Walter Bagehot: Male Efficiency and Female Dignity

Abstract

No one has been of greater consequence for the modern British monarchy than Walter Bagehot. He is the one authority that both defenders and critics of the Crown make it their business to know. Further, Bagehot has now served as an authoritative source on the monarchy for more than a hundred years. His ideas about the monarchy appear primarily in his analysis of parliamentary government, The English Constitution published in 1867. Legal experts on the constitution began to refer to Bagehot’s book from the 1880s onwards.1 Oxford and Cambridge dons began to teach it around the turn of the century.2 At around the same time civil servants began to cite Bagehot as an authority on royal finance and on the Crown’s relationship to the House of Lords.3 Every sovereign since George V has studied Bagehot. The current queen learned about Bagehot from the provost at Eton. The current heir to the throne has sought out Bagehot’s modern editor for advice and further reading on Bagehot.4 Even John Cannon and Tom Nairn, who have written very different histories of the modern British monarchy, agree that Bagehot remains the starting place for discussions of the monarchy. Nairn puts the case more vividly and less neutrally than Cannon. For Nairn The English Constitution is the ‘chief malefactor’ and Bagehot the ‘guilty party’ responsible for quashing reasonable republicanism in Britain and stamping out progressive criticism of the monarchy.5