Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown

A return to the world order of the 14th century? Or try again?

William Shakespeare’s plays King Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 tell a story. In part, it is the story of Henry IV. But the principal character is in fact his son Hal, who later gets a play of his own as King Henry V. The fact that Henry IV was king at all was due to a coup d’état. Henry Bolingbroke, as was, stole the crown from Richard II. On his deathbed, Henry IV, as he’d become and who earlier in the play delivers the immortal line uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, has this to say to Hal:

God knows, my son,
By what bypaths and indirect crook’d ways
I met this crown, and I myself know well
How troublesome it sat upon my head.
To thee it shall descend with better quiet,
Better opinion, better confirmation,
For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me into the earth. It seemed in me
But as an honour snatched with boist’rous hand,
And I had many living to upbraid
My gain of it by their assistances,
Which daily grew to quarrel and to bloodshed,
Wounding supposèd peace. All these bold fears
Thou see’st with peril I have answerèd,
For all my reign hath been but as a scene
Acting that argument.

Let me put it into some kind of modern English:

God only knows, my son,
The means I resorted to
To get this crown, and I myself am only too aware
Of the problems I had to deal with once I had it in my grasp.
You will inherit it with less controversy,
People will think better of you, and will not challenge you so readily,
Because the dirt I stirred up in getting it will go
With me to the grave. On my head, people regarded it
As a smash-and-grab robbery,
And many of those who helped me attain it
Laid claim to it themselves,
And these quarrels led to fights,
Which negated the whole point of having acquired it in the first place—to keep the peace. You’ve seen how facing up to all these challengers
Was not done without danger,
For my entire reign has been nothing but a single playbook
In which that argument was the central plot.

Henry IV came to the throne of England in 1399 after deposing his childhood pal Richard II. He faced rebellion by Owain Glyndŵr of Wales, and by Henry Hotspur Percy (killed at Shrewsbury in 1403), as well as antagonism from the Earl of Worcester and the Scots. Henry IV died in 1413 and, for those 14 years during which the crown of England sat—uneasily—on his head, he never ceased to look charily over his shoulder, for he lived in mortal fear that that which he had stolen—an honour snatched with boist’rous hand—could only too easily be stolen from him.

If we believe Shakespeare, Henry classically had three kinds of answers to challenges: force (Are these things then necessities? Then let us meet them like necessities), proverbs (Advantage feeds him fat while men delay), and plays on words (You have good leave to leave us), but none of them convinced like force, more particularly force that won the upper hand. The famous scene in which the king appears in his bedgown, wearing, of all things, his royal crown (due to his aforementioned mortal fear) is more or less a rant: how come the boy who watches out atop the mast of a ship in a rolling storm can sleep, and I, in the comfort of my castle, cannot? (I paraphrase.) It’s as close as Shakespeare gets to depicting a king throwing his rattle out of his pram (Leontes comes fairly close as well in The Winter’s Tale, but King Lear beats them all hands down, and the Fool tells him so). All in all, a guilty conscience makes for good drama. But does it transfer to real life?

Crowns come and crowns go, and nations come and nations go, and sometimes marauders come, and never go. And the question that poses itself in the light of Henry IV and the fact that, as per that speech above, Henry V would be viewed in a vastly more favourable light than his father (the secret to which is Henry IV’s counsel to go and raise hell in foreign parts—viz. France), is why should they?

Dynastic succession holds two diametrically opposed consequences: the advantage of, some day, being shoehorned into a position of privilege, power and wealth, coupled to the disadvantage of being an assassin’s target. Democratic republics are supposed to be safer constitutions, if only because the president’s dire enemies can be sure that, within a fairly short period, they will get their own crack at the whip, and all they need do is bide their time (and win the election). But even that is not enough, and so it is that presidents get assassinated as often, if not more frequently, than do kings and queens, emperors and empresses, mobsters and molls.

Thirteen ninety-nine was 626 years ago, and the internal affairs of foreign countries were looked on in those days with much the same disinterest as they are nowadays. Up to a point. Charles VI, king of France, was in his early 30s when Henry was wresting the English crown from Richard, and will have viewed the goings-on with curiosity, never more so than when Henry’s son, Henry, came to France to knock seven bells out of him and his country. The course of true inheritance never did run smooth, is how Shakespeare might well have put it (in his Dreams). Hen Five won Agincourt, married Charles VI’s daughter Katherine and in the end only perpetuated the hundred years of warring that had been going on between England and France since the days of Edward III. Henry’s nicking the English crown off Edward’s grandson had done nothing to assuage his thirst for the delights of la belle France. It was the French who ultimately won the Hundred Years War, which neither was a war nor did it last for a hundred years, but was a longstanding 116-year long series of squabbles between France and England, spawned ultimately by William the Conqueror’s role as a duke of Normandy (and hence a vassal to the king of France) and his role as a king of England (and hence the king of France’s opposite number, we would say today). Which goes to explain why, today, France is France and England is Britain.

