by A. N. Wilson
For M
CONTENTS
1: In Praise of Dullness
2: ‘I serve’
3: ‘Cheer up, sausage’
4: Defender of the Faith
5: Brenda
6: Presidents
7: Does the Monarchy Have a Future?
8: The Good Old Cause
9: ‘Remember.’
Notes
1
IN PRAISE OF DULLNESS
‘I don’t fully understand her, but that’s part of her secret’
ROBERT RUNCIE1
The great achievement of Elizabeth II’s grandfather, King George V, was to make the British monarchy dull. There had been some danger, during the short reign of his father, Edward VII, that things might get ‘interesting’. Not only had Edward the Caresser lived a shameless life, with mistresses galore, but he had also openly and independently indulged in European politics. The Entente Cordiale between his country and France was largely his creation, locking Great Britain into treaty obligations – about going to war in the event of another conflict between France and Britain’s natural allies and cousins the Germans – that had catastrophic consequences. His diplomatic trip to Paris in 1903 was the last visit abroad by a British sovereign undertaken without ministerial approval.2
George V was kept on a much tighter rein, both by his wife and by his Prime Ministers. He was also, luckily for the British Constitution’s sake, a much duller dog. His official biographer, Harold Nicolson, exclaimed with self-pity in his diary, ‘for seventeen years in fact he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps’.3 Sophisticated people found plenty to mock about George V. He was small, and peppery. At the opening of the Tate Gallery extension, he stood before the French Impressionists and called out to the Queen, ‘Here’s something to make you laugh, May.’ In the National Gallery, he had shaken his stick at a Cézanne.4 At his Silver Jubilee in 1935, he and Queen Mary went to St Paul’s Cathedral, where, of course, there was a large gathering of clergy. ‘A wonderful service,’ the King said afterwards to the Dean. ‘The Queen and I are most grateful. Just one thing wrong with it – too many parsons getting in the way.’5
Yet, the enormous crowds who filled the streets of London to see their King Emperor on that day moved him, and – for he was a modest man – surprised him. That night, broadcasting to the nation via the relatively new-fangled invention of the wireless, he said, in his strange, cocknified voice, ‘I can only say to you, my very dear people, that the Queen and I thank you from the depth of our hearts for all the loyalty and – may I say – the love, with which this day and always you have surrounded us.’6
It was all the more moving, because this socially awkward sailor-king was not one to wear his heart on his sleeve. For twenty-five years, he had done his duty, gone through the motions of office. He and Queen Mary were, quite simply, adored by the British people, and by the people of the British Empire. His grand-daughter, who became Queen Elizabeth II, used to call him ‘Grandfather England’. It was an appropriate nickname. He was an embodiment, and that is what a successful constitutional monarch can be. It is not yet possible to know how closely Elizabeth II has been involved with the political crises of her reign. For instance, what did she have to say to Tony Blair about the banishment of most hereditary peers from the House of Lords, and the failure of his Government to find a satisfactory way of selecting members of a Second Chamber. We know that George V was, willy nilly, involved in the Constitutional Crisis of 1909–11 – basically caused by the conflict between the strong Liberal Commons and the largely Conservative and Unionist Lords, who clashed over both Ireland and the Budget. The threat to create 500 Liberal peers to outvote the Tories in the Lords was one that George V rejected, but he was forced to accept the Parliament Bill, 1910, which made it impossible thereafter for the Lords to overturn fiscal decisions made by the Commons. (There had been cries of ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Who Killed the King?’ when the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith next appeared in the House of Commons.)7
In December 1910, Asquith sent a memo to George V that set out in no uncertain terms that the era of monarchical power was definitely over:
The part to be played by the Crown… has happily been settled by the accumulated traditions and the unbroken practice of more than seventy years. It is to act upon the advice of Ministers who for the time being possess the confidence of the House of Commons, whether that advice does or does not conform to the private and personal judgement of the sovereign. Ministers will always pay the utmost deference, and give the most serious consideration, to any criticism or objection that the Monarch may offer to their policy; but the ultimate decision rests with them; for they, and not the Crown, are responsible to Parliament.8
At the other end of George V’s reign when, the Liberal Party in tatters, the first Labour Government had been voted in, George, one of the most natural Tories imaginable, had been obliged to oversee the crisis caused by the financial collapse of 1934, and the choice facing the Labour Party – of voting to cut unemployment benefit or going bankrupt. The other parties expressed their willingness to serve in a National Government under Ramsay MacDonald, and this was the option favoured by King George. It destroyed MacDonald in the eyes of his party, and confirmed many Labour supporters in their republican instincts.
