A British monarch shouldn't need to remind Americans of lessons from their own revolution |
King Charles III’s remarkable speech to the United States Congress can be understood as a kind of politely delivered and repurposed version of the Declaration of Independence, a profoundly ironic statement delivered by the king to the nation that violently broke free of Britain.
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King Charles III gently urged Americans to remain true to the principles that led them to declare independence from what the revolutionaries described as the tyranny of King George III, who Charles acknowledged as “my five-times great grandfather.” It is sobering, even staggering, to consider that Americans need a British king to remind them that their nation was founded on a rejection of monarchy and a commitment to, in Charles’s words, “the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”
The first King Charles was well known to the American revolutionaries as a tyrant. Charles I claimed absolute prerogative—power unchecked by law or Parliament. His ambitions were roundly rejected—supporters of Parliament fought a civil war against the notion of absolute prerogative, and Charles I was executed in 1649.
In his speech before Congress, King Charles III broadly (and tactfully) outlined this history, which is itself part of a centuries-old tradition of gradually accumulating limits on the power of the monarch, dating back, as Charles III explained, to Magna Carta in 1215.
As Charles........