Surely having a monarch as head of state is a lot more exciting than being under a boring and bland president, as most Canadian politicians are.

Complaining that the Windsors are not Canadian enough shows a myopic view of history. The ancestor of the current King of Spain was the grandson of Louis XIV, whose family had more foreign blood (Italian, Spanish-Austrian, Gascon, etc.) than French. All the European royal families still around today have ancestors that came from all over Europe. They got fresh blood all the time by not marrying the guy or girl next door, but some aristocratic stranger they barely knew.

Napoleon I was only technically French - he was born in 1769 and Corsica only became officially French in 1770 - and was always very much a short-tempered Corsican with a strong accent.

Napoleon III, nephew of the former, was raised in Holland, Switzerland and Germany, and lived briefly in Italy and England before becoming president of France, then emperor. His wife was a Spanish princess.

When Italy became united in the 1860s - with the help of Napoleon III - their first king was the King of Sardinia /Duke of Savoy (Savoie was a French-speaking dukedom that straddled both sides of the Alps).

Then there is the British Royal family - like the French one it started, after the fall of the Roman Empire, with German tribes. Anglos and Saxons for one, Franks for the other. All bloody - literally - foreigners, weren't they?

Honi soit qui mal y pense, but wasn't Guillaume de Normandie (his true name) and his Angevin and Plantagenet successors on the British throne all French speaking (not quite the same French as in the Paris region)?

Then there were the Tudors, themselves of mixed blood as pretty much all European kings through history had to marry a foreign princess to prevent wars.

Then there were the British kings with a Scottish ancestry; later on there was Charles II, who had the same maternal grandfather as Louis XIV; then there were the kings with a German Hanover ancestry. Prince Phillip is the last consort with more than a hint of foreign blood.

My birthplace, part of the English kingdom for 300 years - quite a few towns in the area were built in the Middle Ages by Plantagenet kings - was also the birthplace of the future King Richard II of England.

It is under his reign that the town got its first formal hospital, in 1390, replaced in 1829 by a much bigger and beautiful one, with gardens between the wards, that is still the town downtown hospital. This is why I am quite sentimental about the monarchy.

Would you truly enjoy being ruled by President Harper or Trudeau? Perish the thought. Canada is bland enough as it is.

Now go wash your mouth out with soap before I tell the Queen.

J-L Brussac Coquitlam