T.H. White on swords and being the rightful Queen of England

It looks as though England has a new monarch. Congratulations to seven-year-old Matilda Jones from Doncaster.

As the Independent tells it:

A schoolgirl pulled a mysterious sword from the same lake in Cornwall that King Arthur’s legendary blade Excalibur is said to have been thrown into. 

Seven-year-old Matilda Jones, from Doncaster, was paddling in Dozmary Pool on Bodmin Moor with her father, Paul, when she stumbled across the object. According to folklore, that is where the legendary King of England threw Excalibur before he died.

Of course there are those who argue that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power, they maintain, derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

I mean, if I went round saying I was Emperor, just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away.

Where was I?

If Matilda Jones is the rightful Queen of England, what happens next?

The best literary authority for this is what happened to the Wart after he pulled the sword out of the stone (even if the most authoritative tellings of the Matter of Britain say that sword was not Excalibur).

As T.H. White wrote in The Sword in the Stone:

The barons naturally kicked up a dreadful fuss, but as the Wart was prepared to go on putting the sword into the stone and pulling it out again till Doomsday, and as there was nobody else who could do the thing at all, in the end they had to give in. A few revolted, who were quelled later, but in the main the people of England were glad to settle down. 

The coronation was a splendid ceremony, and, what was still more splendid, it was like a birthday or Christmas Day. Everybody sent presents to the Wart, for his prowess in having learned to pull swords out of stones, and several burghers of the City of London asked him to help them in taking stoppers out of unruly bottles, unscrewing taps which had got stuck, and in other household emergencies which had got beyond their control.

By one of those odd coincidences, I had not heard of Dozmary Pool until it was mentioned in The School on the Moor last week.

Still Vivat Regina! and all that.