Gerald Warner has a splendid post over on his Daily Telegraph blog on Crown Prince Otto’s ninety-sixth birthday. Heavens! how time flies. It seemed like only yesterday was his ninety-fifth.

My favorite scene that Gerald mentions is this one:

Bravo, Budapest. And Hoch Habsburg!

Big-budget film celebrating anti-Communist hero & White Russian leader Admiral Kolchak is partly funded by Russian government

Here’s a film that has it all: naval battles, mutiny, revolution, civil war, brave men, beautiful women, sin, sacrifice, and betrayal on multiple levels. But “Admiral” («Адмиралъ»), which opened in Russia this month, is notable for another reason: this is the first major film depicting the tsarist White Russians as the good guys to receive at least part of its funding from the Russian government. The eponymous hero of the film is Alexander Kolchak, the naval commander and polar explorer who later led part of the White Army fighting the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War.

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Blessed Emperor Charles was crowned as Apostolic King of Hungary on the 30th of December in 1916. It was the last Hapsburg coronation to this day. For those interested there are two accounts which do justice to the sacred rites. One is by that most devoted admirer of the Hapsburgs, Gordon Brook-Shepherd, in his excellent biography of Charles, The Last Hapsburg. (Brook-Shepherd also wrote excellent and quite readable biographies of the Empress Zita, of Crown Prince Otto, of Chancellor Dollfuß, and Baron Sir Rudolf von Slatin Pasha).

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George Washington’s Society of the Cincinnati medal was auctioned off at Sotheby’s last year for a whopping $5,305,000. Founded by General Washington and other officers of the Continental and French armies who served in the American Revolution, the Society of the Cincinnati is the oldest and most prestigious of America’s many hereditary societies.

Louis XVI was himself a member, and the Society was known as the ordre de Cincinnatus in France, where it was added to the hierarchy of orders (even though it was not, strictly speaking, an order) as ranking just below the Order of Saint Louis.

General Washington’s Cincinnati badge was, after his death, given to the Marquis de Lafayette whose descendants kept it in the family until the auction last December.

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By PETER STEINFELS | The New York Times | July 17, 1989

They came not to praise the French Revolution but to bury it.

In the place of tricolor bunting, there were the black vestments of an old-fashioned Roman Catholic funeral Mass. Instead of fireworks, there were the flickering candles of a Manhattan church. Instead of the “Marseillaise,” there was the rise and fall of Gregorian chant.

They came not to praise the French Revolution but to bury it. In the place of tricolor bunting, there were the black vestments of an old-fashioned Roman Catholic funeral Mass. Instead of fireworks, there were the flickering candles of a Manhattan church. Instead of the “Marseillaise,” there was the rise and fall of Gregorian chant.

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The State Opening of the States-General of the Netherlands

The third Tuesday in September beholds Prinsjesdag — the Day of the Princes — when the Queen of the Netherlands formally opens the annual parliamentary session of the States-General. Queen Beatrix arrives at the Ridderzaal (Knight’s Hall) of the Binnehof palace in the center of The Hague by means of the Gouden Koets (Golden Coach) presented to her predecessor Wilhelmina by the grateful burgers of the city of Amsterdam.

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The Palace has released this YouTube video on the ancient practice of swan upping.

Quentin Bryce was yesterday sworn in as the Queen of Australia’s representative in her kingdom spanning that southerly continent.

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The 1967 coronation of the late King George IV of Tonga took place in the Chapel Royal. Unfortunately, the charming gothic revival structure burnt down some years ago, and so the latest coronation — that of George V — took place in the more spartan surroundings of the Centenary Church.

Elsewhere: See “islomaniac” Cheyenne Morrison’s coverage of the recent coronation at The Private Islands Blog.

Put Taft on a raft and forget Mr. Vorster: In terms of well-dressed heads of state, the King of Tonga is one of the last of his breed

It’s an easily observable fact that, in terms of public attire, the heads of state of today generally leave much to be desired, yet the newly crowned King of Tonga (seen right) keeps up the sartorial tradition, not only of his ancestors, but of ours. George Tupou V (or Siaosi Taufa’ahau Manumataongo Tuku’aho Tupou V to give his full name) was crowned just a few weeks ago in a splendid ceremony in Nuku’alofa, the capital of “the Friendly Islands”.

Though Tonga is certainly not the only monarchy in the Pacific — Japan, Australia, and New Zealand are the most prominent — it is one of the smallest and certainly one of the most traditional. So traditional, in fact, that it is on the naughty list of the CIA-linked “Freedom House” foundation. Tonga’s crime? That only a minority of the members of Tonga’s parliament, the Fale Alea, are directly elected. Of the 30 members, 9 are elected by a general electorate, 9 are elected by the nobility, 10 are members of the Privy Council, and 2 are governors appointed by the King. Curiously, Freedom House does not treat the United Kingdom the same as Tonga, despite the majority of parliamentarians being either directly appointed by the Crown or elected by hereditary lords — elected MPs consist of less than half of parliament.