All this was to show that a constitutional monarch is not just a ceremonial figurehead. Though George V had no executive power, he did have a role, and it was one that history showed to have been that of a broker between differing political sects. He, for example, had chosen Baldwin as Conservative Prime Minister rather than Curzon, in 1923. He knew, however, that he must tread gently. Indeed, George V’s obsession with the Russian Revolution was undying, and one of his great dreads, when there was a Labour Government in power, was that ‘they’, his Socialist ministers, would ‘make’ him shake hands with those who had murdered his relatives, that is, the new Soviet diplomats in London.
George V, who so terrified his sons, was also their political role model. It was the model which his son David – Edward VIII – was unable to follow, but the example of George V and Queen Mary was the tried and trusted role model for George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, when their moments came.
From early childhood, Elizabeth – ‘Lilibet’ as she was known to her parents – had a close rapport with old King George V. Whereas others were terrified of the King’s bad temper, she spoke to him with Cordelia-like directness. When he did a little drawing to amuse her, she responded, ‘You really are not at all a bad drawer.’9 When he fell ill, the doctors recommended her presence to heal him, and she was sent to Bognor Regis, where the King had a villa, to play on the sands, while he sat in a deck-chair on the seashore watching her. ‘It was wonderful to see them together,’ her governess recalled, ‘the bearded old man and the polite little girl holding on to one of his fingers.’10
The decade of her birth was not a happy time to be a monarch. Just eight years before Elizabeth II was born, on 21 April 1926, her cousin the Emperor of Russia, his wife and his five teenage children, two servants and the family doctor were taken to a cellar in Ekaterinburg by Bolshevik revolutionaries, and done to death with revolvers and bayonets. In the same year, her cousin the German Emperor, Wilhelm II – in whose loving arms his grandmother Queen Victoria had died on the Isle of Wight in 1901 – abdicated the German throne, and went into exile in The Netherlands, where he lived until his death in 1941. There had been loud cries in Britain to have him hanged as a war criminal. In the same year as Wilhelm’s Abdication, the last Emperor of Austria, the saintly Karl, was deposed. Even as Elizabeth was being born, Britain was in the grip of the General Strike, in which the middle and upper classes feared that the working classes would, unless
robustly opposed, impose Communism in the United Kingdom. They were heady, miserable, times. The poor were really poor – unimaginably poor by the standards of early twenty-first-century Europe. Children in London had rickets, and lived on starvation rations.
The last years of the Russian monarchy had been a tragic melodrama. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was in some respects the surviving remnant of the Holy Roman Empire itself, was the ancien régime embodied in the figurehead of its Emperors, whose latter days had been marked, as had their Russian counterparts, by the excitement of assassination attempts and political extremism. The Wilhelmine regime in Germany was likewise technicoloured and dramatic.
The comparative boringness of the British court was an essential part of the success story of constitutional monarchy. That is why I began by emphasizing it. The dullness inspired Sir Max Beerbohm, that 1890s wit who lived out of time in the twentieth century, to write his famous ‘Ballade Tragique à Double Refrain’:
SCENE: A Room in Windsor Castle.
TIME: The Present
Enter a Lady-in-Waiting and a Lord-in-Waiting
SHE:
Slow pass the hours—ah, passing, slow!
