UNTIL the first very significant modern revolution in the world, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, some monarchs, much as you don’t like to admit it and as much as we know history is not a tale of royalty, did make a difference in the formation of the nation and defence of it.

This was before social democracy was as established as it is now and largely when a good monarch was a successful warlord who could lead troops victoriously on the field of battle to claim territory.

They made a difference because, in Britain at least, conferring authority on one household to rule the land brought unity amongst competing tribal fiefdoms and protection of the island against outside invaders. A step forward.

Alfred the Great is remembered as being great because he presided over some of the key components of nation building — a common native official language, coordinated national defence forces, consolidated laws and so on.

Later, Elizabeth I’s dad, Henry VIII, got a bad press because of his great revolutionary impact. He is portrayed in popular culture as a fat womaniser and fond of the axe.

In fact, just 160 years after the groundbreaking so-called Peasants Revolt, he uncompromisingly smashed the domination of the Roman Catholic Church and its sanctimonious hoarding of wealth, its ideological prevention of progress and thereby he loosened feudal bonds still further.

He unleashed and accumulated capital to the glory of a better god and his nine-year-old son Edward VI, in one of the most important reigns (albeit very short), could not help but cause and then viciously suppress the much underestimated revolts of 1549.

Under the influence of the power behind Edward’s throne the Lord Protector, Duke of Somerset advanced Protestantism. This had begun in generations of protest against church and king and became both the official garb of a new society and in other forms, it was the voice of radical democrats who wanted something better.

At the height of the economic progress under Elizabeth I, Shakespeare in his histories and tragedies warned against regal tyranny and thuggery, while also expressing concern about the new chaos of capitalism.

The long history of opposition to monarchy and early development of socialist ideas in Britain were variously expressed in the advocacy of a “commonwealth” built on greater degrees of equality and common ownership.

In some of these early counter-cultural visions of a new society there was still a hierarchy with a hereditary head of state, in many there was not. We actually therefore have a very deep-rooted republican tradition in Britain and the sense of being a citizen not a subject remains profound.

While such proto-socialist ideas exist in all countries in one form or another, the ferocity and consistency of the English, then British, people’s opposition to feudalism and foreign domination was pioneering. So were the very early development of manufacturing, workers’ organisations and democratic practices that grew up long before the industrial revolution.

The hitherto relative usefulness of a powerful, progressive monarchy was decisively challenged around the tensions of 1549-1551 under Robert Kett’s oak tree in Norfolk. An early date indeed.

The greatest poem of the times, the Fable of Philargyrie by Robert Crowley, could not convincingly argue that a monarchy could save the day and take history forward. This heralded the monarchy’s subsequent long decline.

The mid 16th-century ruction reflected deep-seated abolitionist views that had existed since Richard II, who at the tender age of 14 betrayed and slayed the 1381 revolutionaries. His actions were never forgotten — which is why we still quote John Ball but not Richard II.

Anti-monarchy sentiment, going back ages, prefigured the eloquence of those who, after very considerable legal process and savage civil war, chopped off Charles I’s head in 1649.

The returning monarchists’ eventual murder of the leaders of the first real republican commonwealth (1649-1660) was savage, but doomed. It was inevitable that thereafter a royal family could only play a constitutionally constrained position secondary to Parliament.

Despite MPs, judiciary and armed services personnel declaring the oath of allegiance to God and the Queen, it’s hard to imagine them today joining a monarch in mustering an army to fight against a parliamentary decision to say, end the Sovereign Grant — the public funding of the Royal Household (valued in 2022 at £86.3m).

Rich, privileged, eccentric, lustful, arrogant, the royal family in its post 1688 incarnations has always been little more than a cipher, an embodiment of the justification of inequality and in more recent times, tittle tattle for the Tatler and the tabloids.

Edward VII was so corpulent he had a special chair made to mount his legions of sexual conquests without crushing them to death. Adultery is an aristocratic affectation and no amount of royal bedroom scandal should surprise us.

The Queen is nominal head of a Commonwealth association of 54 now independent states. It’s one of those nice ironies of language that we say a nation is sovereign meaning it is self-determining.

King Charles III will for sure keep his head on his shoulders and his years of trying to meddle in politics will come to naught as he will open Parliament merely ceremoniously, espousing only what the elected have decided.

But his estate, the money-grabbing Duchy of Cornwall, will keep on fleecing its tenants in true capitalist fashion and he will inherit one of the most lucrative land and property portfolios in the world.

The outpouring of grief at Diana’s death was as complex and contradictory as the bunting flapping of this jubilee weekend.

Diana was appreciated precisely because of her anti-establishment edge. And her death in 1997 coincided with that deep frustration and relief experienced in New Labour’s landslide victory to finally biff the Tories on the nose also that year.

While much jubilation will be had this weekend, a lot of it will be to celebrate our collective contribution to making our nation and having survived and defeated neoliberalism, EU membership and Covid.

How will Elizabeth II be remembered? More like Nero than Napoleon? The royal family have entertained us with the circus and games, but never spoken out against the forces that invaded and marauded across the nation. They went to the races while the City of London spurned us.

Spare a thought this weekend also for the fact that since very early on our national cultural heroes have been those leading brave and successful struggle against destructive and divisive external forces. Beowulf was the best king we never had. His epic captured the spirit of opposition to the common enemy of mankind. And Boadicea would have made a cracking queen to help us take on the new US and Nato threats.