Monarchy: Giving Voice to the Fatherless

Mr Howard reviews The Compleat Monarchist by the well-known Catholic historian and writer, Charles Coulombe. I highly recommend it.

From One Peter Five

By Theo Howard

Monarchies plant forests, republics cut them down. [Anon.]

In The Liberal Hegemony, Thomas Molnar wrote that the three poles which traditionally connect a political community – the temple, the palace, and, in the middle, a general ‘civil society’ – were dislocated for the first time in the Anglosphere and most clearly, in the Liberal United States. In the Anglo-Saxon world it was the amorphous “civil society” that had superimposed itself on the Church and the State, converting the Church into a sort of private option and converting the State into a mechanism at the service of the interests of the different commercial oligarchs of civil society. Yet, as the Feast of Christ the King reminds us, kingship as a universal is inescapable and eternal. It is therefore salutary for us all to consider kingship, both as a universal and as it has been concretised in Christian history. A very good place to begin has been given to us in the shape of The Compleat Monarchist (Os Justi Press, 2025) by Charles Coulombe.

A highly interesting sign of the times, and an indication of widening dissatisfaction with the exhausted liberal order, is the contemporary renewed interest in monarchy, particularly in the United States, which is all the more remarkable since she has long been the great enemy of monarchical government. (Witness the current left-Liberal “No Kings” protest movement invoking the perennial bogeyman.) To Coulombe’s present book could also be added Jeb Smith’s: Missing Monarchy: Correcting Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, Medieval Kingship, Democracy, And Liberty (Sensus Fidelium Press, 2025), which reframes and reproposes traditional Christian monarchy in American terms of ‘libertarianism’ and ‘decentralisation.’ In his charming, avuncular, and often wise collection of essays in four parts, Coulombe takes the reader on an expansive and rich survey, not only covering Christian monarchy itself, but such pertinent topics as Catholic social doctrine, aristocracy, romanticism, counter-revolution, and Christian history in general.

Following the regicide of King Louis XVI of France on the 21st January 1793, and the immense shockwave that rippled through Europe after the murder of His Most Christian Majesty, Pope Pius VI gave a famous address in which he not only argued that Louis had died a Christian martyr, but that monarchy was the “more excellent” form of regime than republican democracy. This was a re-articulation of what had long been taught by churchmen, albeit not magisterially. In his letter on kingship to the King of Cyprus, St Thomas Aquinas wrote that “it is best for a human multitude to be ruled by one person” (De Regno, Chapter III). One of the keys to this perennial teaching on the superiority of monarchy as a form of government might be found in an expression that was dear to the jurists of Ancien Regime France. They would say: “The king is the father of the fathers of the society.” The family, arising from the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, was the model for the political community and so the regime was paternal.

Likewise for Spanish jurist Professor Miguel Ayuso, monarchy as a political form, “is nothing else than the continuation of a society, which consists of families through the continuity of one family, the royal family, symbolising the continuity and vitalisation of each and every one of the families of the realm.”[1] It is no mere coincidence then, that monarchy’s fortunes are at such a nadir in our age in which the multitude reject the natural realities of the family and patriarchal authority. Coulombe frequently evokes the consequences of the lack of long-term thinking that follows in contemporary supposedly “democratic” regimes: great spiritual alienation, chronic short-termism, and an all-important “spoils system” (amusingly a “trough” in Coulombe’s idiom) by which the rulers of today only rule to accrue and maintain power and enrich themselves. As Ayuso writes, and Coulombe echoes throughout his work, when “the elective principle is the only variable that determines the regime – political life is exhausted in the electoral process, becoming more and more discontinuous.”[2]

Miguel Ayuso has provocatively said: “Today there are no monarchies.” There is the British monarchy, the Nordic monarchies and the monarchies of the Low Countries, but these are all parliamentary monarchies. This he calls “a contradiction in terms” because monarchy is personal. Personal command means the responsibility of the exercise of power is personal. Today this does not exist because where there are kings, at least in the formerly-Christian world, they are tied by parliamentarianism. This would be analogous to a father no longer exercising power over his wife and children and these subordinates governing the family. In such a scenario paternal authority would have been renounced. Coulombe, however, does not go so far as to claim there are no monarchies and makes an impassioned defence of those, admittedly Liberal institutions that remain.

