Реферат на тему: «The British Monarchy»
материал по английскому языку (11 класс)

Реферат

на тему:

«The British Monarchy»

Contents

Introduction………………………………….…………………………………3

1.        Role of the Monarchy…………..….…………………….………………4-5

2.        Queen and the Armed Services……………………………………..…...5-7

3.       Queen and Church………………………………………………………7

4.       Queen’s Interests………………………………………………………..7-8

5.       Queen and charities……………………………………………………..8

6.         Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II……….….…………………………..8-13

Conclusion………………………………………………….…………………14

Bibliography……………………………………………………………….….15

Introduction.

It is rather difficult to understand the British way of ruling the country. In Britain the Queen is the Head of State, but in fact she doesn't rule the country as she has no power. The Queen is a symbol of the country history and its traditions.

Britain is a parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarch - Queen Elisabeth II as a head of state. The British constitution, isn't set out in a single document. Instead it is made up of a combination of laws and conventions.

A thousand years ago the Anglo-Saxon kings consulted the Great Council before taking important decisions. Between 1066 and 1215 the king ruled alone, but in 1215 the nobles forced king John to accept Magna Carta, which took away some of the king's powers. In later centuries this was seen as the 1st occasion on which the king was forced to take advice. In 1264 the 1st parliament of nobles met together. Since then the British constitution has grown up slowly as the result of countless Acts of parliament. Then, parliament invited William and Mary to become Britain's 1st constitutional monarchs. A constitutional monarch is one who can rule only with the support of parliamentary. The Bill of Rights was the 1st legal step towards constitutional monarchy. This Bill prevented the monarch from making laws or having an army without Parliament's approval. Since 1689 the power of parliament has grown, while the power of the monarch has become weaker. The UK is a constitutional monarchy: the head of the state is a king or a queen. In practice, the Sovereign reigns, but doesn't rule. The present Sovereign is Queen Elisabeth II. Today the Queen isn't only head of state, but also an important symbol of national unity. In law the Queen is head of the executive, head of the judiciary, the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces of the Crown and the established Church of England. The monarchy's absolute power has been progressively reduced, the Queen is impartial and acts on the advise of her ministers. The Queen and the Royal family continue to take part in many traditional ceremonies. Their visits to different parts of Britain and to many other countries attract considerable interests and publicity.

Role of the Monarchy.

The role of the monarchy as an intelligible part of the constitution might on a superficial level at least have some merit. The Monarch's function of signing into law Acts passed by Parliament is an integral part of the legislative process. The Monarch technically holds the right to veto any measure adopted by Parliament but this is a very rare occurrence and the last time it was used was in the eighteenth century by Queen Anne. The Monarch also receives newly appointed ambassadors to the United Kingdom who are accredited to her court rather than to the state. She is also the commander in chief of the Armed forces and new recruits have to swear allegiance to the Monarch rather than to Parliament or to the State. In this and many similar functions the Queen acts as a living personification of the British State, a type of shorthand by which people can swear allegiance to the state, which is a social construct, via a living person. Whilst the majority of the Monarch's powers have been transferred to the Head of the Government for the Prime minister to use at her discretion; to suggest that the Monarch has no direct input into the decision making process in Britain would be inaccurate.

The active involvement during the nineteenth century of Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert as well as the active interest Elizabeth II has taken in Commonwealth relations point to the way that the Monarch can directly influence decisions made at Westminster at a much more sophisticated and direct way than an average British citizen. Equally to suggest that the Monarch is somehow seen as a spurious part of the constitutional structure of the United Kingdom would seem to be disproved by the millions of letters and petitions for help Buckingham palace receives each day from members of the public. The fact that so many people would seem to be more confident writing to an unelected hereditary Monarch with their problems rather than an elected representative would seem to point to the power of the Monarch in people's imagination. The British Sovereign however is a constitutional Monarch; that is to say she does not directly rule but acts more as a symbolic head of State.

The symbolic role of the Monarch is perhaps its most effective role in the late twentieth Century. The majority of the Queen's workload consists of representing the state at home and the Nation abroad. On state visits the Queen attracts interest from the foreign public and media who helps raise the profile of the Nation overseas. However one might argue that the image of an elderly aristocratic Monarch is not perhaps an accurate representation of the sophisticated multicultural and diverse state Britain is in the late 1990s. It is often also argued that the Queen is an ideal figure to represent Britain as she is a neutral figure above the political arena and one who can represent the nation as a whole without carrying any political baggage. This is again a difficult argument to present with any degree of plausibility given that the Queen comes from such a narrow aristocratic background and has little practical knowledge of the lives and experiences of a great many of her subjects.

In the following chapter I would like to tell about development of the British monarchy.

Queen and the Armed Services.

