor, between kings and nobles, helped the merchants in the cities to break through the crust of the traditional agrarian society because they constituted a valuable source of power in this many-sided competition.¹

Moore’s diagnosis may underestimate the degree to which trading skills, particularly in south China, existed and were honed. The success of twentieth-century Shanghai and Hong Kong and the all-too-evident domination of economic life by the Chinese diaspora in parts of South-East Asia suggest a long history of engagement in commerce. He is clearly right, however, in suggesting that commerce was undervalued and even resented in imperial China, that Confucian ethics rather despised the merchant and that the state did little to encourage or protect townsmen and business. There was no tradition of urban or city rights and legal privileges such as characterised the development of towns in Europe.

Landowners owed the titles of their land to the imperial government, and rather than the government being dependent on the support of landowners, it was they who depended on the government. Mandarins bought land with the rewards for their work for government, but those who inherited land usually needed to pass examinations to prove their gentility and could hope to further increase income and landholding by being given an imperial post. Partible inheritance was a further barrier to the rise of mighty landowners.

The very size of China and the problems of its agrarian economy favoured the imperial system, with its ability in good times not only to ensure order but to undertake great public works. The need for water-control systems for transport, irrigation and the prevention of flooding worked in favour of a centralised government and bureaucracy. While European monarchs struggled to free themselves in the early modern period from dependency on mighty aristocratic subjects on whose support their predecessors had relied upon and had their power limited by, Chinese emperors ruled by means of a bureaucracy that penetrated into every corner of the Empire, while, as officials were regularly moved from post to post, there was little chance that they could establish local power bases.

The major problem of all regimes in both East and West was how to raise sufficient money by taxation to maintain the court, expand government and pay armies. The Chinese had devised a more effective system than Western monarchies. The latter might elevate humble subjects – Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell or Colbert – as their administrators and taxation overlords, appoint their tax farmers and find new goods to tax, but the imperial Chinese bureaucracy with its legions of officials was a much more effective instrument.

A class of officials, drawn mainly from the elite with leisure enough to prepare for a complex examination process but open to the occasional bright son of a poor family, had an ethos and identity in which cultural pride, elitism, corporate spirit and loyalty to the font of patronage and the guarantor of continuity and stability provided faithful servants of the regime. This class provided the maintenance of law and order, the implementation of imperial decrees, the architects and administrators of great schemes and the collection of taxes. They were not, for the most part, well paid, and were therefore corrupt, but provided the corruption was retail rather than wholesale, provided the peasants were not squeezed so hard that they would revolt, and provided the tax gatherers handed over sufficient to the imperial treasury, the system worked rather well.

Chinese ethics and practice placed a great emphasis upon stability. China’s frontier problems and the threat of invasion from central Asia were not dissimilar to Europe’s perennial problem of invasion by the same nomadic hordes from the East. The great size of China, its cultural superiority and its numerous population made it an effective bulwark against such incursions: it could occasionally be conquered, but its ethnic homogeneity, social structure and culture remained substantially intact. To concentrate upon invasions or even periods of internal instability underestimates the much longer periods of internal peace.

Under the early Ming emperors, China reached the apogee of its civilisation. Active emperors promulgated reforms and closely scrutinised the activities of the civil service. Although southern in origin, the Ming established the capital at Beijing, building a complex of palaces that Western monarchs could not hope to emulate. The early fifteenth century saw great imperial naval expeditions to India, Africa and South-East Asia. Significantly, however, the Ming Empire soon lost interest in the outside world and adopted a defensive posture to it. China seemed at the height of its superiority to the rest of the world, a gilded, stable and harmonious civilisation. A central question, however, is whether equilibrium, stability and harmony created a sort of steady-state civilisation that lacked capacity for further development. To contemporary Chinese such a question would have seemed inappropriate. Harmony, balance and a sort of perfection had been achieved. Developments taking place far away in barbaric Europe were, at the best, like the clocks brought by Jesuit missionaries, amusing but unimportant.

The fall of the Ming dynasty came not at the hands of distant Europe but from a more familiar quarter. Invaded by the Manchu, who in common with the Mongols were nomadic warriors from the north-east, the last Ming emperor hanged himself in the palace grounds at Beijing and the imperial throne was taken over by a new Manchu dynasty. As tended to be the pattern with new dynasties, early emperors were dynamic and forceful individuals. A conquering foreign administration, the Manchu imposed themselves on China, maintained their armies of Manchu bannermen and matched every senior Chinese official with a Manchu shadow. The queue and the kow-tow symbolised the elevation of the emperor and the Manchu as a whole above their Chinese subjects, while Manchu conceptions of monarchy reinforced the autocratic power of the emperor. As ever, the new regime had nevertheless to adapt itself to the ways and traditions of the vast country it presided over, though some historians have, in recent years, argued that the assimilation of the Manchus has been exaggerated.²

The power, dignity and separation from ordinary mortals of the long-lived Emperor Kangxi (1662–1722) is effectively summarised by Jonathan D. Spence:

the mediator between heaven and earth, in Chinese terms the ‘Son of Heaven’, who ruled the ‘central country’. Much of his life had to be spent in ritual activity: at court audiences in the Forbidden City, offering prayers at the temple of heaven, attending lectures by court scholars on the Confucian classics, performing sacrifices to his Manchu ancestors in the shamanic shrines. When he was not on his travels, he lived in the magnificent palaces in or near Peking, surrounded by high walls and guarded by tens of thousands of troops. Almost every detail of this life emphasised his uniqueness and superiority to lesser mortals: he alone faced south, while his ministers faced the north; he alone wrote in red while they wrote in black …³

Just as China succumbed to conquest from central Asia, western Europe, armed with newly developed military technology and efficiently administered fighting forces, was bringing to an end its own vulnerability to the long cycle of threats from nomadic peoples. The triumph of the West was imminent and was to bring down imperial China. More than a century separated the haughty reception of the British mission led by Lord McCartney in 1793 and the last desperate attempts by the Dowager Empress Cixi to modernise a regime, now clearly subordinate to the Western powers, a few years before the final fall of the imperial system in 1911. The intervening period saw successive humiliations in the face of Western military and technological superiority, limitations upon Chinese sovereignty as colonies and treaty ports were established along the coastline, messianic internal rebellions and unsuccessful attempts to modernise along Western lines.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was becoming clear that the mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn from the Manchu or Qing dynasty. The effective ruler of China from 1861 – when her husband, the Emperor Xianfeng, died – until her death in 1908, was the Dowager Empress, Cixi. This era was one of dark melodrama and steep decline. Perhaps the wickedness of the ‘Old Buddha’ has been exaggerated by princes, officials and generals, only too pleased to blacken the name of the strong woman they feared. It remains a fact that all who stood in her way, including her own son Tongzhi, were killed or met mysterious deaths, and that until the last years of her life she was an implacable opponent of reform and westernisation. It is also the case that features of the imperial system that had always threatened its efficiency, the many wives and concubines, the lack of a clear line of succession in the absence of primogeniture and the influence of powerful eunuchs, made the court a hot-house of intrigue, decadence and cruelty.

Perhaps the last chance for the Qing dynasty came with Emperor Guangxu’s reform programme in 1898. Conservative forces prevailed and the Emperor became virtually the prisoner of his aunt, the Empress Cixi, who once more became Regent. The occupation of Beijing by the army of the great powers that crushed the anti-foreign Boxer rebellion marked the further h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Power of Kingship
• Part One: A World Fit for Kings
• Part Two: Some Kings Depart
• Part Three: A Further Thinning of the Ranks
• Part Four: Monarchies in the Contemporary World
• Notes
• Bibliography