My doom is worse than anything
Conceived by Edgar Allan Poe:
The Queen is duller than the King.
HE:
Lady, your mind is wandering;
You babble what you do not mean.
Remember, to your heartening,
The King is duller than the Queen.
SHE:
No, most emphatically No!
To one firm-rooted fact I cling
In my now chronic vertigo:
The Queen is duller than the King.
HE:
Lady, you lie. Last evening
I found him with a Rural Dean,
Talking of district-visiting...
The King is duller than the Queen.
SHE:
At any rate he doesn’t sew!
You don’t see him embellishing
Yard after yard of calico...
The Queen is duller than the King.
Oh to have been an underling
To (say) the Empress Josephine!
HE:
Enough of your self-pitying!
The King is duller than the Queen.
SHE
(firmly): The Queen is duller than the King.
HE:
Death then for you shall have no sting.
[Stabs her and, as she falls dead, produces phial from breast-pocket of coat.]
Nevertheless, sweet friend Strychnine,
[Drinks.]
The King—is—duller than—the Queen.
[Dies in terrible agony.]11
The British believe there is an old Chinese curse – ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Although the curse seems to be about as ‘Chinese’ as spring rolls manufactured for a Western supermarket, and no oriental original has ever been found for the saying, it is nonetheless a saying that applies to the monarchs of early twentieth-century Europe, and to the countries over which they once ruled. Nicholas II ruled over a very interesting court – rivetingly interesting when compared with the quiet routines of George V, sticking in his stamps of an evening while his wife did her embroidery. The Russian court was dominated by the wild-eyed peasant con-man and sex-maniac Rasputin, whom the Emperor and his wife pathetically believed could hold at bay, or even cure, the haemophilia by which their son was afflicted.
The Austrian and the German Empires were comparably ‘interesting’, and the destiny of all three Empires, once they had lost their monarchs, became ‘interesting’ to a nightmarish degree. Russia was plunged into the bloodiest of civil wars, in which the Bolsheviks were victorious. There followed the tyrannies of Lenin and Stalin, the establishment of the Gulag Archipelago, and an Eastern Europe, under the sway of Stalin, in which a huge proportion of the population were imprisoned, while the rest feared that their very thoughts might land them in prison or, worse, lead them to the firing-squad. This was to be the fate not only of the peoples of the former Russian Empire, but also of those lands from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire – Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Balkan lands of Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria – that had fallen under Stalin’s sway or Stalin’s threats. Meanwhile, the lands once controlled by the Prussian autocracy would, once the Emperor had abdicated, become briefly a Communist republic, and then a liberal-leftist republic (the Weimar years), eventually crippled by the international economic situation and overwhelmed by the rise of National Socialism. As the world watched the torch-lit processions and stupendously orchestrated rallies of the Third Reich, and noted the slow incremental growth of anti-Semitic legislation, it tried to block its ears to those who warned that Germany was rearming and preparing for war. Listening to Hitler’s theatrical displays of rhetoric must have been a good way of making many British people feel thankful for the ‘dullness’ of their King and Queen and of their nebulous, unwritten Constitution.
Because the role of the monarchy in British political life had become so comparatively subdued in the era of our Queen’s childhood, it was easy to believe that it actually played no significant part in keeping the country safe from the extremes which were destroying the lives of so many millions in Europe. It was easy to say that Britain did not have a Stalin or a Hitler because it had held fast to the institution of Parliament, because its laws were, comparatively speaking, more decent, its economy comparatively speaking more stable than those of Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany or the Stalinist East. No doubt there is much to be said for this point of view. Deeper and longer reflection, however, suggests that the monarchs themselves – George V, George VI and Elizabeth II – did play some role in maintaining the political stability of the nation. Precisely because this role was subdued, gentle, partial, it is difficult to quantify or to prove. Perhaps it is only as Elizabeth II’s reign moves towards its close that we can begin to sense what we owe to these three monarchs who either dared to be dull or who had the good fortune to be born dull.
