Chapter 14
Letting in the Light
Kathy Pauwels, the chic blonde forty-something presenter of the Belgian television programme Royalty, is having a good week. The day I meet her at the studios of VTM, the main Flemish commercial station, she has made the front pages of the Belgian newspapers. After some sleuthing, she has discovered that King Albert II has spent €1.5 million on buying two apartments and some garages in a luxurious complex in Ostende. Rumours had been flying for some time about the purchase, but Pauwels has managed to come up with the evidence: official documents naming the purchaser of the apartments as “king of the Belgians, Albert II Felix”. VTM ran it on the evening news, and this morning the papers are eagerly following up her scoop.
The story comes at a sensitive time for the Belgian royal family. It is September 2009 and the credit crunch is at its height. In his annual address to the nation on the eve of Belgian National Day on 21st July, Albert has described the crisis as raising “questions over the increasing materialism” of society. Yet in the weeks since he has rather lost his footing on the moral high ground after it emerged he has spent €4.6 million on a new yacht. And now yet another expensive purchase has been revealed.
It is only Thursday and Pauwels is not yet sure whether she and her small team will try to follow up the story for Royalty, which goes out for half an hour every Sunday at six p.m. Even without it the programme’s several hundred thousand viewers – not bad given a total Flemish population of six million people – can rely on the usual mixture of stories about the royal family and their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Among other items will be an interview with Princess Astrid, the second child of King Albert II, on her twenty-five years of marriage, and a report from over the border in the Netherlands, where it is Prinsjesdag. The tone this week, as always, will be critical rather than fawning – not surprising given that the programme was edited until a few years ago by Pol van den Driessche, now a senator, who has made no secret of his republican views.
Pauwels likes to feel she brings the same qualities to the job as in her previous role as a news reporter. But she admits it can be a difficult balancing act: if she goes too far in criticizing the royal family, she risks upsetting the ardent monarchists in her audience, many of them middle-aged women.
A few miles away across Brussels, Anne Quevrin, an elegant dark-haired woman several years older than Pauwels, is also hard at work on her programme about royalty, Place Royale, which is broadcast at eight o’clock on Saturday night on RTL, the main French-language commercial station, drawing an audience of 600,000.
Belgium may have only one king but, thanks to the country’s division along linguistic lines, it has two of almost everything else – and that includes programmes on royalty. The difference is more than just one of language. Quevrin has a rather more respectful attitude to her subject. Her show, the first of its type in Europe, was launched in 1994, following the death of King Baudouin the previous year. A former political reporter, she believes her viewers want to see images of the lives of the royal family at work and has little time for “negative reports” about apartments or other such scandals. “What business of ours is what the King spends his money on?” she asks. “Our aim is to strengthen the institution of monarchy.” For that reason, Place Royale does not use paparazzi pictures and, unlike Royalty, it refrained from interviewing Delphine Boël, the King’s illegitimate daughter, the revelation of which in 1999 became a major news story. Indeed, Boël has only featured in her programme once – and that was when she was inadvertently caught on camera near Prince Laurent. Quevrin ceased presenting Place Royale the year after we met, but the programme’s attitude to royalty remained respectful.
The two programmes clearly know their respective audiences: their differing approaches reflect the divergence in attitude towards the royal family in the two parts of Belgium. While polls show the French speakers in the south are overwhelmingly in favour of monarchy, the Dutch-speaking north is more critical.
Yet it also reflects a more general paradox at the heart of all reporting of royal affairs, one that has become acute in the modern multimedia age. Are members of the royal family to be treated as part of a celebrity culture, whose foibles are to be ruthlessly exposed to the world? Or does their constitutional role mean they must be accorded more dignity than we would give to Madonna, Paris Hilton or Lady Gaga? And what of the institution itself? Should the media question the continued existence of monarchy or confine their criticism to the effectiveness or not with which members of the royal family carry out their duties?
This is not just a matter of deference: it can also have implications for the newspapers, magazines, TV shows or websites that feature the activities of the various royal families. Royalty is unlike celebrity in one important respect: while new singers, film stars and reality-show contestants can be easily replaced by others when we tire of them, royals are more permanent: only a few of them come along every generation. There is only one heir to the throne: devalue the brand too much and we risk killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
Matters were simpler in the days before mass media, when the only image the overwhelming majority of the population saw of their ruler was on a coin, statue or the occasional portrait. With the publication of pamphlets and newspapers came the first royal news – and also the beginnings of what was to become a love-hate relationship between palaces and the press.
In early nineteenth-century Britain, King George III was responsible for one of the first moves towards modern royal media management. Irritated at erroneous reports about movements by himself and his family, he instituted the Court Circular, an official record of royal engagements still published today. This did not prevent him from being cruelly lampooned by the caricaturists of the day, however.
