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By Root 1168 0

(In the 1960s there were plans to pull the whole place down and replace it with something of glass, concrete and steel as a sign of Britain’s new role in the world. The money ran out before the demolition contractors could move in, which was a rather better demonstration of the country’s new status.) These heavy public buildings designed to make a statement about the solidity of British purpose can be found everywhere from Dundee to Dunedin: schools, parliaments, stock exchanges, police stations, railway termini, all executed in neo-classical or neo-Gothic style, regardless of whether or not either was appropriate for local conditions. Like the Foreign Office, they stand there still, slightly shabby on the outside, traceried with electric wires and plastered with plastic notices within, reminders of a vain and vanished glory, recalling the desert ruins of Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ (‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’). In the one-time colonies these buildings speak of the past. In Britain they are where the business of the present is transacted, and to suggest that we have somehow developed an ability to ignore the influence of our physical surroundings is to ask us to believe a great deal. As Winston Churchill remarked, ‘We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ We tiptoe into the future down marbled corridors ringing to the clip of Victorian heels.

And then there are Britain’s constitutional arrangements, not least the country’s continued possession of a monarchy. The anthropologist Arthur Hocart spent years attempting to understand the origins of kingship and concluded that all he could say with certainty was that when history began, there were gods and there were monarchs: the earliest-known religion was a belief in the divinity of kings. No rational person has believed that nonsense for centuries. But the fact that Britain is still ruled by a representative of this prehistoric institution is in large part the consequence of empire. Giving Victoria the bombastic title of empress in 1876 had been an empty, cost-free gesture by that great regal flatterer Benjamin Disraeli. But the monarchical tone of empire was useful in co-opting the support of other kings, from Bangalore to Zululand, enabling a form of colonization in which the new subject state might claim hardly to notice that it had been emasculated. One Basuto king is said to have told Victoria, ‘My country is your blanket, O Queen, and my people the lice upon it.’ Across the world, cities, provinces, lakes, mountains, gardens, parks, highways, stations, puddings and flowers were named after Victoria, and many of her people assumed that the Great White Queen was an integral part of the empire’s success. She was not: she just got lucky. Her sons and grandsons, with their imperial tours, durbars, colonial statues, tributes and tiger-hunting were lucky, too. By the same token, you could say that Queen Elizabeth II was unlucky. Her role has been to preside over the disappearance of empire, as the number of British possessions has shrunk to a few curious dots in the seas and oceans of the world. But just as lands were claimed in the name of a British queen, so their independence required a royal witness, with Elizabeth or one of her family on hand to watch as the British flag was lowered and the flag of the new state raised. Look at any photograph of Commonwealth leaders since the early 1950s and the one face you can almost guarantee to find there is that of Elizabeth II, and it is largely due to her that the institution, such as it is, survives at all: like the empire, it smells of monarchy. Elizabeth may never have enjoyed her great-great-grandmother’s title of empress of India, but the fact that other nations have taken her seriously has encouraged the British to do likewise.

And the empire did more than consolidate the position of the monarchy. It did much to make the political identity of Britain, too. Of the many elements which came together to create a ‘British’ identity – Henry VIII’s break with Rome, say, or the adoption of