secrets of the lost tomb reign of terror review

She understood, from this, that the best way to survive was to say and do as little as possible. She knew very well that the louche resorts of Europe contained the human detritus of royal houses, some of which (like the unfortunate tsar’s) could claim much deeper historical roots than her own. Her husband’s father, Prince Andrew, was turfed out of Greece after the revolution of 1922 and died in the Metropole Hotel in Monte Carlo. Her own bloodline, after all, included her grandfather’s first cousins, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II, neither of whose dynasties were able to stay the course when the going got heavy. It was useful to study the form, to be able to make an educated guess about which branch of a lineage might be a dead end and which might thrive. Her biggest interest in life was racehorses, and her specialist subject was their bloodlines. Even the obviously anachronistic nature of her reign served to emphasize its remarkable persistence as the only imperial and multinational monarchy left in Europe. While her United Kingdom was being transformed from a global imperial power to a Northern European country at odds with its neighbors and with itself-while its ideal of greatness was moving from reality to puffed-up pretense-she was always there. The great achievement of Elizabeth II was that, merely by reigning for seventy years, she created and sustained the necessary illusion of permanence. Which invites the question that now faces Britain: What do you do when you have no choice but to “make another” monarch-a seventy-three-year-old man who has spent his life lurking side stage, waiting so long for his entrance that his act has gone stale before he has even properly trod the boards? If a king is a useful public functionary who may be changed, and in whose place you may make another, you cannot regard him with mystic awe and wonder and if you are bound to worship him, of course you cannot change him. For as Walter Bagehot put it in The English Constitution, published in 1867: In defiance of historical evidence, it proposes itself as the great repository of all that does not alter. The hereditary principle rests on a notion of “always”: this is how it has always been and how it will always be. Monarchy seeks, above all, to put on a show of timelessness in which the ruler floats above contingency and change. The subject (and the British are subjects, not citizens) is compelled to feel for the ruler the love that Shakespeare calls “an ever-fixed mark/That looks on tempests and is never shaken.” For if it is not, that supremacy is deprived of its most potent magic: the illusion of permanence. This thought-crime arises, presumably, from the belief that a world beyond the reign of the anointed queen or king ought to be unimaginable. The Treason Act of 1351, still in force, makes clear that this most terrible of offenses is committed by anyone who can “compass or imagine the Death” of the sovereign. Those of us who find it strange that a country should be deeply shocked by the death of a ninety-six-year-old woman must remind ourselves that it is a crime in England to let your thoughts dwell on the death of the monarch.

Secrets of the lost tomb reign of terror review