The monarch is Head of the Armed Forces and it is the monarch alone who can declare war and peace. (This dates from the times when the monarch was responsible for raising, maintaining and equipping the Army and Navy, and often leading them into battle.) These powers, however, cannot now be exercised on the monarch's own initiative. The Bill of Rights (1689) declared that "the raising or keeping of a standing army within the Kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with the consent of Parliament, is against the law". The monarch's powers today cannot be exercised except upon the advice of responsible Ministers.

The existences of the Army (raised as a series of different regiments by colonels - historically, many of these were not loyal to the Government) and the Royal Air Force are legally based on the Army and Air Force Acts of 1955 and previous Parliamentary Acts; their continued existence depends on annual Continuation Orders passed by Parliament.

On enlistment, the Acts require members of the Army, Air Force and Royal Marines to take an oath of allegiance to the monarch as Head of the Armed Forces (those for whom it is against their religion to take oaths and those who are of no religion, affirm instead of swearing an oath). The Royal Navy was formed hundreds of years ago, and its existence stems from the sovereign's prerogative - members of the Navy have never therefore been required to take the oath. The oath of allegiance is sworn to the monarch, rather than to Parliament, which might be confused with the political party in power at the time. This reaffirmation of loyalty to the monarch, as Head of State, also ensures that the loyalty of servicemen and women as serving members of the Armed Services (regardless of their personal political beliefs) is not given to any one political party, but to the country in the form of the Head of State.

The Queen takes a keen interest in all the Armed Services both in the United Kingdom and in the Commonwealth. She keeps in touch with the work and interests of the Services through the Chiefs of Staff and her Defence Services Secretary (a serving officer who is also a member of the Royal Household, who acts as the official link between The Queen, through her Private Secretary, and the Secretary of State for Defence). The Queen is regularly briefed by her Ministers. As Princess Elizabeth, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1945 and thus became the first female member of the Royal Family to be a full-time active member of the Armed Services. Many royal Princes have received training in the Services; The Duke of Edinburgh and The Prince of Wales have served in the Royal Navy (The Prince also trained in the Royal Air Force as a pilot), and The Duke of York is a serving officer in the Royal Navy.

The Queen and various other members of the Royal Family hold appointments and honorary ranks in the Armed Services, both in the United Kingdom and in the Commonwealth. Such appointments include "special relationships" with certain ships, honorary colonelcies in Army regiments and corps, and honorary ranks connected with Royal Air Force stations.

These links are maintained by regular visits by members of the Royal Family to Service establishments (on occasions such as passing out parades and the presentations of new Colours) and to ships (usually when they are in port), to meet Servicemen and women of all ranks and their families, both in this country and overseas.

Queen and Church.

The Church of England and the Church of Scotland are established Churches. This means that they are recognized by law as the official Churches of England and Scotland, respectively. (There are no established Churches in Northern Ireland nor in Wales - they were disestablished in 1869 in Northern Ireland and 1920 in Wales.) In both England and Scotland, the established Churches are subject to the regulation of law. The principle of religious toleration is fully recognized both for those of other creeds and for those without any religious beliefs.

There is no established Church in any Commonwealth country of which The Queen is monarch; in the United Kingdom, The Queen's title includes the words "Defender of the Faith".

Queen’s Interests

An animal lover since childhood, The Queen takes a keen and highly knowledgeable interest in horses. She attends the Derby at Epsom, one of the classic flat races in Britain, and the Summer Race Meeting at Ascot, which has been a Royal occasion since 1911. As an owner and breeder of thoroughbreds, she often visits other race meetings to watch her horses run, and also frequently attends equestrian events. The Queen's horses won races at Royal Ascot on a number of occasions. There was a notable double on 18 June 1954 when Landau won the Rous Memorial Stakes and a stallion called Aureole won the Hardwicke Stakes, and in 1957 The Queen had four winners during Ascot week. In 1984, 1986 and 1991 Her Majesty made brief private visits to the United States to see stallion stations and stud farms in Kentucky.

Other interests include walking in the countryside and working her Labradors, which were bred at Sandringham.

A lesser known interest is Scottish country dancing. Each year during her stay at Balmoral Castle, The Queen gives dances known as Gillies' Balls, for neighbors, estate and Castle staff and members of the local community.

Queen and charities

An important part of the work of The Queen is to support and encourage public and voluntary service. One of the ways in which Her Majesty does this is through involvement with charities and other organizations. The Queen has over 600 patronages. These cover every area of the charity and voluntary sector, from opportunities for young people, to preservation of wildlife and the environment.

