Michael Fry: Elizabeth could yet be a true Queen of Scots

History shows Scotland has had a long and complex relationship with the monarchy, writes Michael Fry

The monarchy is the oldest thing about Scotland, apart from the Antonine Wall and the standing stones. It beats the Scottish Parliament by nearly 500 years, the legal system and the Church of Scotland by around 700 years.

It was a monarch, Kenneth MacAlpine, King of Scots, who, in defeating the Picts and forcing them into a union under his rule in 843, laid the first foundation of what would become Scotland, though this entity was still a long way from being fully formed. Unless he had taken the trouble to subdue the Picts, at any rate, the national territory might have remained divided among its various tribes and been at length partitioned by invaders.

In that sense the monarchy precedes the nation and the nation exists thanks to the monarchy, if not so much to MacAlpine as to the successors who proved themselves the equals of even more perilous times: King David I, King Robert Bruce and then the whole line of Stewarts (or most of them). Without these Scotland would not exist. So it would be an ungrateful Scotland that cast off the monarchy. Yet that is what a poll has just shown most Scots ready to do, to judge by the indifference they display to what they evidently regard as not a national but an alien institution.

It is easy to see why. The Royal Family live most of the time in England, as they have done since the Union of the Crowns in 1603. They may spend part of the year in Scotland, but nobody is fooled by their dressing up in kilts, listening to Presbyterian sermons, attending Highland Games or killing stags. And as soon as they open their mouths …

Still, this in itself hardly represents a class system, since very few people who are not royals speak like royals, with their drawling vowels and bizarre substitution of “one” for any other pronoun. Even the Princes William and Harry do not speak like royals, but express themselves in normal Estuarian English. This could be a mistake, though. The Windsor dialect, if I may coin the phrase, is one of the things that makes the Royal Family unique, completely deviant from any normal family and living a life almost unimaginably different from how the rest of us live. But because they are unique, they are able to belong to any one of the 16 realms over which they still reign, ranging from Canada to Papua New Guinea, being equally alien yet equally at home (to the extent of providing the head of state) in each of them.

There is no reason why Scotland should not become their 17th realm. It would hardly signify continued English hegemony over Scotland, any more than retention of the monarchy signifies English hegemony over Australia.

When in 1975 the governor-general in Canberra, Sir John Kerr, dismissed the prime minister, Gough Whitlam, the Queen, though asked, replied that it was nothing to do with her, even if the governor-general in theory represented her. Rather, it was for the Australians to work through this little local difficulty for themselves, to develop and practise Australian rules in politics just as they had done in football. In both cases they have turned out to be pretty rough, but the Queen leaves them to it.

Scotland is, despite its reputation, a much more douce kind of country, and also one with a somewhat uncertain constitutional tradition in respect of monarchy. Still, it might be worth reviving and exploiting for the sake of national self-definition or redefinition. On this point the United Kingdom has, since 1707, always been England writ large, a modified absolute monarchy otherwise known as the Crown-in-Parliament. In practice, that means the government of the day enjoys an unlimited sovereignty so long as it can retain a majority in the House of Commons. “Elected dictatorship” is what some have called this too.

Scotland might lay claim to a different constitutional tradition, though the claim has never been substantiated on any of the few occasions it has been tested. The nearest hit came in 1953, when John MacCormick and Iain Hamilton went to law to dispute the Queen’s right to call herself Elizabeth II in Scotland, since here there had never been an Elizabeth I. The Court of Session rejected their case, but in his judgment Lord Cooper of Culross remarked that “the principle of unlimited sovereignty of parliament is a distinctively English principle and has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law”.

The territory was a bit too touchy for his lordship to spell out the argument in full. But logically, the reason why parliament could have no unlimited sovereignty in Scotland was that here the monarchy, from which parliament derived its authority, had never had any unlimited sovereignty either.

This interpretation goes back to the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, which made allegiance to a King of Scots conditional on his defending national independence. It was confirmed by the doctrines of George Buchanan, religious reformer and tutor of James VI – a king who, however, in later life rejected these ideas that in his youth he had had beaten into him. Even so, there is something here that the present Scottish government could latch on to, a potentially valuable historical continuity of which we usually lose sight in the rough-and-tumble of daily politics.

The official doctrine of the British state is that Scotland has no right to constitutional change or initiative of any kind which is not granted by the parliament at Westminster in exercise of its absolute sovereignty. David Cameron evidently believes that, however softly he may choose to express it.

On the other hand, Alex Salmond evidently believes in the Scottish alternative of popular sovereignty, though he has been hesitant about expressing it in any systematic fashion. It would be good for him to do so. He could add that the future of the monarchy in Scotland will therefore in the end depend on a vote, possibly of the people but certainly of their representatives, offering the Crown to Elizabeth I, Queen of Scots in the powers and prerogatives, together with the limitations on them, which have come down to us out of Scottish history.

This would be much more than mere romantic gesture. One reason why Scots have grown dubious about the monarchy is that they no longer see it in a connection with their history, even though it is on the basis of this history that Scotland stakes its claims as a nation with a right to self-determination.

Today, everybody wallows in victimhood, whereas in truth Scots were more often victors than victims. How else could such a small nation have survived?

This is not to say the record was of constant success. Before it prorogued itself in 1707, the old Scottish Parliament had spent rather more than a century passing laws to make the nation perfect by controlling the personal behaviour of the citizens, in sex and drinking and smoking and a range of other vices to which Scots seemed particularly prone.

They all failed to produce a perfect nation, and meanwhile the forces that were to cost it its independence crept up on it unawares. There are continuities even in an erratic history such as Scotland’s, and a monarchy can help to keep their memory alive.