8 - Monarchs

Summary

‘The Moon grows pale, in envy sighs

To view the Monarch of the skies

In triumph ride…’

Air-Balloon, or Blanchard's Triumphal Entry into the Etherial World; A Poem (1785)

HISTORIANS AGREE THAT the institution of monarchy changed in the eighteenth century. ‘The French Revolution marks the transition of monarchy as a divine institution to a monarchy legitimised by the nation. This process, which had started long before 1789, was associated with a loss of the magical, with a desacralization of the monarchy and a separation between the king and the divine.’ Quite how and why the old order ebbed is ‘anything but a straightforward tale’, though one can point to factors like the power of Enlightenment critiques of absolutism; the growth of the press, which made monarchs less important; and, in Britain, where satire of the king freely circulated, the familiarising of royalty through royal families. At the same time there was also a growth in civic organisations, friendly societies and freemasonry, all variously keen on loyalist and royalist activities. Belief in monarchs as earthly representatives of divine power continued; what weakened was belief in the monarch as embodiment of divine right. In Britain, Queen Anne was the last monarch whose touch was believed to cure ‘the king's evil’, or scrofula; George I thought the idea abhorrent and stopped it. What Antoine de Baecque describes as the transition of sovereignty from the body of the king to the great citizen body was not an even process across Europe, and to complicate matters some monarchies played better in the new order than they had in the old, laying the grounds for monarchy to re-establish itself tenaciously in nineteenth-century Europe. ‘It is easier to document this apparent transformation in the monarchy's public status than account for it,’ says Linda Colley, though she suggests an upsurge in royal and national spectacle in Britain was partly due to an outpouring of patriotic art by Royal Academy painters, which benefited the reputation of their patron, George III, who had encouraged it. Tracking changes in France, Sarah Melzer and Kathryn Norberg also see the Bourbon monarchs benefiting from spectacle, with Versailles as its great theatre.