As you will perforce be aware if you’ve read this far, the Laundry has been aware for a couple of years that our oath of office is subject to various workarounds and contains loopholes.
I gather that, historically, certain individuals in Mahogany Row were aware of these weaknesses but, for reasons now becoming evident, thought that the risk of third-party exploitation was outweighed by the benefits of being able to work around the outside of our normal constraints in event of an existential crisis.
The oath is a geas—a thaumaturgically enforced compulsion—that maintains security by compelling the sworn party to work in the best interests of the agency, as defined by its charter established by Royal Prerogative, et cetera. Note that Royal Prerogative bit: the geas in question draws its power from the sum over time of the entire loyal British population’s faith in the Crown since that charter was established over four centuries ago. Which adds up to something like ninety million person-centuries-worth of belief. Hence the, shall we say drastic, consequences of violating one’s oath.
Iris Carpenter got around it by convincing herself that with CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN imminent, the best way to maintain operational continuity was to adopt the methods of the other side. Call it the Edward VIII Approach if you like: if you’re convinced you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. (You might call it treason; I couldn’t possibly comment.)
There are other weaknesses, of course. The definition of the Crown is not constant over time: does it mean the Crown-in-Parliament, the absolute Monarchical Privilege of Elizabeth I, the whatever-the-hell-it-was exercised by the Lord Protector during the Commonwealth, or what? The twenty-first-century Crown as defined by the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act is not the same as the Crown as implied or assumed by the Treason Act (1800), which is not the same as the Treason Felony Act (1848), and so on. The oath works best on plain ordinary human brains. Those of us who are no longer entirely human are variably resistant to it. PHANGs are better than 50 percent likely to be immune to regular geasa, as we discovered the hard way thanks to Basil. I gather the V-parasite infestation confers resistance. Even the alf?r invaders, who have a lot more experience at controlling PHANGs than we do, use other methods to ensure docility. And then there’s Angleton’s special case … which I have inherited.
But 95 percent of the time the oath of office is pretty good at binding us to obedience, and by the time you read this file it will have been superseded by something much better, so that’s water under the bridge, right?
Well, no. Because in addition to the lift-bridge itself having mechanical vulnerabilities, the foundations are deliberately weakened. Not enough to count in most circumstances, but with the right leverage …
… like Dr. Armstrong’s plan …
… the entire system can be destabilized.
During normal operations (before it was dissolved so abruptly) the agency operated as part of the Civil Service—a secret part, but nonetheless, staffed civil servants. However, our charter was established by Royal Prerogative of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I in 1584. It was renewed by King James VI and I in 1611; and more or less swept under the rug by King Charles I during the disastrous period of Personal Rule that preceded the Short Parliament and the subsequent descent into civil war. For entirely understandable reasons, the small, collegiate body that saw to the nation’s magical defenses kept a low profile during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and subsequent Puritan rule. And by the time the modern British constitutional framework took shape in the early eighteenth century, nobody thought to check the dusty archives for fine print.
So when Chris Womack’s researchers went digging a few months ago, in order to prepare the groundwork for bringing the agency under the aegis of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, they discovered a loophole the size of the one that allows the heir to the throne to play with buckets of instant sunshine.6 Which came as something of a surprise, to say the least.
Most people live under the misconception that the United Kingdom doesn’t have a written constitution. Ignorance is bliss, as they say. The UK does in fact have a constitution—but it’s written up in about thirty different Acts of Parliament, and Parliament reserves the right to tear it up and redraft it pretty much at will. In a republic, the source of state power is the people. In a monarchy, the source of state power is the Crown—an abstraction that represents the power vested in the person of the monarch. (Monarchy demonstrably travels faster than light, for the instant one monarch dies, the next in line to the throne inherits the power of the Crown; indeed, if we had a sufficiency of petty kingdoms to mess with we could use it as a basis for time travel, causality violation, and thereby an ironclad proof that P = NP. But I digress.) In the British system, ever since Charlie’s unfortunate haircut, the monarchy delegates its power to the Crown-in-Parliament, which is to say, the successors to the chappies who administered the severe shave: but that’s the post–civil war settlement.
Our royal prerogative is a bit less abstract: it just says we owe allegiance to the monarch and his or her heirs and appointees. It completely misses out the indirection operator of referring to the Crown, so instead of a sophisticated royalty virtualization system we’ve been handed a raw, unprotected, bare-metal loyalty pointer leading straight back to the King or Queen.
Oops.
Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t make any difference to the day-to-day business of running the agency as an arm of government: it’s pretty much a legal abstraction. We do as we’re told and leave the policy-making to people at higher pay grades because we’re civil servants and we’re supposed to be politically agnostic, loyal to the government of the day.
But it turns out that we’re not actually required to be loyal to the government of the day, to the Crown-in-Parliament: we’re loyal to the person of the monarch.
Which is why Continuity Operations was able to so easily ignore the dissolution order issued by the Cabinet Office, drop a new oath on everybody, and carry on as if the agency was still authorized to exist.
And I think you can guess where this is going. It’s going to be a wild roller-coaster ride: better hang onto your hat!
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