I recently found myself in the unusual position of being an unwitting ‘royal well-wisher’, being coincidentally at the roadside during a drive-past by a man I will insist on calling Charles Windsor. Despite strong republican predilections, I had unknowingly found myself in York in time for Mr. Windsor to pass en route to unveil a statue.
Sprung upon by the exalted, I tried putting myself in the shoes of the other, more enthusiastic bystanders. Some with flags, others smiling and waving, I got the sense that many had travelled some distance to be there and had waited some time. Though York was not packed, there were respectably sized crowds for a rainy weekday. 
For all their willingness to withstand the inclement weather, I wondered what they had to show for their efforts. Whilst the expensive Jaguar Mr. Windsor travelled in hadn’t flown by, his passing can’t have taken more than about 45 seconds. Was that a smile? Did he wave? Few can have communed with him in any way. 
Did they count themselves fortunate to have breathed the same air as England’s foremost plant conversationalist? That photons of light which bounced off him were refracted through their humble eyeballs? Surely those with ambitions of some more meaningful interaction would have been left disappointed.
I note that Mr. Windsor has since visited both Malton and Pickering. The reverent tone of various locals would lead a visitor from another planet to conclude that God himself had descended to peruse foodstuffs and shake hands with dignitaries. 
At moments like this, as a republican, I find myself mystified by the outlook of my countrypeople. I would invite them, those deferring in such circumstances, not to be blinded by the customs associated with monarchy but to return to first principles. To ask themselves ‘why do we have a monarch?’ and ‘what makes him so special?’; questions asked not to be impertinent, but to encourage healthy scepticism. A democracy which ceases to question itself could cease to be a democracy at all.
Thomas Babington Macaulay once considered the roots of our monarchy. He wrote that “if you go far enough back, you find the necessity of absolute monarchy. You find some one Gaulish or Saxon chief who settles in a district, who fights and governs”. The monarchy which persists today, bedecked in a veneer of grandeur, was born of this primitive principle; that the most successfully violent is the one who should rule us. Mr. Windsor’s notional right to rule, i.e. what makes him so special, is that the blood of these tyrants flows within his veins. 
What continues today as a relatively benign, genteel institution is the same which allowed a small elite to lavishly feast in palaces whilst ordinary people lived a life Thomas Hobbes described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
This ingrained inequality and position in which it places the ordinary person is what continues to bother me about monarchy. We tell our children that if they work hard they can perhaps achieve anything. In theory there is no field in which there is a cap on ambition, saving one. Except for those born into one family, none can hope to be our Head of State, nor enjoy the privileges/responsibilities of the position.
I understand the constitutional utility of our politically weak head of state and the stability that it has conveyed in recent centuries, and I don’t look favourably on the routine logjam that an unclear separation of powers causes within the Presidential system of the US. But ceremonial heads of state do not have to be hereditary ones. Look to Ireland and Germany for examples of modern states where the model works perfectly without the need for reverence for ‘royalty’.
Those who truly believe in monarchy are welcome to their position, and I would welcome someone defending monarchy based upon first principles. But I would encourage those who have not examined the principles on which monarchy was founded to not unthinkingly stand by, wave flags and fall over themselves with gratitude because another human being came to their town and ate a macaroon. 
A. Cunningham
Norton-on-Derwent