This chapter discusses the position of the head of state and the executive in the SNP's 2002 constitutional draft. The draft proposes a constitutional monarchy, in which the office of Head of State is vested in Elizabeth Windsor and descends to ‘her successors as determined by the law of Scotland, acting in right of Scotland’. At the same time, it provides an explicitly parliamentary form of government, in which many – although not all – of the conventional relationships characterising parliamentary democracy are constitutionally prescribed.

In analysing this combination of monarchy and parliamentarism, this chapter relies upon two key distinctions. The first is the distinction between the symbolic nature of monarchy (that is, the monarch as an iconic, ceremonial totem, who lends a romantic and quasi-sacred legitimacy to the state) and the constitutional function of the Head of State (as an office holder invested with specified powers under a democratic, parliamentary Constitution).

The second, related, distinction is that which exists between the powers of the Crown (the legal entity), which are largely exercised by the ministers, and the discretionary powers of the monarch (the person). Much confusion arises, in popular polemic debate between royalists and republicans, from a failure to appreciate these distinctions. One may, for example, support the symbolic monarchy as a Ciceronian moral rector, or as the embodiment of idealised Christian virtues, whilst combining such ceremonial royalism with ‘republican’ principles that are opposed both to the Crown's prerogative powers and to all forms of arbitrary power, both public and private. This seemingly dichotomous position – simultaneously royalist and anti-monarchical – has a long history. It was, for example, the position taken by Henry Neville in his plans for the reform of the English system of government after the Restoration at the end of the civil wars, by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun in his proposals for a Scottish constitutional settlement before the Union, and by Viscount Vilain in his decision, at the Belgian Constituent Assembly of 1830/1, to accept monarchy ‘on the most liberal, the most republican, the most popular principles’.

With these distinctions in mind, the first part of this chapter is dedicated to a discussion of the symbolic nature of the Scottish monarchy as envisaged by the draft Constitution.