As you will know if you have been reading this blog for a while, I am a defender of the monarchy and Commonwealth (to be clear, I mean the monarchy based in the UK). I understand how both institutions work in the present day and am continuing to refine that understanding, so that I can more clearly explain it to other people. I shouldn’t have to be defending them from anything, but here I am, defending them both from ignorance. This ignorance reveals itself in the terminology used to speak about the monarchy and the Commonwealth. The focus here is mostly on the monarchy; the only ignorant terminology re: the Commonwealth that I can think of is calling it the ‘British Commonwealth’ when it hasn’t been called that since 1949, and foolishly referring to it as ‘Empire 2.0’. The latter term, in particular, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Commonwealth actually is and actually does in the present day.
So let us unpack some terms and phrases that need to stop, and why, and where possible, what to replace them with.
‘Ties to the British monarchy’
One phrase that I see quite often in the context of the monarchy in Canada is ‘ties to the British monarchy’, as in, Canada’s ties thereto. Friends, this is not accurate! Canada and the other Commonwealth realms don’t have mere ‘ties’ to the monarchy, the monarchy is ours. It may be physically based in the UK, but it is ours. The monarch is our monarch, our head of state. This is how our system of government works, so to use the phrase ‘ties to…’ another country inaccurately represents, and wildly undermines, the reality of how our government is structured. It also makes us sound dependent on the UK somehow, which is not the case, and has not been the case for decades. Sharing a head of state is not being dependent or less-than in any way. Stop using this phrase, and instead simply normalise the use of phrases like the monarchy/our monarchy, the King/our King, King of Canada, etc.
Get the names right
King Charles III is not just ‘the King of England’. He is not only king of the rest of the United Kingdom (NOT JUST ENGLAND BECAUSE THERE IS MORE TO THE UK THAN JUST ENGLAND), but of all of the other fifteen Commonwealth Realms. So the term ‘British’ monarchy isn’t entirely appropriate either: it would be fine to use if you were writing or speaking from outside the Commonwealth Realms and it wasn’t your monarch, but places like Canada, for example, shouldn’t really be calling it the ‘British’ monarchy and definitely shouldn’t be using the term ‘King of England’. On the topic of names, I’m not really sure why we’re still calling the Princess of Wales Kate Middleton, over a decade after her marriage…
‘Modern Monarchy’
The other phrase that just doesn’t work is ‘modern monarchy’, because it tends to be used in the sense of the monarchy not normally being modern, as if ‘modernising’ and ‘monarchy’ cannot somehow co-exist, as if one precludes the other. Making the distinction between monarchy in the modern day and monarchy in the past is fine, of course, but too often if someone specifically describes a monarch as ‘modern’, it somehow implies that the monarch is unusual for being so and the assumption is that they won’t be modern. The monarchy of which we speak is already modern, and certainly many of the other monarchies in the world today could say the same: it has evolved over time and grown and adapted to keep up with wider changes in the world, but not to the extent that it has changed radically; it doesn’t need to. And a politically neutral head of state who symbolically represents the values a county agrees on, alongside an elected head of government who oversees the political disagreement, sounds perfectly ‘modern’ to me. The hereditary element of constitutional monarchy and the outward visuals and protocol look ‘old’, and are, because they have a long history, but that does not by itself mean that the monarchy is not modern. It is traditional, but not in an outdated stick-in-the-mud way; it evolves and adapts and is in fact very good at doing so. A monarchy can be modern, so why do we assume it can’t be?
‘Royal correspondent’
The reason I dislike this term so much is because it others the Royal Family in a way that reduces them to mere celebrities and minimises their actual role. Royal Correspondent is a job I would actually kind of love to have, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be called a royal correspondent. I’d call myself a ‘constitutional monarchy explainer’, or just be one of the political correspondents, right alongside the people who discuss the rest of the government, or I’ll just have no specific title: as and when the actions of the Royal Family come up and as they become newsworthy, I’ll address them. I think also that setting the monarchy apart like that is not helpful when it comes to normalising talking about it as part of our political system (‘our’ being the Commonwealth Realms). I’m going to call out the CBC here, with their ‘Royal Fascinator’ column addressed to ‘Royal Watchers’: I will come and write for you, CBC, and I will change the name of that column, because…
…I cannot stand the term ‘royal watcher’ or ‘royal fan’. Yes, there are people who are a bit over the top and obsessive about following what members of the Royal Family do, but there are worse things to obsess over and also they are the exception. I do not tolerate being called a royal fan, because the phrase is usually used in a dismissive kind of way, as if it is somehow weird to show any interest in the Royal Family. I am interested – and? What is wrong with that? When the King and Queen came to York for the Maundy Thursday service in 2023, was I there among the crowds? Yes. But that does not mean I want to be called a royal watcher: the King was coming to my city, and if I had the chance to see him, that would be a pretty special opportunity, so I took the chance. What is weird, or wrong, or obsessive, about that?
Saying someone is acting like a king/queen, as if kings and queens are somehow inherently selfish
There is also the idea that if you are doing whatever you want then you are acting like a king, or queen, as if doing whatever you please is simply what monarchs do – it might have been centuries ago, and in an absolute monarchy situation, but today, most kings and queens now don’t have the unlimited power to act however they want.
Misuse of the word tyrannical/tyranny
On the subject of not being able to just act however they want: Monarchy.Is.Not.Tyrannical. Centuries ago, in the past, it could be, when a monarch could do what they wanted and not take advice from anyone else, but constitutional monarchy is absolutely not that, i.e. it’s specifically designed not to be. That is so obviously not how constitutional monarchy works. I once heard someone say, deadly earnest, that Elizabeth II was ‘almost tyrannical’ – he was swiftly and firmly corrected.
Calling monarchy undemocratic
If you lived in an absolute monarchy, where the monarch could do what they wanted without taking any advice, and the people had no say in any of this, then sure, that would be undemocratic. But, as I have already said, that is not how modern constitutional monarchies work: you do have a say in what the government does, and neither the head of government nor the head of state, i.e. the monarch, can act merely on their own whims.
I will end things here, hopefully having called into question some common terminology that I come across in the British and Canadian context with regard to OUR monarchy. These are small things, mere choices of words, but the words we normalise can have a noticeable effect on how people think, whether we’re thinking about the monarchy, or the Commonwealth, or anything: how are we speaking about it?
How It Was Because 