Involvement with these organizations helps to recognize their achievements, and helps to recognize the contributions of many different sectors of public life.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

The kingdom that Queen Elizabeth II inherited from her father, King George VI, was a confident one - war had ended nearly a decade earlier, and 1953 proved to be a golden year that imbued Britain with a sense of optimism unprecedented in recent years. The austere days of rationing were finally over, the British Commonwealth had claimed Everest for its own, and, most importantly of all, the nation had great hope for its new, young Queen. Following the Coronation on June 2nd, the men and women of Great Britain were looking forward to a new age, a second Elizabethan era in which the specter of war would become a distant memory and the normal rhythms of life would be resumed. One cannot easily imagine just how great a responsibility this must have appeared to Her Majesty at the dawn of her reign; yet, from the outset, she proved herself to be the very model of a modern Monarch and bore the immense burden of public expectation both gracefully and willingly.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were the successors to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth not only by right of birth, but also, to informed commentators, in a spiritual and emotional sense. The zeitgeist of 1950s Britain was remarkably reminiscent of that of the nation some twenty years previously - the energy, dynamism and sheer personality of the Royal couple were reflected in the contemporary press. One periodical commented on the different but complementary natures of the Queen and her husband, noticing how her "quick common sense" and his "shrewd modernity" combined to make them the perfect parents for Prince Charles and Princess Anne.

But the high esteem and affection in which the new Monarch was held was not confined merely to the United Kingdom; during a series of high-profile Royal visits to Australia, New Zealand and Canada in 1954, the Queen was able to gauge for herself her extreme popularity throughout the Commonwealth. Ever conscious of the changing role of the Sovereign in the post-war world, the rapturous reception she received left her in no doubt as to her subjects' feelings for her. In May 1954, Queen Elizabeth pronounced that: "The structure and framework of Monarchy could easily stand as an archaic and meaningless survival, [but] we have received visible and audible truth that it is living in the hearts of our people." For a Monarch, there can be no more deserved nor more welcome an assurance than this.

But trouble was around the corner. As the 1950s yielded to the socially turbulent sixties, the Royal honeymoon period appeared to be drawing to a somewhat abrupt end. In spite of the efforts of the new Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, to shore up the Monarchy's central position in British society, the Suez Crisis opened up a wider debate as to the validity of the Monarchy as an institution, not least among ambitious politicians in capital cities across the Empire. With the Commonwealth on the verge of fragmentation, the British press could not resist the opportunity of questioning the relevance of the Royal Family in the second half of the twentieth century. This debate, however, vastly underestimated the loyalty and love of the British people. In the summer of 1959, when Her Majesty took the world by surprise by announcing that she was once again pregnant, the newspapers and popular magazines reflected the delight of her subjects, and no amount of republican whispering could conceal that fact.

Prince Andrew, the first child born to an enthroned Monarch since Princes Beatrice in 1857, was also the first to be born with the new, "de-royalised" surname of Windsor. Five years later, on 10th March 1964, the birth of Prince Edward Antony Richard Louis completed the Royal Family unit. Queen Elizabeth II soon demonstrated that she was every inch her mother's daughter; insisting that her children should lead lives that were as normal as was possible, she stressed the importance of education and was adamant that they should have the academic advantages that had always been denied her. Accordingly, all the Royal children came to be educated at schools that were traditionally perceived to be upper-middle and upper-class institutions. Charles set the precedent by attending Gordonstoun, a prestigious if austere private school in Scotland where he was free to mingle with boys from backgrounds very different from his own.

Not only a devoted mother, the Queen proved that she was also blessed with an impressive degree of social acuity - she had long known that if the Monarchy was to survive into the next century, then its next generation would have to be more grounded and aware of the different strands of British society than any of its recent predecessors.

Evidence of the Monarchy's drive towards "normalisation" was provided by the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales at Caernarvon Castle (the historical seat of the Welsh princes) on 1st July 1969. At the Queen's wish, it was not to be an exclusive "in camera" affair. Instead, Her Majesty was determined that it should serve as an example of her commitment to a "People's Monarchy", decidedly aware of its duties, responsibilities and, to a certain extent, its audience. As a television documentary, Royal Family, made the previous year, had shown, Her Majesty was keen to stress that whilst her Family was indeed Royal, it was, first and foremost, just a family.

The uses and advantages of television as a communications tool were not lost on Buckingham Palace. Just as the Coronation had been filmed and attracted an enormous global audience, so Queen Elizabeth was convinced that a large, lavish investiture was the best way for her son to keep in touch with the British public. The ceremony itself was devoutly traditional and solemn in tone, but, largely due to the ardent desire of courtiers to bring the British people closer to their future King, it was a truly modern spectacle. Charles touchingly recorded its personal significance for him when he wrote in his diary that "by far the most moving and meaningful moment came when I put my hand between Mummy's and swore to be her liege man of life and limb". At the same time, the investiture propelled the twenty-one year old Prince on to the international stage.