All this looking back at days gone by serves as backdrop to the question I want to ponder today: if men have been stealing land from one another since time immemorial, if not time uncountable, what, oh, what is the great problem with the take-over of Palestine by Israel, or the take-over of Gaza by the United States of America, or the take-over of Greenland by Denmark, or the take-over of Ukraine by the Russian Federation, or the take-over of Westlake by the Los Angeles East Side Crips, or the take-over of the Cherokee Nation by the United States Cavalry, or the take-over of the US Justice Department by West Publishing, or the take-over of Nancy Pelosi’s house by a man with a hammer?

What’s wrong with all these take-overs? Go on, list me all the fine differences, and let’s look at those fine differences, and we will see a pattern emerge: the take-overs that were legitimate; and the take-overs that weren’t. Except that, which take-over is in which column will differ according to who you are, and what your viewpoint is, because we cannot agree what legitimacy is. We set up a world order based on a concept that no one understands. Or that some don’t want to understand.

It took 85 million deaths to galvanise the world into some sort of consensus (not complete, but some sort) that reliance on force alone to determine the apportionment of the Earth’s surface was a long-since failed experiment, and that a more just basis should be established. And so the nations of the world united as one to lay down a blueprint for future peace, and almost their first act was to dispossess a Middle Eastern people of their land and gift it to someone else. Because that someone else had been decimated, not by that Middle Eastern people, but by a third country: the loser of the war that had led to this galvanising in the first place. There was no diversity, no equality and no inclusion. Whatever the United States of America is doing to our vocabulary, there is little question but that, in Israel, these three aspirations were non-starters. Instead, the Israelis embraced monotheism, not diversity, apartheid, not equality, and exclusion, not inclusion.

And what is wrong with that is that it falls foul of the very reason we cite to justify the deaths of those 85 million: our post-war effort to establish a concept of legitimacy that is not based on the size of the muscles you flex, but on universally accepted rules: the concept that all are equal before the law, a concept central to the very idea of democracy and that should therefore apply universally among nations which claim to embrace the ideals of that democracy.

I wrote a piece in which I challenged myself with these words:

The argument that we make the rules, so the rules do not apply to us is the very best reason to respond with then you should not make the rules. If the response to that is that Graham, you don’t understand how the world functions, then my response to that must be Make the world function fairly, and I will understand how it functions.

But there are noises off (Michael Frayn, this time) that yearning for a utopian world in which everyone obeys the law is ridiculous. It is a fairytale, and politicians, especially, need to get realistic. But, surely, if politicians, especially, had been realistic for the past twenty to forty years, we would not be in the dystopia that we are in; we would maybe not be in utopia, but we’d be closer to that than we are to dystopia right now, would we not? If they’d been realistic? Or is the dropping of the baton on this four hundred metre relay just one of those things that was utterly unforeseeable as the elites all feathered their own nest, just hoping that they could get their salted millions out to Cayman before the hailstorm started? And before you cry out that this is all somewhat over-dramatised and more akin to the way Shakespeare would have portrayed the passage of time’s history, let me tell you, he told more truth in 38 plays than many a politician told in 38 years of playing.

A recent item on Weltwoche [DE] utterly dismisses Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s vision of a new European order. He sees Ukraine as forming a central part of it: You have the resources, we have the battlefield experience is how he puts it. All this is poo-pooed by the writer, who says that only unicorns are missing from this idealised picture of European security.

There’s a fork in this road. One direction leads to an acceptance of the current state of play and admission that we are stuffed. If that’s so, America will be the last country that Zelenskyy will be asking for a helicopter ride. Europe may acquiesce in an unfavourable settlement for Ukraine, in the hopes that Putin’s war machine will advance only as far as the limits of the USSR’s sphere of influence. But, that might well turn out to be nothing more than a hope, and hope is fast running out, wherever you are.

I suspect the rapturous applause that greeted Mr Zelenskyy in Munich might well have been encouraged by the pretty universal rejection of what Mr Vance had said to the assembled dignitaries. For my money, Zelenskyy deserves rapturous applause regardless of whose speech he follows.

The other direction leads to where Europe won’t let itself be pushed around. To translate Koydl:

The applause shows how Europe is ignoring reality. But it cannot be denied: with sharp intakes of breath after Vance’s speech came the news that the Americans and Russians would be [have been] talking to each other.

The topics: Ukraine and Europe’s security. Not included in Saudi Arabia: Ukraine and Europe.

What was that about getting pushed around?

There is at least a hope that Europe will get its act together before the Czechs and Slovaks are invaded this time around. It’s to be hoped that, all proverbs and plays on words aside (and unicorns, thank you), enough force can be mustered to persuade Russia to stay ... in Russia (or, at worst, in Russia and Ukraine), even if that means persuading the US to stay in the US.

But that’s no reason to tell Zelenskyy not to dream, not to aspire, not to hope for a rules-based system that takes justice as its founding precept. For we nearly had that once, and it is achievable (yes, even with realism). And the quest to establish it for once and for all starts here, right behind Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That, or it’s the other fork in the road.