Egbert's accession
Sir: Bruce Anderson (Politics, 17 August) illustrates how the rock of our constitution is being undermined by shallow advice to the Crown. Ironically, he undermines this proposition by a phrase in the penultimate sentence: `. our line of monarchs is approaching its own millennium . . .
When Margaret Thatcher went to the Palace to kiss hands and become Europe's first woman prime minister, we were pre- cisely a thousand years from the coronation of Athelred the Second — by which time the throne of England had been established for a couple of centuries.
What we are approaching, in half a dozen years' time, is the 1,200th anniversary of the accession of Egbert — under whom the kingdom of England was consolidated around the throne of Wessex.
lain Burgess
4 Cedars Road, Hampton Wick, Middlesex
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