The greatness of Westminster Hall, a witness to a noble history

National Post, 18 September 2022

Monarchs live and die, are crowned and condemned. Westminster Hall records all this.

When William the Conqueror’s son built Westminster Hall 925 years ago, the population of London was about 50,000. There are more people in the queue to pay their respects to the late Queen — more than five miles long — than that. London has seen more than most cities, but nothing quite like this.

There are few buildings anywhere from 1097 that are still standing, let alone functioning. History takes its toll. King Charles spoke of the “weight of history” on Monday when he spoke there, the oldest part of the mother of all parliaments.

Queen Elizabeth II was something like Westminster Hall, where she now lies in state. Magnificent, capacious and enduring, a repository of the best of the British history, but also a witness to its shadows.

Her Late Majesty was Queen of Canada, Australia and the other realms, not only because British might extended across the seas, but because of the genius of Westminster, a system of constitutional monarchy and limited government that is mightily successful. And history was not unilateral. The experience of “responsible government” — now a lynchpin of the Westminster constitutional system — was first worked out by Queen Victoria in Canada before it was fully adopted in the United Kingdom.

“Allow me also to express my esteem for the Parliament which has existed on this site for centuries and which has had such a profound influence on the development of participative government among the nations, especially in the Commonwealth and the English-speaking world at large,” Pope Benedict XVI said in Westminster Hall in 2010, noting that “your particular vision of the respective rights and duties of the state and the individual, and of the separation of powers, remains an inspiration to many across the globe.”

The German pope, who thanked Britain for fighting heroically against the Nazi regime during that same visit, knew how precious the Westminster system of constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy is, one of the greatest political achievements in history. It is a tradition which has lessons to teach today in the face of extremist tendencies arising anew.

“This country’s parliamentary tradition owes much to the national instinct for moderation, to the desire to achieve a genuine balance between the legitimate claims of government and the rights of those subject to it,” Benedict said, adding that “the nation’s political institutions have been able to evolve with a remarkable degree of stability.”

In our own daughter parliament, Yves-François Blanchet, leader of the Bloc Québécois, thought Thursday would be good time to offer his own reading of history.

“Let’s arrive in the 21st century and see that any power which is supposedly based on divine right, which has so much influence and is so terribly expensive, might be considered as something of the past,” he muttered.

Blanchet might consider how the French reality in Canada might have fared under another constitutional arrangement. He may recall that the chief grievances of the American revolutionaries against King George III — the “Intolerable Acts” — included the Quebec Act, which gave status to French civil law and religious liberty to Catholics in Quebec.

Magnificently missing the point entirely, Blanchet thinks that a 21st-century concoction would be better because it would be shiny and new. Westminster Hall is older than the Magna Carta and a witness to it. A thousand-year history is an occasion for gratitude, not grumbling.

Westminster Hall is actually available today for use, which can’t be said for our own parliamentary chambers, shut down for a ten-year renovation after an onerous single century of service.

An innocent consequence of monarchy is the British obsession with plaques, hence the floor of Westminster Hall has plaques commemorating those monarchs who have laid in state there. But not only kings and queens: “Winston Churchill lay in state here from the twenty seventh of January until his burial at Bladon on the thirtieth of January nineteen hundred and sixty five.”

Among the nine plaques is this one: “In this Hall Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, Speaker of the House of Commons, author of Utopia, was condemned to death, 1 July 1535.”

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