Harry, Meghan and Marx

MARX PREDICTED that capitalism would destroy every remnant of feudalism. It would tear asunder “the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’”, in the words of “The Communist Manifesto”. It would drown ecstasies of religious fervour and chivalric enthusiasm in the “icy water of egotistical calculation”. And it would subject every national institution to the revolutionary logic of the global market.

So far the British monarchy, one of the last vestiges of the country’s feudal system, has proved a splendid refutation of Marxism. The Crown has survived both the high-noon of Victorian capitalism and the revival of market orthodoxy after 1979. In “The English Constitution”, Walter Bagehot explained why: far from undermining capitalism, the monarchy, in its British form, reinforced it, acting as glue in a society divided into antagonistic classes and distracting the masses from the real sources of power. It injected pageantry, romance, mystery and drama into the lives of British people, mitigating the dreary business of being a cog in the wheels of capitalism.