His son, who succeeded him as George IV in 1820, was an even more attractive target for the fledgling media because of his lavish spending and sexual peccadilloes during his long period as Prince of Wales and then Regent. A further dimension was provided by his disastrous marriage to Caroline of Brunswick. In a foretaste of Princess Diana’s behaviour almost two centuries later, the then Princess of Wales was ready to make use of the press to get her side of the story into the public domain. Angry at being denied access to their daughter Charlotte, Caroline wrote a complaining letter to her husband and, when he didn’t respond, had it published on 10th February 1813 in the Morning Chronicle. In it she begged her husband to pity “the deep wounds which so cruel an arrangement inflicts on my feelings… cut off from one of the very few domestic enjoyments left to me… the society of my child”. The tactic worked – at least as far as winning over public opinion; prints and even cups and plates were made and sold in Caroline’s honour. It didn’t prompt her husband, however, to allow her access to their daughter. Their battle went on, much of it in print.
The newspapers continued to adopt the same critical tone towards George IV even after his death in 1830. The obituary in the Times was characterized by a savagery that would be unthinkable in the case of a modern-day monarch. “There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased king,” the newspaper wrote. “What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow?”
Elsewhere in Europe, other monarchies were also having to come to terms with the might of the press. Soon after coming to power, Louis Philippe, France’s citizen king, came under fierce criticism from his country’s newspapers for “betraying” the revolution of 1830 that had brought him to the throne. An extra visual dimension was provided by the invention of lithography, which made it much easier and quicker to reproduce images. This encouraged the emergence of caricatures, which were often savage; the King became a favourite target and was depicted as a pear. Indeed, so closely did Louis Philippe become identified with the fruit that the smallest image of a pear was immediately understood by readers as referring to him. The inevitable clampdown on caricatures as well as the written word
swiftly followed.
In newly created Belgium, by contrast, the newspapers continued to operate with a freedom rare in the rest of the Continent. Thanks to his years in Britain, Léopold appreciated the power of the press and, rather than trying to curb it, set out to manipulate it. In 1831, shortly after coming to the throne, he secretly founded his own newspaper, L’Indépendant, which backed the Catholic Party, and during the twelve years that followed he pumped in 40,000 francs a year to cover its losses. Then in 1858 he provided another 200,000 francs to found L’Écho du Parlement, which supported the other main group, the Liberals.1
This did not prevent other newspapers from being critical – especially of Léopold’s colourful private life. Articles started appearing in the newspapers in 1847 about his relationship with his young mistress, Arcadie Meyer. To stop its diffusion, the King began to bribe journalists to avoid such subject matter. The British ambassador reported to London that Léopold gave up to 125,000 francs in “hush money” a year to “scurrilous papers”.2
Léopold II, his son and successor, also paid journalists to buy more favourable coverage; indeed, he spent so much money on the practice that Adrien Goffinet, his loyal aide-de-camp, warned him to hide all the accounts of the Civil List carefully so they would “never fall into the hands of the enemy or of revolutionaries, thereby revealing that you subsidized newspapers and paid pensions to journalists”.3
The King was obliged to step up his efforts considerably after reports of the atrocities carried out by his agents in the Congo at the end of the nineteenth century began to circulate in Europe and America through letters from Protestant missionaries. The tactics he had employed to build his private empire were sharply criticized in both British and American newspapers and also in pamphlets such as ‘King Leopold’s Soliloquy’, written in 1905 by Mark Twain. Their judgement coloured in part by payments from the King, Belgian newspapers from the Liberal Le Soir to the Catholic Le XXe Siècle fought back with articles that blamed such critical foreign reports on British agents who were bitter that they had been beaten to the Congo by the Belgians.
Trying to win over the foreign press necessitated a more sophisticated approach. Showing an early understanding of the dark arts of public relations, Léopold set up a secret press bureau that provided journalists with information favourable to his activities and commissioned public statements of approval from big names of the day. Embarrassingly for the King, however, the bureau’s existence was revealed to the world by the New York American after a few years of its clandestine operations.
In the last years before Léopold’s death in 1909, the media focus shifted to his private life, as had been the case with his father before him. The socialist newspaper Le Peuple was especially savage, seizing on his relationship with his last mistress, Blanche Delacroix. “The King no longer stoops to prostitution, like his associates, in wild outbursts of sensuality and lasciviousness: prostitution climbs to meet the King,” wrote Jules Lekeu on 19th July 1906, in the first of a series of articles. “To megalomaniac financing and building, the King now adds megalomaniac debauchery, and this debauchery is founded on plunder and on crime.”4
Although British newspapers remained just as free as their Belgian counterparts to criticize the monarchy through all these years, they often exercised considerable self-restraint, as was shown as late as 1936 by the way they covered – or rather didn’t cover – the events leading to the abdication of King Edward VIII – or rather didn’t cover them.