As an historian Coulombe is more a romantic like Belloc than an empiricist like Dawson or Duffy. This stylistic approach enables him to make many astute points throughout the book. The common argument that God condemned monarchy in the Old Testament was first made by the revolutionary deist Thomas Paine in his pamphlet Common Sense (1776) and derives from the moment the elders of Israel demanded that the prophet Samuel “set us a king to judge us, like all the nations have” (1 Sam 8:6). God tells Samuel, “Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but me, that I should not reign over them.” (1 Sam, 8:7). It has therefore been argued that the monarchical form is the only one criticised in Holy Scripture. Coulombe swats away such contentions by pointing out that a monarchy was among the promises made by God to Abraham (Gen. 17:6) and to Jacob (Gen. 35:11). Biblical scholars tell us that the sin of the Jews did not consist in preferring monarchy as a form of government, but in wanting to hasten the establishment of the monarchy before Providence had ordained and looking to idolatrous nations as their models.

Nevertheless, if I have any criticisms of the book, it would be that further engagement with a serious Catholic republican critique might have been particularly interesting. Some of these Catholic republicans have pointed out that Scripture speaks approvingly of the Roman republican constitution during the Maccabean revolt:

And none of all these wore a crown, or was clothed in purple, to be magnified thereby. And that they made themselves a senate house, and consulted daily three hundred and twenty men, that sat in council always for the people, that they might do the things that were right. (1 Macc. 8:14-15)

Hilaire Belloc maintained an admiration for the Roman Principate, a kind of ‘monarchical republic,’ since it was the form of government that Our Lord and Saviour was born under. Other scholars have argued for the continued republican nature of the longest-lasting Christian polity of all: the Byzantine Empire. Throughout his book, Coulombe is carefully perceptive in pointing to the diverse range of polities in Medieval Christendom and making an important distinction between most people’s idea of monarchy – deriving from absolutist early modern examples – and earlier Catholic monarchies limited by divine and natural law as well as local liberties.

In the future, it would also be interesting to read Coloumbe’s opinions abouts the controversial frontiers of Christian monarchical theory: namely, the question of whether a king that betrays Christianity loses legitimacy and, relatedly, whether tyrannicide can ever be justified. These were questions which greatly exercised early modern Catholic scholars in the context of the Protestant heresy and rise of absolutism. The Jesuit and teacher of St Robert Bellarmine, Juan Mariana (1536-1624), famously argued that a king who had wilfully violated divine or natural law became a tyrant and might, in certain circumstances, be overthrown by his former-subjects. This view did not arouse great controversy in Spain where Mariana’s De rege et regis instituione (Toledo, 1599) was dedicated to King Philip III, granted royal favour, and approved by his superiors. In France, however, where the sinister creed of Regalism was in the ascendent following the Wars of Religion and the assassinations of Henry III in 1589 and his successor Henry IV in 1610 – both by Catholic zealots – Mariana’s work provoked a strong official reaction, was banned and publicly burned.

The pertinence of this crucial question can be seen among Carlists today who reject ‘Felipe VI’ as King of Spain following the doctrine of the “Two Legitimacies;” of blood and of conduct. As Felipe VI embraces Liberalism – the Carlist tradition holds – according to ancient Spanish law he has denatured the very essence of Catholic monarchy (the Crown embodies the whole community in a unity of faith: salus animarum suprema lex) and is simply an illegitimate usurper. This doctrine has interesting correlations with various sedevacantist theories as pertaining to the spiritual sphere.

The choicest fruits this reviewer took from Coulombe’s work were the nuggets of wisdom and experience spread throughout. To take one:

Seemingly every youngster opposed to the current horrors knows something of Evola, which is unfortunate… Mere opposition to revolutionary “modernity” is not enough; the opposition of those of its opponents who really had something true, good, and beautiful to offer as an alternative must be put forward. (pp. 170-1)

In addition to being a prolific historian, Coulombe has been the co-host of the popular and eclectic ‘Off the Menu’ podcast from Tumblar House publishing. For some time in this exceptional weekly podcast, part music-hall variety show, part historical Wanderung, Coulombe and his co-host Vincent Frankini offered something altogether quite rare in today’s Catholic podcast ecosystem – a Catholic podcast hosted by two laymen principally focussed on the temporal sphere – culture, politics, economics – the lay domain. Packed with in-jokes, the rapport between the two ‘GladTrad’ Angelenos and their loyal audience (particularly of young men) is both genuine and enjoyable. Though it is often one of the most light-hearted Catholic podcasts, with jolly levitas aplenty, the heart of the show tends to be towards the end of each episode where Coloumbe offers sage and fatherly advice, usually in answer to personal questions that afflict some of his youthful followers. It is striking how, more often than not, these pearls of wisdom are shared from a store bequeathed to Coulombe by his late-father, Guy Coulombe. To this reviewer, the greatest virtue of Coloumbe’s publication, and dare I say his work in general, is to give both voice and succour to the fatherless; we the orphaned children of drear democratic ages.

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[1] Ayuso, M. (2014). Spanish Carlism: An Introduction. In A Catholic Witness in Our Time (Fitzwilliam: Loreto Publications), 329.

[2] Ibid., 330.