By the time the Queen and Prince Philip came to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary in November 1972, the British had grown so accustomed to seeing them on television that they had come to be seen as just another, albeit rather special, couple. The Times commented on how much the public perception of the Royal Family had altered, noting that the Windsors were a "large, close, and remarkably devoted family". The Queen herself was in no small way responsible for the Windsors' continuing popularity: her ideals had shaped her children as much as had their social status, and her deliberate decision to make the Royal Family as accessible as possible had been vindicated by the warm respect that infused newspaper letters columns and editorials.

Five years later, Elizabeth was celebrating both thirty years of marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh and the twenty-fifth anniversary of her accession. The Silver Jubilee was marked in the summer of 1977, amidst the largest and most vibrant street parties seen since the end of the Second World War. Her Majesty's popularity had reached such heights that when, on 6th June, she ascended Snow Hill (in the environs of Windsor Castle) to light the first of a network of bonfires that would illuminate the length and breadth of the kingdom, courtiers remarked that her own warmth combined with the torch she held to set the country alight. A million people crammed into the Mall the next day to watch the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh as they rode up to St Paul's Cathedral.

There was further national rejoicing when, on 24th February 1981, the engagement of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer was announced. However, it soon became alarmingly obvious that not all subjects shared in the happiness of the Royal Family. On June 13th of that same year, during the Trooping the Colour ceremony, an obviously very disturbed adolescent boy loomed out of the crowd, brandishing a revolver. Six shots were fired at the Queen. To Palace security chiefs' immense relief, it transpired that the weapon was loaded with blanks, and the feared "assassination attempt" had been nothing more than a pathetic and deranged publicity stunt. The most remarkable feature of the entire episode, however, was Her Majesty's amazingly cool and dismissive reaction to what can only have been an utterly terrifying experience. Shrugging the incident off with the calm humour that has become one of her most endearing traits, she showed that, like another Queen Elizabeth some four centuries earlier, she was certainly not lacking in the sang froid so vital in a Commander-in-Chief of the British armed forces.

When Charles and Diana walked down the aisle of St Paul's Cathedral on 29th July 1981, Britain seemed to come to a standstill. The Queen was immensely proud as she watched her eldest son - and her heir - marry a beautiful young aristocrat. The wedding proved seductive to the public, but soon it became clear that this was not a happy union. It was not long before the Queen began to grow concerned about Charles, her son, and Charles, the future King of England.

To add to her parental anxieties, the Falklands War, provoked by the Argentine annexation of the Britain's South Atlantic islands, meant that Prince Andrew, a gifted Royal Navy helicopter pilot, was called up to serve his country in spring 1982. Worrying about one's children is an integral part of any parent's life, but that process is unlikely to be made any less difficult by having to live under the constant scrutiny of both the press and the public. Still, Her Majesty steadfastly refused to let the strain show, knowing as she did that there were countless other mothers in the world in exactly the same predicament. And, like them, she knew that all she could really do was hope and pray and go about her business as usual. Mercifully, the conflict ended in June, but not without considerable loss of life on both sides; and Prince Andrew returned home, where he was hailed a war hero.

By the end of 1982, the Queen's heir had, in turn, produced an heir, but pressure on the Family was growing. Charles and Diana were becoming increasingly estranged, the tabloid press appeared to have developed a fixation with Prince Andrew's personal life, and two IRA bomb attacks had brought death and destruction to London and to the Queen's Household Cavalry. This was the start of a 15-year period that would test the British Monarchy to its very limits.

The Queen steeled herself to face the greatest challenge to the Throne in more than three centuries. This was a Monarch who had stared down a gunman, and a mother who knew both her duty and her own mind. True to form, she would ensure the "modernisation" of the Monarchy while remaining the best and the most "normal" regent that she could.

Conclusion.

I can't but mentioned that in Britain the Queen is the Head of State, but in fact she doesn't rule the country as she has no power. The Queen is a symbol of the country history and its traditions. She is very rich. She travels about the United Kingdom, meets different people and visits schools, hospitals and other special places. So do all the members of the Royal family: the Queen's husband, her son Prince Charles, Queen's daughters - Princess Anna and Princess Margaret.

At the beginning of the century many countries all over the world were ruled by Britain. All of them were included into the British Empire and were its colonies. India, Pakistan, Ceylon, for example, were among them. Now these countries are independent states. But in 1949 Britain and the former colonies founded the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth includes many countries such as Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The real power in the country belongs to the British Parliament and to the British Government.

Bibliography.

1.        Byrova I. I " The history of England. Parliamentary Monarchy". "Питер пресс", 1996

2.        Byrova I. I. " The history of England. Absolute Monarchy". "Питер пресс", 1997

3.        Britain. The Country and it's People. James O'Driscoll. Oxford University Press, 1997

4.        The British Royal Family. Dossier Stephen Rabley, 1994

5.        David Mc Dowall, Longman, 1989