It was one thing to be dull. What, though, was the British monarch’s function? Was George V doing anything that could not have been done equally efficiently by an elected President? Was there any need for the British to continue with their monarchy at all? For the first ten years of Lilibet’s life, ‘Grandfather England’, when not killing animals or sticking in stamps, continued the patient, steady business of being a constitutional monarch. In one of his earliest audiences with Ramsay MacDonald, the King assured the Labour Leader that the sovereign does not discuss business with anyone other than his Private Secretary.12 Whereas the treatment meted out to the King by the Liberals, and especially by Lloyd George, had ‘bordered on the contemptuous’,13 MacDonald ‘kept him better informed than any of his predecessors had done’.14 This pattern strangely enough was followed by later Labour leaders, James Callaghan, for example, noting the Queen’s interest in the day-today ups and downs of politics. Yet there was no sense in which the monarch had his hand on the tiller of power. The Asquith–Lloyd George government had seen to that definitively and forever.
What remained to be seen, as George V’s reign came to an end, was whether the old order could be maintained when his raffish bachelor son, Edward VIII – Lilibet’s ‘Uncle David’ – came to the throne. When old King George eventually died, a young poet, John Betjeman, wrote one of the finest royal elegies in the English language. He imagined old men of the King’s generation receiving the news – ‘old men who never cheated, never doubted’15 – and staring nervously towards the future world. Betjeman, in a sense, was seeing the same truth that had so amused Max Beerbohm. If you were writing a textbook on the Constitution, the power and function of the monarchy, you would say that the power and function of the monarchy, by 1936, had shrunk to almost nothing. Yet this was patently not the case, for, although politicians could carry on the business of government without the King, and treat him on occasion with contempt, there was another country which
was definitely in touch with its monarch. That was the population of Great Britain, and its Empire, outside the Whitehall establishment. In 1936 Betjeman demonstrated that the monarchy and the British people enjoyed a symbiotic relationship which could perhaps only be defined in poetry. The extreme conservatism of ‘Grandfather England’ prompted many, not least his heir, to believe that the monarchy had to change in order to survive. Whether it would survive the arrival of Edward VIII remained only to be seen.
Old men who never cheated, never doubted,
Communicated monthly, sit and stare
At the red suburb, stretched beyond the run-way
Where a young man lands hatless from the air.
This was Lilibet’s Uncle David. The delicate destiny of the British crown now lay in this rather stupid man’s reckless hands.
2
‘I SERVE’
‘My whole life, whether it be long or short,
shall be devoted to your service’
PRINCESS ELIZABETH IN HER TWENTY-FIRST
BIRTHDAY BROADCAST
In 1965, the year that Churchill died, the 1930s had begun to seem a very long way away. The Queen’s family, led by her mother, had behaved for nearly thirty years as if the exiled King, now the Duke of Windsor, did not exist. It was Queen Elizabeth II who decided to bring this state of affairs to an end. When the poor ‘little Dook’, as his friends in Paris called him, came over to the London Clinic for treatment on a detached retina, Lilibet went to visit her uncle. She spent about half an hour talking to him, bandaged and pyjama-clad, and to the stringy old Duchess Wallis. It was a sign that she had buried the hatchet. Some journalists claimed that when she left the hospital, the Queen was wiping a tear from her eye. During two or three days of convalescence, the pair were seen, uncle and niece, walking together in the gardens of Buckingham Palace.16 She made another visit to see him in Paris when he was dying in 1971. By then, he weighed six stone. It had taken the nurses several hours to prepare him, getting him out of bed, removing the tubes, and dressing him in a blazer and trousers. Although he was on a carefully concealed drip, he rose to his feet to kiss her and to greet her as ‘my dear’. She asked him how he was. ‘Not so bad’, was the reply in his strange voice, a mixture of his father’s cockney and his wife’s American. He was dead ten days later.17