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Russia remembers the murdered Tsar St. Nicholas II & his family

Christians in Russia yesterday solemnly remembered the brutal killing of the country’s Imperial Family by the Bolshevik revolutionaries 90 years earlier. Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina Alexandra, their daughters the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and the Tsarevich Alexei have all been added to the canon of saints of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Imperial Family were first officially recognized as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church outside the Soviet Union in 1981, and the Moscow patriarchate extended the same recognition in 2000.

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The ceremonial Changing of the Guard takes place at Rideau Hall, Canada’s viceregal palace, and Parliament Hill during the warmer months of the year. I recall with great fondness a summer trip to Ottawa when I was but a little boy and watching the Changing of the Guard on the green in front of the splendidly gothic parliament buildings. I instantly wanted to become a Canadian soldier, and pondered how many chocolate bars I could hide in the bearskin cap of a red-tunic’d guardsman. (Needless to say, I have not become a Canadian soldier, but Sa Majesté need only call and I would be at her service).

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WHAT BETTER WAY to celebrate this, the feast of St. John the Baptist and the national day of Quebec, than to bring you news of the reëstablishment of the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean. The site in the town of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu was first put to a military use in 1666 when the French soldiers of the Carignan-Salières Regiment. The Collège militaire royal, however, was only founded in 1952 when it was inaugurated by the Rt. Hon. Vincent Massey, CC, CH, GCStJ, CD, PC as a classical college to increase the number of French-speaking officers in the Army, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Air Force.

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Elizabeth II, Queen of New Zealand, recently approved a new vice-regal flag (above) for her governor-general, His Excellency the Honourable Anand Satyanand, PCNZM, QSO, KStJ. The flag has a blue field charged with the shield from the coat of arms of Her Majesty in Right of New Zealand, topped by St. Edward’s crown. The previous flag (below) was of the standard viceregal type for the British Commonwealth of Nations, depicting the crest from the British royal arms with a scroll bearing the name of the dominion.

His Excellency, incidentally, is the first Catholic governor-general in the history of New Zealand.

Over in Great Britain, the House of Commons recently passed the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill which, among other things, keeps the time limit on abortions at twenty-four weeks (in spite a hope that it would be lowered), authorizes the creation of “savior siblings (brothers and sisters deliberately created in a lab solely for their organs to be harvested for use by the already-born), and allows for the creation of animal-human hybrids. The British human rights activist James Mawdsley, famously jailed for over a year by the military junta in Burma, has asked opponents of the HFE Bill to sign a petition to Queen Elizabeth II imploring her to withhold the royal assent necessary for the Bill to become law.

Under the British constitution, a bill only becomes a law when it has received the assent of all three components of the British Parliament: the Commons, the Lords, and the Crown. The last time the Crown withheld consent was in 1708 when Queen Anne refused to sign the Scottish Militia Bill. Since that time, it has been an unspoken convention that should the Crown object to a piece of legislation, it should privately inform its ministers before the legislation is voted upon in order for it to be withdrawn, thus preventing the scandal of the Crown and the Commons appearing to be in disagreement. Despite this convention, however, the Crown still has the right to withhold consent, but merely neglects to exercise that right.

While the Crown has faded to near-irrelevance in the everyday workings of the British government, this was certainly not always the case, and the Crown has intervened in politics several times since Queen Anne’s refusal of assent in 1708. What follows are but a few twentieth-century examples.

In 1925, William Mackenzie King was Prime Minister of Canada with 99 Liberal MPs to the Conservative opposition’s 116. He was able to do this by forming a minority government with the support of the 24 MPs of the Progressive Party. A year later, Liberal MPs were implicated in a bribery scandal and so the Progressives having withdrawn their support for the minority government. As parliament debated a motion to censure the MPs involved, the Prime Minister asked Lord Byng, the Governor-General of Canada (and thus the direct representative of the Crown), to dissolve parliament and call a general election.

Lord Byng did not want it to appear that the Crown was allowing parliament to be dissolved in order to prevent the censure of government MPs and so used the royal prerogative and refused to call an election. The Conservatives, as the largest party in parliament (Lord Byng argued), should have a chance at forming a government instead. The Governor-General invited Arthur Meighen, leader of the Conservatives, to form a government instead, and Meighen agreed. This, in turn, infuriated not only the Liberals but also the Progressives, throwing the middle-man back into the Liberal camp. Meighen put his government up to a vote of confidence, lost it by one vote, and so resigned and asked the Governor-General to dissolve parliament and call an election, which Lord Byng duly did.

“I have to await the verdict of history to prove my having adopted a wrong course,” Lord Byng wrote, “and this I do with an easy conscience that, right or wrong, I have acted in the interests of Canada and implicated no one else in my decision.”

In 1931, when the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald submitted his resignation to the King, George V took the unprecedented step of asking MacDonald to form a national government with the support of Conservatives and Liberal Members of Parliament. MacDonald lasted as Prime Minister until 1935, but Great Britain would not be governed by a single-party government again until 1945.

