Ceremony and Politics: The British Monarchy, 1871–1872

Walter Bagehot divided the English constitution into two parts, the “dignified” and the “efficient.” The sovereign and the House of Lords were the dignified or the showy parts, imposing spectacles designed to serve as reminders of a glorious past and to impress an uneducated populace with the authority of the state. The cabinet and the House of Commons were the efficient parts, where the real work went on, where men of business transacted affairs of state using the authority obtained by the dignified parts. So he wrote in the years preceding the second Reform Bill, when it was conventional to speak of the rudeness and unruliness of an uneducated people and of the hazards of admitting them to the franchise. Yet his book, animated in such large measure by the debates on parliamentary reform of the late 1860s, remains a much-quoted authority on the English constitution today.Perhaps one among the reasons for its enduring popularity is that he expressed so neatly a notion that certainly existed before as well as in his time and that survives today, namely, that governmental activity can be divided into ceremonial and political parts. The one is opposed to the other as pleasure is to business, as emptiness is to substance, as illusion is to reality, as artifice is to plain speaking. In affairs of state, the adjective “ceremonial,” when attached to words like “head of state” or “official,” has come to mean empty figurehead or powerless placeholder. Ceremonies of state—coronations, jubilees, openings of Parliament—are picturesque and pleasant but essentially ephemeral, devoid of anything powerful other than that which is powerfully sentimental, colorful, and evocative.