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Election Day

While in the outer world the British people have been electing as their representatives, by the degrading process of universal suffrage, several hundred paid professional politicians, few of them owners of landed property, many of them positively base-born, in the closed world of this column a very different ceremony has been taking place.

In the dark, time-worn Gothic Hall of Assembly, amid crumbling tombs and carved symbols whose inmost meaning few can now read, the Great Feudatories of the Realm have been swearing fealty to the Regent, settling on their broad shoulders once more, for another year, the dreaming loads of Church and State.

In a thousand manors too, throughout the column, the Lesser Feudatories have been receiving the allegiance of village headmen bearing baskets of eggs, indigenous stones and symbolic flowers, of representatives of the craft-guilds – wood-carvers, arquebus-designers and organ-builders prominent as ever – and tenant farmers and yeomen, red-cheeked, bucolic figures in their holiday coats of decent frieze.

After these day-long, solemn ceremonies, rituals so intricate that none but the columnar heralds can understand them, high and low, through all their exact, foreknown, immutable degrees from the Regent to the humblest labourer, feel themselves united, confirmed once more, as the mighty order of society is confirmed.

In the outer world all is ephemeral, unstable, eddying and whirling this way and that in ceaseless, unreasonable change. Within, all is unchanging and unchangeable. As it was, as it is, as it will be, till Judgment Day.

— Peter Simple
Published at 5:00 pm on Thursday 4 July 2024. Categories: Great Britain Politics Quotations Tradition Tags: .
Comments

Simple himself, or your own approximation of his unique voice?

In either case a delightful evocation of the eternal truths so sadly spurned by our irredeemably decadent society.

A correction: yeomen are well above tenant famers, and would vigorously reject being placed, even by implication, upon the same level. Hierarchy is all.

— L G Clark 5 Jul 2024 11:12 am
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