The American newspapers relished the story of his romance with Wallis Simpson, reporting the various twists and turns in their relationship, and couldn’t understand why their British colleagues remained so quiet. When Lord Beaverbrook, whose ownership of the Daily Express made him the most powerful press tycoon of Fleet Street, arrived by ship in Manhattan during the crisis, reporters demanded to know why his and the other British papers had not printed the story. “You are the censor!” cried one reporter. “Who? Me?” Beaverbrook replied. But even so, as Time magazine put it, “the entire British Press continued unanimously to ostrich”.5 When American newspapers and magazines with stories about the romance were imported into Britain, the relevant columns were blacked out and whole pages torn out.
Then, suddenly, on 3rd December 1936, as the crisis was reaching its height, the British press suddenly broke their silence. The catalyst was a bizarre one: in a speech to a Church conference Alfred Blunt, the appropriately named Bishop of Bradford, had talked about the King’s need for divine grace – which was interpreted, wrongly as it turned out, by a local journalist in the audience as a reference to the King’s affair. When his report was carried by the Press Association, the national news agency, the British newspapers took it as the signal they had all been waiting for: they could now report the affair.
The Daily Mirror, for example, filled its pages on 3rd December and the days that followed with stories of crisis meetings at the palace, pictures of Wallis Simpson and the opinions of men and women in the street. “They have much in common,” began its gushing profile of the royal couple. “They both love the sea. They both love swimming. They both love golf and gardening. And soon they discovered that each loved the other.”
Under the headline “Six Months of Rumours” the newspaper also looked at how speculation about the relationship had spread since Mrs Simpson’s name appeared as a guest at a dinner hosted by the King at St James’s Palace that May. Tellingly, it also felt the need to justify to its readers why it – and the rest of Fleet Street – had been sitting on the story for so long. “We have been in full possession of the facts, but we resolved to withhold them until it was clear that the problem could not be solved by diplomatic methods,” it claimed. “This course we took with the welfare of the nation and the Empire at heart. Such is the position now that the nation, too, must be placed in possession of the facts.” There were echoes of this same self-restraint – initially, at least – on the part of the British press a decade and half later when rumours started to circulate that Edward VIII’s niece, Princess Margaret, was having an affair with the divorced Peter Townsend.
The willingness of the American papers to tread where the British were reluctant to follow exemplified a broader tendency still true today. When reporting on the activities of members of the royal family of their own country, the media often hold back, whether out of respect for the institution or because of a more pragmatic realization of the need to keep on good terms with them: step too far and they risk being denied precious access to events or having other privileges withdrawn. This mutual dependency is similar to that which exists between the media and Hollywood actors and pop stars. There is far less at stake, however, when dealing with foreign countries’ royals, which opens the way to more aggressive and often downright fictional reporting – as demonstrated by the imaginative royal coverage of the more downmarket German magazines.
The invention of radio, cinema and television presented new challenges for the monarchies across Europe, especially since their arrival coincided with a greater democratization of society and a reduction in the deference of old. The various royal courts were far from passive actors and began to adapt to this new age. On Christmas Day 1932 George V began what was to turn into a national tradition: the annual radio broadcast to the nation. Seated at a desk under the stairs in Sandringham, the elderly monarchy read out words written for him by Rudyard Kipling, the great imperial poet and author of The Jungle Book. “I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all, to all my peoples throughout the Empire, to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert or the sea that only voices of the air can reach them, men and women of every race and colour who look to the Crown as the symbol of their union.”
The broadcasts, which were mildly, but not overly, religious in tone, were intended to cast the monarch in the role of head of a great family, that spanned not just the United Kingdom but also the Empire (or Commonwealth, as it is today). This was made explicit by his son George V
I in his first Christmas speech of 1937. “Many of you will remember the Christmas broadcasts of former years when my father spoke to his peoples at home and overseas as the head of a great family,” the newly crowned King declared.
That George VI had made the speech at all was an achievement in itself: despite working for more than a decade with Lionel Logue, his Australian-born speech therapist, he still loathed public speaking. In 1936 there hadn’t even been a speech: his elder brother, Edward VIII, had abdicated just two weeks earlier, and the new King did not yet feel ready to address his subjects. And even when he gave his speech the next Christmas, he made clear it was a one-off, and didn’t repeat it in 1938. Following the outbreak of war, however, he realized the importance of this annual ritual for boosting morale and reluctantly spoke to the nation again – and indeed every 25th December for the rest of his life. After her accession in 1952, his daughter, the present Queen, continued what was by then a well-established tradition.
By that time Britain was well into the television age. When Elizabeth was crowned in 1953, the now elderly Winston Churchill, back for his final stint as prime minister, did not want to allow the television cameras into Westminster Abbey out of fear it would impose an intolerable burden on the young monarch. His cabinet unanimously agreed. The Queen’s position was not so clear. According to the official version of events, she overruled them, insisting that the event be televised. Robert Lacey, the respected royal biographer, by contrast, suggests she was initially opposed but changed her mind after an outcry by the newspapers.6 In any case the cameras were admitted into the Abbey, for the first time in its history, allowing an estimated twenty million viewers to watch the mammoth outside broadcast, transmitted from 10.15 a.m. to 5.20 p.m.
The Great Survivors Page 34