More recently, the Crown controversially intervened in Australian politics in 1975. Gough Whitlam’s Labor government commanded a majority in the House of Representatives but the opposition coalition of the Liberals and the National Country Party held sway in the Senate. It is traditional in Westminster-style systems that if a money supply bill fails to pass, the government falls with it. The Senate refused to vote on the annual Budget, in hopes of provoking Whitlam into calling a new election. Whitlam stubbornly refused, and the impasse grew as the weeks passed and, with no budget approved, it looked like the government of Australia would not be able to meet its financial obligations for the year.

Finally, the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, used the royal prerogative to dismiss Whitlam as Prime Minister, asked the opposition leader Malcolm Fraser to take the job. Fraser formed a caretaker government solely to pass the appropriations bill then immediately called a new election which his own Liberal/National Country coalition won handily.

Such royal interventions, however, are not limited to the English-speaking world. Belgium’s King Baudouin I, a Charismatic Catholic and friend of Francisco Franco, famously refused to give assent to a bill liberalizing the kingdom’s abortion laws. The Prime Minister, Wilfred Martens, simply had the King declared temporarily unable to reign and the Government signed the Bill in place of the King (as is provided in the Belgian Constitution). Two days later, the Government declared the King able to reign once more, and all was back to normal (except for the unborn children killed thereafter, of course).

One of the great benefits of a monarchy is this: that the Crown act as a source of authority, free from democratic accountability, who is capable of blocking any egregious acts which the government of the day may attempt. The HFE Bill is the perfect example of a bill the Crown ought to reject, for the benefit of all the kingdom, most especially the unborn. Yet we can reasonably assume that Elizabeth II will grant her assent to this travesty of law nonetheless, as the current occupant of the throne has (ironically) so thoroughly and woefully imbibed the democratic spirit that she knows not how to fulfill her purpose and duty as Queen. (It is important to note that in neither the King-Byng affair nor the Whitlam-Kerr affair was the Governor General acting on the orders of the actual person who was the Crown at the time, but rather on their dutiful instinct as the local incarnation thereof). It is disappointing to those who are unflinching in their attempts to defend the British Monarchy that the British Monarchy insists on participating in, and sometimes urging on, the very sort of wickedness which we look to the Crown to protect us from. Alas, so far we have looked in vain.

The Official Birthday of the Queen of Canada

ELIZABETH II will have had, in her lifetime, more birthdays than Methuselah. This is because, in addition to the actual date of her birth, April 21, 1926, she has several different days which are designated as the Sovereign’s Official Birthday. In Britain, her birthday (which is the official national day of the United Kingdom) generally falls on the first or second Sunday in June and is the occasion of the ceremony of Trooping the Colour. Australia celebrates her birth on the first Monday in June with a public holiday, except for in Western Australia, where it is usually either the last Monday in September or the first Monday in October. This is the day when the latest members of the Order of Australia are announced. New Zealand also holds the Sovereign’s Birthday on the first Monday of June. Fiji is now a republic but Elizabeth II remains ‘Paramount Chief of Fiji’ and so a Monday in June is declared a holiday each year to commemorate her birth.

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TO VICTORIA, the capital of British Columbia, where the sun never sets on the British Empire. As the Monarchist blog has reported, the Queen of Canada has appointed a new Lieutenant Governor to represent the Crown in her province on the Pacific. In the sumptuous Parliament Buildings of British Columbia, the Chief Justice of the province read the Royal Proclamation, weighted with the Great Seal of Canada, in both native English and appallingly-pronounced French before administering the Oath of Loyalty and the Oath of Office to the Honourable Steven Point, British Columbia’s twenty-eighth Lieutenant Governor. (more…)

THE QUEEN HAS once again visited Williamsburg, Virginia’s ancient capital, after an absence of half a century. His Excellency Mr. Timothy Kaine, the Governor of the Commonwealth Virginia, was good enough to call a public holiday in the state, giving public workers the day off in celebration of the Queen’s visit. During the trip, Her Majesty spoke to the General Assembly of Virginia, the oldest legislature in the New World, in Richmond (the current capitol), as well as meeting privately with the friends and relatives of the victims of the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech. In Williamsburg, she received an honorary degree from the College of William and Mary and was the guest at a luncheon at the Governor’s Palace, once the official residence of her predecessors’ viceroys in Virginia. (more…)

In honour of the anniversary of the birth of Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, I raised a glass of Warre’s (Purveyors to the Household of the Queen of Denmark) this evening. May God bless and keep Her Majesty!

Some of you may recall that Her Majesty is of a somewhat artistic temperment. She sent her sketches inspired by The Lord of the Rings to J.R.R. Tolkein while he was alive, and the author liked them so much he had them published in the Danish edition of the trilogy. Above is an episcopal cope designed by Her Majesty in 1988 for the Cathedral of Viborg.

His Royal Highness Prince Christian, the Queen’s grandson and the future King of Denmark.

Naturally, we also wish a very happy birthday and many, many bountiful blessings to another of Christendom’s reigning monarchs: Christ’s vicar and our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, who, it seems, is a reader of Chronicles. God bless our Pope, the great, the good!

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