Louis de Bernieres: Republics are rational The fact is, however, that most of her constitutional functions could be undertaken by a president, at which point my gut feeling is "O no, please let's not have a president." Most of us have no idea who the president is of those countries where there is a prime minister. They are faceless people who do not in any real sense embody or represent their country. They come and go, and they do very little. The Mary Robinsons of this world are as rare as hens" teeth, and there isn't one president I can think of, from anywhere whatsoever, who I would have preferred to the Queen. You could have made a case for Robinson becoming Queen of Ireland, however. In the case of countries where the president does have executive power, they and we know that there's no democracy in which any of them will last very long. They carry ephemerality and ultimate insignificance around with them like a curse, and often knowingly choose to do the wrong things for short term reasons. There isn't one American president I would have preferred to the Queen either. Even an American president, when he meets the Queen, knows secretly that his status is lower than hers. The Queen has more prestige than anyone else in the world, and she's ours. In this country we had our period of republicanism, and we did not enjoy it. It has become a kind of horrible folk memory. All sorts of fun were prohibited, including the theatre, and Cromwell's men roamed the countryside smashing our stained glass windows, breaking the carved figures from pews, and stabling their horses in cathedrals, sacrileges that they added to that of decapitating the King. King Charles the Second "who never said a foolish thing nor ever did a wise one," was found to be infinitely preferable, for all his extravagance and uselessness, because he brought jollity back to the nation. We still have our puritans of course, who appear in all sorts of different disguises, and most of us who enjoy life still engage in a low-level running battle against them. The mythology of kinghood has evolved by steadily diminishing and receding with time. Few of us are exercised by the sanctity of the royal blood any more, and now it's a minority that believes that monarchs are chosen and appointed by God, as King Charles the First and his predecessors did. After the regicide, and after so many regicides in previous times, it finally became rather obvious that human agency has a lot to do with it. What we are left with is not a mythology about the sacredness of kingship, but an assessment of the greatness of particular monarchs. In most of the world, the sobriquet "the great" is actually shorthand for "megalomaniac and mass murderer," but in our country we have had only one, and he is remembered as a lawmaker, peacemaker, liberator, and spreader of learning. It is arguable that we should have had several "greats." The Scots had Robert the Bruce, Queen Elizabeth the First is an English candidate, and Victoria is a British one. I believe a strong case could be made for King George the Fifth, who, amongst other things, was so concerned about the possibility of civil war in Ireland that he convened a conference of all the parties involved, in the hope of averting it. King George the Sixth fulfilled Socrates" criterion that only those who do not want to rule should be eligible to do so, and my own parents often talked about how he had kept us all going during the war. My father describes him as "our faithful, steadfast, and courageous king." It mattered that in the Great War the King visited the front, and that his sons were in the armed services, just as it mattered in the Second War that the Royal family chose not to evade the bombs, and that Princess Elizabeth was dressed up in dungarees and working on military vehicles. My father remembers having to go out on the parade ground in 1952, to announce to his regiment "The King is dead. Long live the Queen! The soldiers, like the nation, were stunned with grief, but shortly afterwards everybody was talking about a new Elizabethan age. We are now sixty years into the Elizabethan age, and if you look back over what has been achieved, even if only in the arts, such talk makes sense, even if we have not managed to produce another Shakespeare. No-one else ever has either. We have not called any of our monarchs "the great" since Alfred's time, but that is not to deny that we have had some very great ones. Elizabeth the Second has travelled with us for sixty years, sometimes behind us, sometimes in front of us, sometimes at our side, and what she has accomplished is to persuade us quietly that the monarchy is still a part of what we are. She has become as near to being "the Great" as it is possible to be when you reign but are not allowed to rule. Not ruling is by the far the most sensible option, since you cannot really be blamed for anything and you can avoid the political hurly-burly, but it does diminish one's chances of greatness. This Queen seems to have achieved it, though, to a greater extent even than Victoria, who lost heart and caved in after Prince Albert's early death. The weakness of monarchy is that it does these days depend upon the quality of the individuals, and no longer on the nature or the sacredness of the institution itself. Nowadays one has to be worthy, and not just an heir by blood. This is where we have to draw a distinction between being a monarchist and being a royalist. They are not at all the same thing. A monarchist has positive ideas about the beneficial constitutional functions of a monarch, whereas a royalist is someone who feels an emotional attachment and a loyalty to the royal family. You can of course, be both, but you shouldn't confuse them. It seems to me that monarchism as a philosophy of government has faded from the public mind, but that Royalism has been growing for years. It does help if you have met any of the royal family personally, because it instantly frees you of the distortions of the tabloids and the satirists. I am not a personal friend of anyone in the royal family, and am not even sure that it is possible for anyone to be so, but I have met some of them. I met the Queen a few times in connection with the Commonwealth Writers Prize, in my view one of the few literary prizes worth having, because the judges and contestants come from all over the world. I would guess it is the only one that interests the Queen. On the first occasion she said something quite irreverent about an important foreign clergyman. She is an amusing woman, as well as being much tinier than you had expected. Bowing to the Queen is not something that has to be rehearsed, because you cannot otherwise shake her hand. She always ends her conversations with you by saying "fascinating," looking at you slightly upwards and sideways, and then moving off decisively. If anyone else did that, you might think it rude, but everyone understands that the Queen does not have any choice if she is to speak to everyone to whom she has to speak. You feel surprised that she spoke to you at all. I did go to a dinner at Windsor Castle, the first one after the fire, where she did not seem to mind me bending down to pat the dogs when she was