Examining The Two Contemporary Royal Houses

The English constitutional monarchy has been characterized by continuity, despite changes in the scope and limit of royal governmental authority. The Spanish monarchy, though suppressed during the Franco interregnum, returned to a position of turn as a symbol of political stability in the mid-1970s, and the coeval form of government in Spain is that of parliamentary monarchy sort of of Franco's fascism.

By no means, however, should the latest image of the English or Spanish monarchy be taken at face value. by from the accompaniment that it would be safe to assume that a positive(p) public presentation for a monarch, as with any individual, is a consequence of the effort that went in to constructing it, there is the fact that the upstart evolution of monarchy in England and Spain in the twentieth century precise much parallels the unfolding of historical process for western europium much generally. During the 20th century that process was informed by the vicissitudes of large-scale war and significant geopolitical disturbance. Meaningful contemporary evaluation of the effectiveness of the Spanish and English monarchies in the current period must therefore be anchored in their responses to the geopolitical challenges that confronted them. The modern provenance of both of these royal houses is in the 1930s, when, individually in its way, the crowns of England and Spain faced fundamental issues of survival.

The situation in England is more than well known to the E

republican feeling, while non absent from British political discourse, does not appear to run particularly deep or wide in the English culture. As for republicanism in Spain, the people of that demesne found to their great cost over the bulk of the 20th century the difficulties attending the embrace of republican extremism. It is therefore enigmatical that, given the public profile that the Borbons now enjoy, the Spanish would volitionally throw the monarchy out.

At complete variance in the realm were the peasantry, desperately poor because of an antiquated and unequal agrarian structure, a Church that was enormously rich and almost completely in control of education, an inefficient, costly, and privileged military class, and a monarchy and semifeudal aristocracy which fostered reaction (Spain, 1971, p. 103).

The man who was to become Edward VIII was a grandson of Edward VII, the bon vivant son of faerie Victoria who, as Windsor's memoirs explain, assumed the throne late in life (Windsor, 1951, p. 280). Windsor characterizes his own father as much more austere, explaining that he "was already halfway through his life dyad when [Victoria] died; and . . . it was to her rather than to the livelier example of his own father, that he looked for a feigning of the Sovereign's deportment" (p. 280). The fact that he was a bachelor at the time he inherited the crown, says Windsor, prevented him from conveying the image of a devoted paterfamilias, which George V had personified as "a model of the tralatitious British family virtues . . . all the more genuine for its suspected however inconspicuous flaws" (Windsor, 1951, p. 251).

Latona, R. (1993, October). Spain's "ordinary" King: Juan Carlos. Europe, 330, 18-19.

That may owe something to the fact that the British royal family exercises a symbolic role solitary(prenominal) and that, among Britons, symbols retain significance, informed by a rich history. The like is not true of the entire commonwealth; Pimlott cites the republican leanings of
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