Tim Knight, who started off British and became Canadian, writes the regular HuffPost column Watching the Watchdog. On Monday he began a six-part series on the Queen of Canada -- whose Diamond Jubilee celebration starts next Saturday.
He uses Elizabeth's Canadian titles as a focus for the series:
To try to understand who this Queen of Canada is and what she does, Knight wrote a background on Monday. Yesterday, he started examining her Canadian titles one by one. He began with "Elizabeth the Second ...", wherein he compared Elizabeth ll with her predecessor, Elizabeth l, and detailed her often dysfunctional family, lavish lifestyle and workaholic schedule.
Today, he explores the second and third parts of the Queen's titles:
...
The title's origins go back deep into the mists of time. It literally means that Elizabeth reigns over Canada and her other 15 Realms and Territories because God anointed and thus endorses her.
Which presumably makes her Queen of Canada by divine right.
In an increasingly secular world, acerbic tongues ridicule this part of her title. Others, including bishops of her Church of England, (of which she is Supreme Governor and they therefore have no choice) do their best to justify this connection to the Almighty.
The main purpose of the title seems to be a warning that if you mess with this monarch, you mess with God himself.
Never a good idea.
In the U.K., Elizabeth reigns over England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
But the United Kingdom isn't noticeably united. Most of Ireland left after decades of bitter sectarian fighting. Independence movements flourish in Scotland, rumble in Wales and smoulder in Northern Ireland.
During her reign, starting with Winston Churchill in 1952, she's consulted weekly with the 13 British prime ministers she's appointed. So she's likely heard every British state secret -- honourable and otherwise -- for the past 60 years.
In fact, Elizabeth has no more than "the right to be consulted, to encourage, to warn." But British prime ministers generally speak well of their meetings. Margaret Thatcher (whom she is said to "cordially dislike") summed up thusly:
"Her Majesty brings to bear a formidable grasp of current issues and breadth of experience."
Present British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is far more enthusiastic and noticeably more jingoistic:
"In the sixtieth year of her reign, we honour our queen as the finest and most famous example of British dedication, British duty, British steadiness, British tradition, let us use these things as a mirror of ourselves, too, a mirror of the nation."
It costs every one of Elizabeth's 61-million British taxpaying subjects around 94 cents a year to keep her in the style to which she was born and has always been accustomed.
She certainly has no shortage of splendid places to live. They include Buckingham Palace, Hampton Court Palace, St. James's Palace, Kensington Palace, The Palace of Holyroodhouse, Windsor Castle (her favourite), Balmoral Castle, Clarence House and Sandringham House.
This Diamond Jubilee year, though, she's not staying home. Instead, she's touring the nation, visiting 52 cities, towns and villages. So far, she's been met by big crowds everywhere she's been.
As she has said:
"I have to be seen to be believed."
Recent polls show four out of five Britons respect her, support her and want their country to remain a monarchy. To many, she's one of the last living symbols of British wartime valour, and the embodiment of the nation's resolute defiance of German bombers during the Blitz.
Britons are considerably less enthusiastic about her 64-year-old son and heir, Prince Charles. Half believe he should give up his right to be King Charles lll to let the crown skip a generation, land instead on the brow of his eldest son, the very popular 30-year-old Prince William.
William and his new bride Kate recently toured Canada on a somewhat-less-than-romantic honeymoon. Main event was their hanging out at the Calgary Stampede wearing jeans and cowboy hats, holding hands and smiling a lot. This so impressed Canada's news media that newspapers, magazines, radio and TV fawned over them and competed to report every single (public) detail of their visit.
(Charles himself may well decide to change his name -- a royal prerogative monarchs occasionally exercise -- if and when he takes the throne. After a bloody civil war, the first King Charles was beheaded for treason. The second Charles, known wryly as The Merrie Monarch for his hedonistic lifestyle, fathered at least a dozen illegitimate children by various mistresses.
As far as is known, no subsequent British monarch has matched this feat.)
Tomorrow, Knight will explore the "... Canada ..." part of her title. Stay tuned.
Follow Tim Knight on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TimKnight6
The queen has never been, nor will any king or queen be, appointed and thus anointed by any divine right, and to imply or assert that this is the truth is obscene and an assertion to be PROMPTLY apologized to the rest of mankind for.
Please, Mr. Knight, if you enjoy your status as a British serf under the dying vestige of the anything-but-necessary monarchy, please do not drag Canada into this stupid notion of an ideal way of life. Most Canadians are at the very best, indifferent, if not hostile, to the monarchy as having any place in Canada's system of government.
When will you silly British people realize the idiocy of monarchy. How you can support the same system that still keeps millions of people imprisoned in absolutist systems which the UK used to be identical to in every way until we the people finally broke out of our chains in the modern era, boggles the mind of every freethinker alive.
Tell me: will future columns comment on how the British and Canadian media report on the queen and her family? Your previous columns have indicated that when it comes to God and queen, journalists either become obsequious stenographers or find themselves unsure as to how critical they should be. I'd like to hear from you as to whether the queen has 'earned' the right to positive coverage or whether, even at her advanced age, journalists should be far more critical of her and her family.
You seem generally positive about the queen, yet dismissive of her son Charles. Yet, despite his famed adultery, despite apparently having cold and absent parents, Charles himself has done much good, following what appear to be genuine beliefs about Britain's natural and built environments and helping Britains' inner-city youth. He also did this long before any of it became fashionable among his generation.
So what are we to make of the media coverage of the queen, and her royal family?
Thanks for the excellent writing.
"This stone was taken from the grounds of Balmoral Castle in the Highlands of Scotland — a place dear to my great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. It symbolises the foundation of the rights of First Nations peoples reflected in treaties signed with the Crown during her reign.
http://www.themonarchy.ca/en/monarchy/firstnations.shtml
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"On July 4, 2011 the Queen of Canada, attended a Sunday morning service at St. James Cathedral in downtown Toronto. Four days after Canada Day, the choice of a service at St. James, one of the most visible manifestations of Toronto’s increasingly atavistic ‘English connection’, was a reminder of the living presence of history. This was poignantly apparent in Queen Elizabeth’s personal decision (according to Kevin S. MacLeod, Canadian Secretary to the Queen) to present two peals of hand bells to the Chapels Royal of the Mohawks.
In so doing, as the Archbishop of Toronto Colin Johnson and the day’s homilist Cathedral Rector Douglas Stoute reminded the 700 sweltering bodies inside the Cathedral and the thousands the Queen honoured a relationship that pre-dates the existence of Canada by more than 150 years."
http://activehistory.ca/2010/07/the-queen-among-the-mohawks/
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http://www.parishoftyendinaga.org/chapelroyal.htm
Antigua and Barbuda
1982 – : Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of Antigua and Barbuda and of Her other Realms and Territorie
s, Head of the Commonwealth
The Bahamas
1973 – : Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas and of Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth
Barbados
1966 – : Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of Barbados and of Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth
Belize
1981 – : Her Majesty Elizabeth The Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of Belize and of Her Other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth
Canada
29 May 1953 – : In English: Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith[7][N 1]
Grenada
1974 – : Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Grenada and Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth