#1702 Thomas Jefferson on British Royalty

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Hello everyone and welcome to this introduction to this week's podcast.

[00:00:04]This is about Thomas Jefferson and royalty. One of my favorite subjects.

[00:00:08]You know, Americans have a real thing about British royalty. You can see Megan Markle and Harry on the cover of People magazine and its equivalents half the time now as we saw Princess Diana most of the time during her lifetime. Always good copy in America. I can't understand quite why. nor do I understand the appeal of the of the musical Hamilton.

[00:00:33]But I do love in it when King George III sings I'll be back. I think that's an outstanding song. I actually heard it in London where it was even more biting than it would be on the New York stage or Chicago.

[00:00:48]So David Horton's going to become increasingly more the guest host, even host of the program. He likes to keep Jefferson in the mix, which I like too.

[00:00:57]So this was a program in which Jefferson first denounces royalty in all sorts of ways. Really grim. I mean Jefferson is a bit of a Scrooge with respect to royalty and Christmas.

[00:01:09]Uh not sure why but this is well certainly I I understand why he's a Scrooge with respect to British royalty.

[00:01:17]I think he would be appalled by America's fascination. You know, you can see Megan Markle and Prince Harry on the cover of US magazine or People magazine about half the time. Why we care is completely unclear to me. And and much earlier, we could see Princess Diana all the time in those journals. Great copy, I suppose. Anyway, this is a lot of fun.

[00:01:43]I thought Charles III whom I greatly admire within limits gave an outstanding joint address to Congress.

[00:01:53]I think trying to rebuild the special relationship between England and the United States is very important. You know, England sort of regards itself as Athens to America's Rome. Athens was the place of philosophers and architecture and poetry and epic and drama great oration and Rome was seen as kind of a over muscled a musclebound bully boy and I feel very certain well I know from my own experience at Oxford over the years that that's how the British tend to see us that they think of us as kind of crude unfinished adolescent fools who really don't understand how the world works and shove our weight around usually in in the wrong situations for the wrong purposes and with terrible results. At any rate, so Charles came to the United States and wanted, of course, to do what he could to repair the relationship. I think that's important. David Horton and I talk about the the split in Britain.

[00:03:00]There is a king, but there's also a prime minister, and they have different functions. The king has almost no actual political clout, but he has an extraordinary symbolic role.

[00:03:12]In the United States, the president is to play both of those roles. Some do it better than others. Let's put it that way. At any rate, it's great fun and I think you'll enjoy this program a lot.

[00:03:23]I've asked David Horton to do a larger number of hosting jobs for us because people have been saying to me they want more Jefferson and they want more me.

[00:03:34]and not so much me interviewing others, although they're fine with that, but more commentary and and I hope insights about this really fascinating, troubling, problematic crisis that we're in in the United States in 2026 and not over yet. Just wait. This is going to be the wildest next five or six months that you can possibly imagine. And you're going to have jaw-dropping moments where you think, "How has it come to this? How has it come to this?"

[00:04:07]So, just a few things. We have some places still for the Great Crow Canyon National Monuments and Antiquities Field Trip September 13th through 19th. Please do really consider signing up for that.

[00:04:19]A couple of places left for the summer Louiswis and Clark trip. A number of places left for the three winter encampments. the Beatles and week one, thorough week two, and six novels by Jane Austin on week three. The next online course with scholarships, by the way, so if you can make the claim that you are a struggling scholar of some sort, we we have a friend, a donor named Phil Rdnik who has made scholarships available. So, we want you to think about that if you know somebody you think would benefit. This one's going to be about a mock constitutional convention. I'm very excited about all of that. So, I'm off tomorrow. I will see you soon. Thanks for everything.

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[00:05:28]This week on Listening [music] to America with Clay Jenson, Thomas Jefferson and English royalty. Guest host David Horton interviews the third president about [music] his strong anti-royalist principle. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson lambasted King George III for his crimes against the American colonists.

[00:05:45]Jefferson did not go quite as far as Thomas Payne, who called George III the royal brute of England, but he wanted to eliminate all echoes of monarchism in American public life. Jefferson met George III once in 1786 and came away even more disillusioned than he had been previously with the ways of kings. In France, Jefferson met [music] Louis V 16th on several occasions and generally liked him, but found him woefully out of touch with the suffering of the great mass of the French people. As King Charles III visits the United States, [music] David Horton wonders how Mr. Jefferson would react to America's fascination with British royalty in our own time. All of that and more on this week's Listening to America.

[00:06:29]Good day and welcome to Listening to America with Klay Jenson. I'm your host, David Horton, and today we explore the monarchy, its past, present, and future, and America's enduring fascination with it. Joining us today for this conversation is the third president of the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson. Mr. President, thank you so much for being with us today.

[00:06:53]>> A good day to you, citizen.

[00:06:55]>> It's an interesting time here in the United States. King Charles III, who is the present monarch of the United Kingdom, and his wife, Queen Consort Camila, are actually having a state visit to the United States as you and I gather here today. Which made me think a little bit. Why in the world are Americans still so fascinated with the monarchy, particularly the British monarchy, having given our history? And I'm hoping maybe you can help clarify some of this because I know you had your own encounters with the monarchy during your time.

[00:07:27]>> Well, let me say I'm flabbergasted in two different ways. Number one, that there still is a British monarchy.

[00:07:35]We're talking about several hundred years after the age of revolutions when it became clear that monarchy is an artificial, foolish, counterproductive paradigm for governance. The idea that you could have the mastery of an entire civilization pass from father to son is so ludicrous. And I once suggested that we try a chair of hereditary calculus at one of our universities and see if the the son of a calculus professor would learn this by the accident of being born. So I'm first shocked and disappointed to think that Great Britain uh which should know better still has a monarchy in your time. And secondly, I'm even more flabbergasted that the American people, the people of our republic, care.

[00:08:27]We should turn away in indifference or disgust from any monarchy anywhere in the world.

[00:08:34]Not because we hold a grudge. That's been over for a very long time. The United States has established its own mastery and so on. But the idea that there's some attraction that still lurks in the soul of the American people for this sort of pomposity, ceremonial ritual, crowns and scepters and fabulous gowns, the whole thing is absurd and it would seem to me that the American people should be better than that.

[00:09:02]>> It's an interesting subject for me. I've always been fascinated with the monarchy, trying to understand why it's such a popular thing in some places in the world, but also understanding the true American spirit of meritocracy as opposed to hereditary passing down of power. But during your time, there were people who believed America should pursue a monarchy. Is that not correct?

[00:09:24]>> Yes. So, two people come to mind for sure. One is Colonel Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton was koi about this but he essentially um preferred monarchy and in fact at a dinner party which I hosted when I had come back from Europe after my five years residence there Hamilton said to a group of people uh that he regarded hereditary monarchy as the most stable system of governance in the world. He said he would be willing to accept a constitutional monarchy of the sort that Britain now had. In other words, that the parliament is supreme and the monarch is in some respects subordinate to the will of the people as seen through the House of Commons. But the idea that in Hamilton's dream world, hereditary monarchy would seem to be the best answer tells you a great deal about Alexander Hamilton. The other person who squinted at monarchy was John Adams and he was more difficult to pin down in this respect and he denied all of his life denied voseiferously that he was a friend to monarchy. But some of the things that he said in his endless publications led the majority of American people to think he was not only in favor of aristocracy, that is a clear class hierarchy and a hereditary birth, but that he favored some sort of monarchy. And as you probably remember, as the presiding officer over the Senate, as the first vice president, he actually took a couple of weeks of Senate time trying to devise titles for George Washington. And he wanted called his excellency and the preserver of the American liberty and so on. All sorts of nonsense. But he believed that the presidency would not have enough reverence attached to it, not enough majesty unless titles of some sort were adopted. So those are the two that I think of most. Of course, there were plenty of other Federalists who uh held similar views, but they were the two leaders I think of of this attitude. It is so interesting to me that so much was offered to President Washington before he became president and during his time that would have resembled a monarchy.

[00:11:38]Can you speak to that just a little bit as well?

[00:11:41]Well, the miracle, if you want to call it that, is that George Washington refused to be arandized in that way. We were so grateful to him after he got us through the war of independence and he had such sterling character and I mean no person had greater character than George Washington that we would have made him president for life surely and there was no constitutional prohibition of that in our time. we might have made him dictator. There were times when it looked like we would need a dictator to get through the war. We were able to do it without having to resort to that, you know, fatal choice.

[00:12:22]But the great thing about him is that he did not want to be made permanent as the leader of this country. He resigned his commission after the war was won. Most successful war leaders never do that. He wanted to return to what he called his vine and his fig tree, a biblical expression at Mount Vernon. He was very reluctant to go to the constitutional convention in Philadelphia because he felt that by coming out of retirement in that way, it would show that he was a man of ambition, not not the Cincinnatus that we all believed that he was. And then when he was made first president, he really lamented that now the people would see him as just another politician who who talked a good game about not wanting power and wishing to be home and be retired and so on, but that in fact he was just a garden variety man of ambition. We all knew better, but he was very concerned about his historical reputation in this way. Fortunately, that has not stuck with him. Our gratitude is what has continued. not any sense that he was a man of ambition because he clearly was not at least was not after he had successfully won the war.

[00:13:35]One of the things that I find so interesting in this turbulent political time of my era is the desire of some people to wish that we had a head of state that was apolitical, not partisan, not from that point of view of a party, but really just functioned more as a unifier as an official and stayed out of a lot of the policymaking areas. Could you speak to that and how the founders along with yourself viewed the presidency? So we had a great distaste for monarchy. The great majority of the founding fathers were appalled by the activities of George III, were bewildered by the activities of Louis the 16th and especially Marie Antuinet.

[00:14:18]We wanted nothing to do with monarchy and we were insistent on a republic. So there was very little desire for a king in America. However, if you look at what the French have done, the French have a president who is their ceremonial figure and then they have a prime minister or premier who is their political figure.

[00:14:42]That's sort of a halfway house. And one can understand that, you know, we think of the president as somebody who celebrates great achievements in the country or grieavves with us when there's been a terrible setback for the United States of some sort. And the president under our system is a sole practitioner. And he therefore must not only shepherd legislation through the legislature and do state of the union messages and be commander-in-chief and preside over a cabinet, but he must also grieve when there is grieving necessary and so on. And I think these are potentially separate categories.

[00:15:20]One single person does not necessarily have both sets of those talents. And so I can see why the French handled it in their way. But I'm I'm glad we didn't do that. I'm glad that we settled on a president and we hemmed in his authority by way of the Constitution of the United States. We insisted in the way the Constitution was written that article one was about the legislative branch.

[00:15:46]Other words, we didn't start with the the president. We started with the legislature which is actually the will of the people distilled through a senate and a house of representatives and we made the presidency weaker. I wasn't at the constitutional convention in 1787 but I know some of the liberations there and and there was a very significant bewilderment about how much power we should grant to the president. We wanted the president to have enough power. The articles of confederation had clearly failed in that way. But we didn't want the president to have too much power because that way leads to desperatism.

[00:16:19]And I said, and I think I was unique among the founders in doing this. Again, I wasn't at Philadelphia, but I was of the generation and thinking a lot about all these issues all of the time. I said, if you think the presidency is too strong now, just wait. It will grow over time until it becomes essentially the same as a monarchy. So, I'm glad that the founders, the 55 men who met in Philadelphia, limited the presidential term to four years. I wish they had put term limits on all federal officers.

[00:16:50]Fortunately, and here's another sign of George Washington's greatness. He insisted upon retiring after a second term. John Adams was a single-term president. When I became the third president, I insisted upon retiring after two terms. Mr. Madison automatically did it. James Monroe automatically did it. that became a habit like a norm that was not enshrined in the constitution but was enshrined in the hearts of the American people and no one dared to tamper with that until the 20th century and then under conditions of extraordinary international crisis and as I understand it then subsequent to that elongated presidency the people of the United States passed an amendment to limit any future president to just two terms and so that is another way of avoiding ing monarchy. You know, under the original Constitution, which was written in between May and September of 1787, a president could serve four years, 8 years, 12 years, 16 years, 20 years, 24 years. And John Adams actually thought that he should be allowed to serve as the second president until such time as he wished to retire. So maybe it would be four years, maybe six, maybe 12, maybe 13 and a half. In other words, he thought, Adams thought of the presidency as sort of a life tenure under good behavior and the president was free to retire when it pleased him, but that the people would routinely return him to office unless he were a criminal of some sort.

[00:18:18]>> Thank you, Mr. President. You know, this is such a fascinating subject and one I'd like to delve into deeper. We do need to take a quick break right now, but when we come back, I'd like to talk a little bit about some of your personal experiences with the monarchy during your time [music] and how that influenced your feelings about this country. This is Listening to America with Klay Jenson.

[00:18:59]Welcome back to Listening to America with Klay Jenson. I'm your host, David Horton, and joining [music] us for this edition of Listening to America is the third president of the United States, Mr. Thomas Jefferson. In our first segment, Mr. Jefferson helped us understand why we didn't look at a monarchy seriously in this country.

[00:19:18]Although some founders were of different minds, ultimately the American experience decided that the presidency pretty much as we know it today was a good path to take instead of a monarchy.

[00:19:29]And it's a fascinating subject to think about, particularly at this time where King Charles III and Queen Consort Camila are in America for a state visit to celebrate the 250th birthday of our independence. Mr. President, thank you so much for joining us. Could you speak a little bit to the monarchy experiences that you had during your lifetime?

[00:19:51]>> Yes, of course. So, I would hope that the visiting monarch, Charles III, would read the Declaration of Independence, which is a sustained indictment of bad monarchy. Most of my complaints are against the King of England, for taking us for trial across the Atlantic, for quartering troops in our homes, for vetoing any legislation that any state might have passed to limit or end the slave trade. All the things that the king was doing were also being done by the king's council in Parliament. But um before that I had spared the king in my previous writings because I thought maybe he would become our champion as against the parliament. It turned out not to be the case. And so I would urge King Charles to read the Declaration of Independence as a way of celebrating the 250 years of the United States as as a country that that deliberately refused to continue under that arrangement. You know, the foolish Canadians until long into their history kept the king, wanted some sort of commonwealth relationship with the British monarchy, but kept the crown, including on its coinage and its iconography and the names of buildings and so on. That I think was a a really profound mistake by the Canadian people.

[00:21:14]Again, their timidity in the face of the rights of man has always been sort of a foil against wi which we could test our own deeper commitment to to reason and good sense and reform. I had some contact with kings. Uh he was in England in 1786. So John Adams was the minister to the court of St. James and I was the minister to the court of Louis V 16th and we were good friends and had spent some time in Paris before he was moved to London and he invited me to come to London to work on a commercial treaty with Britain. It turned out to be a fiasco and nothing good came of it. It was a complete waste of time, but it did give me a chance to come to Britain. And Adams and I went on a six-week garden tour of the home counties of England, and I took extensive notes, and we went to some of the great palaces and houses and so on. But I principally was interested in British approaches to the art of of gardening and also their Palladian architecture to the extent that they had adopted some of it. Uh but our work with the commercial treaty completely fell apart. The Brit the British were in no mood to treat with the upstart new United States or to treat us with anything like respect. But John Adams took me in the ceremonial way to meet the king, meet George III.

[00:22:35]George III had leveies from time to time and people would come in and bow and scrape and keep their mouths shut and look reverently and and feel over a face of the majesty of the crown. I felt no such thing. Of course, here's what happened though. When when Adams introduced me and said, "Your majesty, this is Thomas Jefferson who is an American patriot who is now the principal diplomat at the court of Louis the 16th. Do you know that King George turned his back on me and just snubbed me? He just walked away in hot. That muish gloomy man. He he didn't even have the grace under a situation like that to say some simple thing like well you are welcome here sir or much so we disagree you know that sort of thing. Instead he just muishly turned his back like some child. And I was just so well I was disappointed. I wasn't hurt. I didn't I didn't care one way or the other, but I was it confirmed everything that I thought. You know, I once said if you took all of the crowned leaders, all the princes and monarchs and dukes and so on of Europe of every European country and melted them like clay into a single being one. All of them. Hundred of them melted into one. That person would not deserve to be elected vestmen of the me parish church in Virginia. These are people the sons of kings. Primogenature the idea that the power will go from father to eldest son and then to eldest son and then to eldest son. I abolished primogenature and endail in Virginia between 1776 and 1779. I I revised the entire law code of my home commonwealth and the first thing we did was get rid of primogenature and entail.

[00:24:20]Primogenature is when the estate goes to the eldest male child. The rest are just on their own and entail is worse. That's where you can create a legal contract to protect the way an estate goes through history. So if your son marries the wrong woman, you can entail it so that it doesn't go in that direction. Or if your daughter marries a a booby, you can protect the property in some other way.

[00:24:43]That's a fundamental violation of the idea that the earth belongs to the living, not the dead. And so here's George III, who's by the way insane for part of his long reign, pretending that he could be offended by an American.

[00:24:58]Showed such a gracelessness. The other encounter I had was with Louis V 16th several times. I'm not much for these ceremonials. When John Adams met a king and he wrote 20 pages about it, wrote letters to everybody, kept it in his diary, told great stories about it. None of this pleases me. And I I barely even mention in my correspondence or in my journals meeting kings or these these absurd levies, which I put an end to, by the way, when I became the third president. But I met Louis the 16th a number of times. He was a good and decent man in over his head. I think I said if there had been no Marie Antuinette, he might have survived. The real issue was her. She was so so disdainful of the masses, so vain and so completely tied into a certain idea of her being sort of an angel god on earth uh that she offended the French masses to the point that they were much angrier at her husband uh than they might have been had he married better. Uh he was an amuable moment man drank too much I think love loved hunting too much but I don't think that there would inevitably have been a French revolution at least at that moment had it not been for Marie Antonet but if you think they're ceremonial in England when you go to Versailles that is ceremonial and I found it all perfectly distasteful and and frankly boring >> was Versailles not the most visceral example of the dichotomy of the poor and the wealth in France.

[00:26:42]>> Yeah, I think so. Yes. Fontlau was close. There were some things in Paris that were also upsetting from the point of view of any notion of distributive justice. You know, when I was in northern Italy, I saw the Duomo in Milan and I said, this is just a monument to human folly. I said, you could have paved the Adriatic with the money it cost to build this thing. the vanity of humans and their superstitions and their subordination of of their spirit of of independent thinking to superstitious and foolish notions like monarchy or priests that speak for God or cathedrals that that take six or seven generations to build at enormous expense and just have no commitment whatsoever to human dignity or human rights. But yes, Versailles with its hall of mirrors and its incredible gardens. I mean, they are some of the most beautiful gardens in the world. But what I noticed as the French Revolution came was that a handful of a few thousand maybe a hundred thousand French people lived like gods on earth, but 20 million were unable to put bread on the table.

[00:27:52]Literally, they're starving. They're bread riots. So a handful of people live as no human should ever be permitted to live, thinking themselves as gods, thinking that the that those below them are a rabble or some sort of some creatures out of a bestiary. And then you have 19 almost 20 million Frenchmen, good and amiable people who are starving, who are living in rags, who fight every day just to get enough calories into their children to survive.

[00:28:22]And to think that this was regarded as acceptable, that this was just taken for granted as the way things are. Well, it didn't strike me that that's the way things are. Social conditions were much better in England than in France. But France understood how to build a capital like Versailles. That is for sure. But I found nothing to admire in it except the ingenuity of the gardens. You know, as I've been thinking through some of these subjects, kind sir, I've thought that the British monarchy has been said to have persisted because it has evolved, whereas other monarchies refused to find new paths forward. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:29:04]>> Well, I think what happened, as I understand it, is this goes back to the first Charles. So you, the Charles you're now inviting to the United States is the third. They number these beings like popes. The first Charles was beheaded in 1649 by the British Parliament because he had committed many grievous errors against good sense and good government then prolonged issues of revenue of how he would have the funds he wanted for his extravagant life and so on. And so in the English rebellion 1641 to let's say 1660 they fought a war against Charles I and his cavaliers and his loyalists.

[00:29:51]Eventually they struck off his head which is another problem of monarchy.

[00:29:55]You know in our system we can get rid of a president by not reelecting him after four years. In France and England you had to cut off his head. Well, after Charles II came, uh, he's the king that came for the restoration in 1660 after this Puritan interregnum. So, you have a monarchy that fails. These are the Stearts, James I, Charles I, it fails.

[00:30:19]They strike off Charles I's head. There is a interregnum of a number of years and then the British desire was to restore the monarchy. Why? I don't know.

[00:30:29]And Charles II becomes king. He was kind of a hedonist. Loved women, loved luxury, loved theater, loved music. Not a bad man particularly, but another pointless example of what monarchy brings to a country. And then James II was a disastrous king because he was a Catholic and Britain had decided emphatically that it was done with Catholicism. So he had to go. And when he went, William of Orange was brought in. And he was a Protestant, which is mostly why he was brought in. And then you'd had the 1688 glorious rebellion.

[00:31:10]And after which they installed a constitutional monarchy. So it was no longer an absolute monarchy as it had been under the Stearts. Now it was a limited monarchy in which the House of Commons, the Parliament had enormous power that it had never really had before. So there's a solution to your problem. In other words, what they effectively did, sir, was keep the monarchy in name but hollow it out in authority. And that has apparently satisfied the British people up until the present time. You would think that in the course of those several hundred years that the British would have finally decided just to kill off the monarchy once and for all because it's such it's a patent absurdity. The idea that the idea comes from a previous medieval notion that God God himself would would select a human being like Charles I or like James I or Henry VIII that God would select that person to be his viceroy on earth and that person was surrounded with a divine aura and that there was a divine right a design that that this person this wasn't sort of some sort of lottery where somebody gets chosen as king. This is God's instrument upon earth. The insanity of that, the pure irrationality of that, the senselessness of that is so palpable.

[00:32:34]And so if people still love the monarchy in England in your time, it's not because they believe in any of that.

[00:32:42]It's that they like the ceremonial. But the ceremonial was part of its decadence. you know, in our when Calvin helped to reform Christianity in the in the in the early 16th century in Geneva.

[00:33:00]They got rid of stained glass windows and fancy vestments and all of that because those were things that were not in the Bible. Those are accretions that came along in the in the in the dark ages and in the medieval world. And so to to save Christianity, Kelvin made it spare. Again, whenever you have ceremonials, they're costly and they create class divisions.

[00:33:25]They're intended to create class divisions. And so I'm so pleased that, for example, when I went to my first inaugural on March 4th, 1801, I walked.

[00:33:36]I did not wear a uniform. I had never been in the military. I had been a justice of the peace and I had been the commander of of a local militia in Alber County but never really a warrior and I stewed a military escort and I I I didn't have a sword as John Adams had a man who never wielded a sword in his life had a sword on his body. I I I got rid of I didn't have a carriage and liveried servants and and splendid white stallions. All those ceremonials under cut our understanding that we are all born equal and and that and no one has more dignity than another human being.

[00:34:17]I think that's one of the real challenges of humanity is that folks are looking for something whether it's a spiritual leader, a political figure, whomever to be something special, that there's a reason why we should listen to that person, that there's a reason why they should be in charge of things. And it's not necessarily again the meritocracy, it's not the experience that they've had. It's not the example that they've shown, but there's something divine about it. And I'm glad you touched base on that. Do you believe that's just a part of the human experience?

[00:34:51]>> I think it comes out of some ancient superstitions about the nature of life.

[00:34:58]You know, if you look at primitive peoples the world over through history or in our own time, they carry a lot of magical thinking.

[00:35:06]This just seems to have been a part of superstition. So, you know, if there's an eclipse in my time, we think, well, the moon has gotten in the face of the sun and we can measure this and even predict it. But in the year 1,000 BC, when an eclipse happened, people thought, why has the sun blinked out? Is God angry with us? What's going on here?

[00:35:31]This is clearly something that has a magical element. It can't be explained rationally. And this is true.

[00:35:38]earthquakes, you know, when when there was a tremendous earthquake in Lisbon in the 1740s and people wrote about it as if God were angry with the people of Portugal and were punishing them. So these these superstitious views that somehow it's a magical world and that there's a God that wants to punish as well as reward and that God has chosen peoples like the Jews of the Old Testament or has a chosen person like James I of Scotland and England. These are these are part of the primitive pre-rational thinking of a pre-scientific age. And the minute you actually step back and say, well, if let's say you are Charles the first, so you are the son of James the first.

[00:36:20]James the first was not a very good monarch. This is the time of Shakespeare. This is the time of Walter Raleigh. And Walter Raleigh, by the way, was beheaded by James the first for no good reason. So he has a son named Charles.

[00:36:34]How do we know Charles is intelligent?

[00:36:36]How do we know Charles has character?

[00:36:38]How do we know Charles is physically able to be a king? How do we know that Charles cares a wit about the future of the people of England? We don't. Uh and the fact the sons of kings are almost all waistrols. They're just they just live like hogs. Their every need is supplied by liveried servants. They're out of touch with the people. They have no understanding of what life is really like. They spend their time hunting and drinking and wenching. That people could believe any of this is staggering. But once you see the truth, that comes with the scientific revolution. Oh, there's a way to predict an eclipse. Okay, we know how the stars work. We know something about the solar system. You know, once you begin to start a scientific understanding of the world, you emancipate yourself from these primitive myths and then you don't ever go back to them. And if you cling to them, it's just a sign that there's some boredom at the center of your soul.

[00:37:30]>> Mr. President, thank you as always for helping us sort through some of these complex ideas and to really reconsider how we think about things. We'll be back in just a moment. This is Listening to America with Klay Jenson.

[00:37:56][music] Welcome back to Listening to America.

[00:38:06]Joining us now is Klay Jenson after a very spirited discussion on monarchy with Mr. Jefferson. How are you, my friend?

[00:38:14]>> I'm fine, thank you very much. I'm glad to be with you. [music] Thanks for stepping up and being a more frequent host of this program.

[00:38:21]>> Well, it it is so much fun. And as a listener, I love getting your perspective on things. And Mr. Jefferson's perspective and everything that we try to talk about on the show, but after talking with Mr. Jefferson, it's very clear he was not a fan of the monarchy.

[00:38:36]>> Well done. You got the takeaway.

[00:38:38]Jefferson dislikes monarchism, royalty, aristocracy, pomp and circumstance, self arandisment.

[00:38:47]You know, he was a very humble man actually. He always felt that if he'd never been born, things would have been more or less the same. That's fascinating to see someone who was such a difference maker in this country, in this world to feel that way. I wondered as we've been talking, do you think that Mr. Jefferson almost had to develop those feelings toward the monarchy to be able to state the things to enumerate the things in the Declaration of Independence and to be the leader that he was in the founding of our nation?

[00:39:19]>> Well, you raise an interesting question, David. So Jefferson wrote his draft. he said without consulting book or pamphlet. So he he certainly had one of his essays in front of him, the summary view that he had written in 1774.

[00:39:33]He probably had George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights in front of him at the same time. So it wasn't just he was writing on a blank sheet of paper. But you take his point that he was he was not doing deep research on this. This was he said he was stating the American sense of the thing. Well, he finished it, handed it to Adams and Franklin.

[00:39:52]They made a couple of felicitus suggestions and then they turned it into the committee on the 28th of June 1776 and the committee debated it for several days. It was finally unanimously adopted on the 4th of July. But with about a quarter of Jefferson's text missing and some other verbal changes that Jefferson did not like. He didn't like to be tampered with as a writer. Who does? and he felt that Congress had made a terrible mistake in eliminating an anti-slave passage. But the point for your question is that he he really made it personal in some respects. There was a sense of woundedness in the tone of the Declaration of Independence. It was personal, affronted, offended, damaged, hurt by George III. Congress said, "Let's let's tamp that down a little bit so that it's a little less personal."

[00:40:45]And so that's really an odd thing about Jefferson. So your question is did he have to sort of work himself into a anti- monarchical moment in order to do this? I don't think so. But I think he felt the king should be above politics.

[00:40:59]The king should be every British citizen's champion, not a partisan tyrant or somebody who has decidedly anti-American feelings. I think he blamed George III for the war. So I don't think in the long run it was too personal. I think Jefferson mostly wanted to ridicule monarchy.

[00:41:19]>> While we're producing this episode, King Charles was addressing a joint session of Congress and I think it was just a remarkable speech. What are your thoughts?

[00:41:27]>> Well, first of all, I was really glad to see it 34 minutes. It was a speech of enormous dignity and he said every right thing. He didn't duck [clears throat] anything. He didn't duck global climate change, which he knew would be somewhat controversial in the United States given our denialisms.

[00:41:47]He didn't duck the problem of separation of powers and holding powerful people accountable.

[00:41:53]Uh he didn't duck the crisis of NATO. In fact, he pointedly said, "You're better with us and we're better with you. This alliance is one of the most extraordinary things that's ever happened in the history of the world.

[00:42:06]what a mistake it would be to erode it.

[00:42:09]He didn't get very particular.

[00:42:12]I was surprised that people on both sides of the aisle wound up cheering and standing up and even though he was saying things that were an implicit criticism of the MAGA movement, he couldn't have been more gracious. I thought, why can't we have statesmen?

[00:42:29]Wouldn't you love it? I mean truly, forget, you know, our cheap shot jabs against Donald Trump. Wouldn't you love it to have an American executive who made you proud when you watched him or her give a speech when you felt they rise to the occasion of being the leader of the greatest and most consequential country in the world instead of the stuff we got frankly from Joe Biden and from Donald Trump that has none of that dignitas. And I thought that could not have been easy for for King Charles. He knew what he knew where the minefields were and he managed to move say what he wanted to say without I think offending anybody.

[00:43:09]>> I thought it was one of the most remarkable speeches I've seen in Congress and the United States at least in decades. I think you're exactly right on all of that. He hit things head-on, but he did it in a way that was still diplomatic, that still offered room for people to come to the table, that gave hope and inspiration, that was firm, but still offering that hand to say, "Let's work together on this. We're better together. We're stronger together." I particularly loved his comments on faith. you know, he's the head of a church for goodness sake. And he talked about how faith in his mind should be more personal, a firm anchor, a daily inspiration, and not the typical discussion we get of religion and faith in political circles where it's very partisan. It's extreme. It It's not something that speaks to, in my opinion, most people's relationship with faith.

[00:44:03]And and I thought that was absolutely amazing. But I was particularly taken by the fact that this is what you would expect from a leader at that level. And one of the things we've talked about is does the monarchy make sense because is it hereditary to be able to do that kind of work or is this someone who's chosen?

[00:44:25]Is it the training they've experienced?

[00:44:26]Is it a mixture of a little bit of everything? And because they're in that unique position, a speech like that can happen. Well, I think that Charles, who's been around for a very long time, has probably seen every village in England. He's cut 100,000 ribbons. He's met people from every walk of life, every part of the of Great Britain and Ireland.

[00:44:52]He knows his Commonwealth as well as anyone in the world. And you know, he has a reputation of sometimes being a little loony and being kind of newagy and fattish and so on. And then there's all the personal stuff going way back. But I thought he was outstanding.

[00:45:10]And and and I'll say this, I was a great admirer of his mother, but she could not have given that speech.

[00:45:18]There was a gravitas to him that has something to do with gender. I'm afraid that he was able to say some things and if she had said it, there was kind of a grandmotherly feel to her. Let's all get along kind of a feel that she's she's she's a a sweet, strong but sweet representative of the British people.

[00:45:41]He's more hard and firm and I actually thought that was great. I think that frankly I don't think that the Congress would have taken it as seriously if she had been doing it. I don't think she would have said the same things as seriously as he did. So you know it an almost impossible task to follow Queen Elizabeth II especially since we we know way too much about the inner workings of the royal family. But he rose to the occasion and you know he's not in great health but he came to this country. I'm sure that it must have been excruciating at times for him to meet certain types of political figures in this country who don't have high seriousness, who who don't have any interest in dignity. And David, I'll tell you what I hoped most.

[00:46:32]I hope that every member of the Congress who was there went away and said, you know, we should we should probably get more serious about the business of governance, about what it means to be the United States of America to this heritage that goes back to the Magna Carta. I mean, didn't you wish that that every one of them was in some sense shamed and inspired at the same time?

[00:46:57]>> Absolutely. to sit there and then think, what am I doing to be anything close to that level? I'm here representing a group of people. I'm trying to lead a nation. I'm trying to help. And do I do what he just did? You could. They all get opportunities to stand up and speak and use their time. They could find a way to do those same things. And I agree with you. I hope they're all inspired and I hope they feel that urge to make something happen. You know, it's moments like this that I think make you reconsider some of your thoughts about the head of a state being a king versus a president. I'm still very firmly in the presidential elected, not hereditary category, but I was impressed and I think it could have a moment of clarity and inspiration for people in this country to do exactly what you said. I wish every commentator who has a political show would play at least part of the speech and say this is what we should be doing. This is how we can communicate. This is what we should expect of our leaders. It just was a remarkable moment. I don't want to turn on Fox News analysis of this or QAnon's analysis of this or NewsNation's analysis of this because, you know, you're going to get who is he and what does he know about us and you know, we thank goodness we no longer have to put up with any of that and he's a bit stiff and you know how how dare he come and lecture us about global climate change and so on. you know that that exists probably on both sides of the political spectrum but principally on the MAGA side because there was an implicit critique of the current president. There was an implicit careful very careful implicit critique of our war in Iran.

[00:48:45]But he handled it with such grace. He also had humor and there were four or five very funny moments including when he said that for us it's the 250th birthday for Britain it's only yesterday. He got a big laugh out of that. I was hoping that he would quote Churchill saying, "America always does the right thing after exhausting all the wrong things for a while." He didn't go that way. But he also said that Dickens might have called this a tale of two Georgees, George the first and George Washington. Um, it was really well done.

[00:49:12]and to talk about the Bill of Rights, our Bill of Rights 1791, but that we basically incorporated a great deal of British theory, British law, and British language into the Bill of Rights. I think that that's a civics lesson for a lot of people who who don't really understand how deeply rooted we are in the British rights tradition. These kind of moments I think are crucial in a person's development for their love for their nation, for their love of history, their understanding of things. So I think you're right. It is a civics's lesson. It's an opportunity. I was eight when the bicesentennial happened and that and the Statue of Liberty centennial were really the last mega events that were about American history.

[00:50:00]But I remember being inspired by the same kinds of things, the same rhetoric, the same celebration of where we came from and what we're doing. So I think it was actually perfect for the 250th anniversary. I did want to ask you something. I think you actually had a personal experience with Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth.

[00:50:20]>> Well, I had a couple of them actually.

[00:50:22]Not very personal. I was fortunate to be a a scholar, road scholar and they had a big giant reunion when I was there uh where they come from all over the country. I mean all over the world. So America has 32 annual road scholarships, Canada 11, South Africa has some, the former Rhdesia, Zimbabwe has some and so on so forth and so there are thousands of them and there's a it's a pretty tight network as you might expect. So I was there as the assistant American secretary to the road scholarship trust if you can imagine it. And I had done this big brochure to commemorate this extraordinary moment. And then I think it was the lawn of Trinity, one of the great lawns at Oxford. There are 38 colleges. There was a reception and the king and the queen were there. Well, the the queen and the prince, Prince Phillip, and they were doing their thing. We all got our little sheet of paper saying, "Don't try to talk with them. Just nod." You know, but people, it was so weird. People were like trying to figure out where they were going to go in this circle and trying to jump the queue and get in line and see them twice and get a photo. And you know, thank goodness that didn't get out of hand.

[00:51:36]And then once my parents had come to see me, we were in Edinburgh up in Scotland and we were right in one of the parks in the center of Edinburgh and along comes this horse carriage and open carriage and there were Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth when within 15 ft of us and you know today I'm sure that would never happen but security is not as tight in England as it is in the United States and I have to say after what happened last weekend at the correspondence dinner when I started watching the speech I thought oh please oh please oh please no incident and not just maybe something wild like a shooting or a threat but I didn't want some congressman saying you lie or who are you or you know some typical jackass kind of an American response there was one whoop it was an all right whoop but for the most part it was his grace inspired their gracious response. And I think that, you know, the fact is we can make more of the of the special relationship maybe than it deserves. And Britain is in decline. It's in steep decline, but then so are we. Not steep, but we're in decline, too. But they're in steep decline. And so there are lots of people, especially on the right now, that say, well, what is this relationship with Britain and so on? I think it's one of the best things that we have, you know, and they they regard themselves as Athens to our Rome. You know, we're the brash, adolescent, arrogant, violent, bully nation, which is high on self importance and low on humility. and they're Athens, their Socrates, their their Aristotle, their uh the playwrights, the drama, the architecture, you know, their their culture. And just as Greece was to Rome the kind of tutor, here's how you become a civilized nation instead of the power- hungry thing you are Rome. So, Britain has had that role and I've heard it when I'm at Oxford. I just happened to be just when I went to see my daughter's graduation last year. I was at high table at a college. there are 38 of them. And a classicist and I were talking about America and classical culture. And he started to tell me that Jefferson and Adams didn't really know ancient Greek because you know you you Americans are America. And it was my daughter's colleague. So I didn't take the bait. I thought you smug.

[00:54:13]So then I wrote I came back. She was belittling Jefferson's Greek and belittling Adam's Greek. And so I came back and I wrote to Carl Rashard, who's America's leading expert on the the founders in the classics, and I said, I didn't mention names, but I said, "How how good do you think Jefferson's Greek was?" I just met somebody in England who said he just had like a school boy's Greek, and he wrote back and said his Greek was better than the best classics professors in the United States today.

[00:54:45]He said, "Whoever that was doesn't know what he's talking about." But that's a very British It's a very British thing is to look down on us as claw hoppers from the new world. When I when I went to Oxford, which was one of the happiest times of my life, I if I could have stayed, I would have stayed forever. I'd stay forever. Now, I met the warden of my college. So, he's really the principal called warden. And when I went in to meet him on the first day, he said, "So, you're you're from America, are you?" And he said, "Uh, where?" And I said, "Well, North Dakota." He said, "Is that near Chicago?" And I thought, "Well, you know, everything's relative."

[00:55:19]Then he said, he said, "I think he was I think he was taking the mickey out of me, as the British say." But he said, "You're not a Red Indian, are you?" So they think of Nate, they call Native Americans red Indians as opposed to Indian Indians. You You're not You're not a red Indian, are you? And I I I think he was joking, but you can never tell. So no, but they they do have an attitude towards us, but they've earned it. They have earned it. We have no Charles Dickens. We have no John Milton.

[00:55:46]We don't have statesmen the way they have had statesmen at their very best.

[00:55:50]So, I love them. And even though I'm fiercely anti- monarchical, as was Thomas Jefferson, I admire King Charles III. And I thought it was a great moment and a great moment for the United States and the special relationship. And boy, do we need it right now. Boy, do we need decorum and dignity and gravitas and good sense and grammar. a wonderful example and I think a real moment that will be remembered as part of this 250th birthday celebration.

[00:56:20]>> If you didn't see the speech, please watch it. It's available in many ways and on YouTube, but please watch. It's 34 minutes. You'll be glad you did.

[00:56:27]>> I agree completely. Clay, thank you so much as always, my friend.

[00:56:34]Join us again next [music] time for another important edition of Listening to America.

[00:56:50]>> [music]