speaking to me - I pat dogs automatically, I am afraid - and where she humorously ushered Tony Blair back into the dining room when he tried to go out with the ladies. The Queen knows an awful lot about all the objets in the castle, and obviously values then for their provenance and their role in her family history. I briefly sat next to Prince Andrew for a short time and thought him very jolly. Prince Phillip is a natural joker who is quite likely to challenge you with "What are you doing here?" in a tone of mock exasperation. When he did that to me once, I wanted to say "I got lost looking for a restaurant," but I thought better of it, and think now that he might not have minded. Otherwise the only royal I have met is Princess Anne, who is direct and forthright and puts on no airs at all. She is the kind of woman who would have made a great Queen in wartime. So it does make a difference actually meeting them. Having met the Queen, albeit very briefly, meeting anyone else is a disappointment by comparison. You aren't impressed by President Clinton, and you wouldn't be nervous about meeting Barrack Obama or Paul McCartney either. Trevor Nunn and Seamus Heaney and Alfred Brendel are not far off, but there is still no contest. This is why it must have helped the royal family immensely to have been so conspicuously out and about for so many years. This, of course, is the point; this is what has made us all royalists even though we might disapprove of ourselves. The sheer "out-and-about-ness'of the Royals has made them a part of everybody's life for decades now. The last item on the television news always used to be about what the Queen had just done today. That is no longer the case, but if you look at their lists of engagements, you cannot help but wonder how they can bear to live in such a public whirlwind. The list of charities they take an interest in is also immense. Some of what they do is large-scale and very successful, such as The Prince of Wale's Trust, but the Duchess of Cornwall, for example also quietly supports Emmaeus, a profitable charity that creates work and accommodation for homeless men who would otherwise be dead behind the dustbins. The Queen donated a huge organ to Norwich's Roman Catholic Cathedral, to no fanfare whatsoever. In addition to this continuous public presence, there is no-one now alive who has not had the Queen as their Queen since their childhood, and all of us have kept track of the royal family whether consciously or not, by osmosis. This is also the case all over the world. It amuses me when I go to a place like Turkey, and all that my left-wing intellectual friends really want to talk about is whether the Duke of Edinburgh is well, and how lovely the Duchess of Cambridge is, and who really killed Princess Diana. When anyone has so much of a sustained presence in our lives, we can't help but think of them as honorary family and friends even if we have never met them and have no prospect of doing so. There is a sense in which we have met them even when they have not met us, which is why even a hardened cynic like me was overwhelmed with shock on that Sunday morning when I came down to the kitchen, turned on the radio, and heard the news about Princess Diana. Why am I crying? I asked myself. I was one of the thousands who filed past the body of the Queen Mother. I'd got fond of her, and my father tells a good story about a great dane of his that escaped from captivity when she visited his regiment. It realised that she was the most important person on the parade ground, and bounded up to her. She was very tiny too, and my father thought she would be bowled over, but she greeted it with pleasure and remained on her feet. I know someone else who, as a little girl, was supposed to present her with a posy, but was so overwhelmed that she threw the flowers at her and ran away. The Queen Mother evidently enjoyed that experience too. In my part of Norfolk the towns have been decked with bunting, and people have clipped their hedges for the jubilee. One of our farmers and his son have strimmed the churchyard. Everyone is putting in some kind of effort. For many people their royalism is mixed up with their patriotism (or even their nationalism). I am certain that for my parents" generation royalism and patriotism are indistinguishable; they are the ones who swore allegiance to King and Country, and went off to fight the Nazis and the Fascists. For my generation of baby boomers it was perhaps different. I had immense difficulty at Sandhurst with the idea of swearing allegiance to Queen and Country, partly because I had lost my faith, and so swearing anything on the Bible seemed pointless (and in any case the Bible specifically forbids the swearing of oaths), but also because I thought "Surely one has allegiance to specific causes rather than to a person?" I would have had difficulty fighting for Queen and Country if the Queen had turned out to be a rotter, and my country clearly in the wrong. If I had been sent to fight in the Second Iraq war, I would have resigned my commission afterwards, upon hearing that there were no weapons of mass destruction. I think I might even have tried to sue Tony Blair. The Queen promised when she was young and beautiful to serve us all her days, whether long or short, which is to say that she swore allegiance to us. She could have had a lot more fun if she had been like her sister, her uncle, or her great grandfather, but it is more than likely that if she had gone down that path the monarchy would already be defunct. It is true that she and her family have gilded lives in the sense that they lack for nothing, live in fabulous places, meet everyone worth meeting, and get to travel all over the world, but even these things can be small compensation for their complete lack of freedom. I know that I couldn't stand it, and I know that I would be out behaving disgracefully like Charles the Second or Edward the Seventh, until I was deposed and decapitated or died of obesity and social diseases. It seems almost superhuman to exercise such dignity and restraint, and to have done so for so long without, in the case of the Queen and the Duke, ever making any big misjudgements. In the case of the Duke and the Queen it must be because they really do think that their oath of allegiance to us in the Commonwealth is absolutely binding and inviolable, and that the enjoyment of privilege comes second. They are not softies anyway, all of them excelling at different sports, and enjoying long walks in dreadful weather - something that Tony and Cherie Blair used to dread when they visited Balmoral. Whilst it is true that a boring republic is a more rational option than an interesting monarchy, it also true that we are not, as some Ancient Greeks thought, rational animals. We are emotional animals that use our reason to work out how to get we want. I am a sentimental royalist like most other people, and we shouldn't have to justify it any more than we should have to justify our love for our children or an interest in bromeliads. It's what we like, and, fortunately, it's what we've got. Louis de Bernières's most recent book is 'Notwithstanding: Stories from an English Village" (Vintage; £7.99)