by A. N. Wilson
Although her political views (if she has them) are opaque, her personal tastes and characteristics (outside the equestrian sphere) not so much unknown as strangely irrelevant, her conversation seldom if ever repeated, her close relationships unshared with the gossips, her religion is plainly seen as part of her role. One would guess that, as far as she is concerned, it is completely central. Certainly, at Christmas after Christmas as the years have rolled by since the Coronation, she has used the annual broadcast to testify to her faith. In 2015, reflecting on the plight of refugees fleeing to Europe from the Middle East, she said:
It is true that the world has had to confront moments of darkness this year, but the Gospel of John contains a verse of great hope, often read at Christmas carol services: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’… For Joseph and Mary, the circumstances of Jesus’s birth – in a stable – were far from ideal, but worse was to come as the family was forced to flee the country.
It’s no surprise that such a human story still captures our imagination and continues to inspire all of us who are Christians, the world over.
Despite being displaced and persecuted throughout his short life, Christ’s unchanging message was not one of revenge or violence but simply that we should love one another.
In the previous year, 2014, she said:
For me, the life of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, whose birth we celebrate today, is an inspiration and an anchor in my life.
A role model of reconciliation and forgiveness, he stretched out his hands in love, acceptance and healing. Christ’s example has taught me to seek to respect and value all people, of whatever faith or none.
Similar words could be found in any of the broadcasts she made in the 1950s. The inspiration and anchor of her life have remained constant: her faith in Jesus Christ.
This fact gives a peculiar quality to her role in regard to the Church. Many in Britain who still go to church on Christmas morning (if not very often for the rest of the year) must have come home dismayed by the lightweight attempts at humour or the patronizing secularity of the sermon by a professional member of the clergy which they have just heard from the pulpit, only to hear, in the sovereign’s broadcast, the sort of words they might have expected to hear from their bishop or priest. Even if this is not the case, everyone must wonder, as the Church of England’s regular congregations become more ancient and more sparse, and as Britain as a whole becomes more secular and more ‘multi-faith’, whether there is a place any longer for an established Church.
If you were to consult many commentators on the political scene, they would surely think that the British Head of State’s relationship with the Church of England was the most anomalous feature of her role. In the course of her reign, the numbers of practising Anglicans – members of the Church of England who actually go to church – has plummeted. Runcie’s successor at Canterbury, George Carey, has even suggested that the Church of which Elizabeth is the Supreme Governor, is but ‘one generation away from extinction’.57
The National Secular Society has called for the Coronation Oath to be discarded or replaced with something ‘more inclusive and appropriate for the modern era’. It reported that, in an interview, the Prince of Wales had recanted his idea that he wished to be seen as a defender of ‘faiths’, and he now wishes, when he takes the oath, to be seen as Defender of the Faith, as British sovereigns have been since the 1540s.58
When we read again the order of service for the 1953 Coronation, it is actually hard to imagine the words, as they stand on the page, ever being repeated in quite this form again. Apart from anything else, the promise to maintain the Protestant religion seems quaint, when relations between Catholics and Protestants are so much more cordial than they were when the Queen was crowned, and when the huge proportion of Christians in Britain who go to church on a regular basis are in fact Roman Catholics.
Archbishop. Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?
Queen. All this I promise to do.
Then the Queen arising out of her Chair, supported as before, the Sword of State being carried before her, shall go to the Altar, and make her solemn Oath in the sight of all the people to observe the premises: laying her right hand upon the Holy Gospel in the great Bible (which was before carried in the procession and is now brought from the Altar by the Archbishop, and tendered to her as she kneels upon the steps), and saying these words:
The things which I have here before promised, I will perform and keep. So help me God.
Then the Queen shall kiss the Book and sign the Oath.
The Queen having thus taken her Oath shall return again to her Chair, and the Bible shall be delivered to the Dean of Westminster.
The Church of England is often spoken about, understandably enough, as a quasi-comic, senescent and outmoded institution which cannot be justified, when the majority in society do not apparently acknowledge its place in society. Secularists, as well as religious people who do not belong to the Church of England, might understandably object to the hold which the national Church still possesses on national life: the huge proportion of primary schools (schools teaching children between four and eleven years old), for example, are Church of England; the most influential private schools are Church of England foundations; nearly all the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge have Church of England chapels and are Church foundations too. Bishops of the Church of England, as of right, sit (at the time of writing!) in the House of Lords. Although the statisticians seem to be satisfied that Britain is becoming ever more secular in outlook, there is no country in the Christian world, unless you count Vatican City as a ‘country’, where institutional Christianity is so entwined with the political framework. Can this continue?
Archbishop Fisher, who placed the crown on Elizabeth’s head in 1953, recognized that the monarchy had been deprived of political power. This released it, in his estimation. It now possessed ‘the possibility of a spiritual power far more exalted and far more searching in its demands: the power to lead, to inspire, to unite, by the Sovereign’s personal character, personal conviction, personal example’.59
The Queen is an observant Anglican. She takes a personal interest in the day-to-day life of the Church of England. Archbishop Runcie’s sense of support from her in times of crisis will have been felt by his successors. She has followed the changes in the liturgy and in the canon law of the Church with interest – she has always, for example, supported the ordination of women to the priesthood, and their consecration to the episcopate. More than this, however, she is that rather unusual figure on the public stage, a figure who makes her religious faith completely central to her whole world-outlook. She has been the complete fulfilment of Archbishop Fisher’s dream.
Whether the future monarchs will be so overtly pious, no one can say. Whether the Church of England will even continue to exist – at any rate in its present form – is a matter of speculation. One thing can be said about the last sixty years, however, and that is that Christianity has had no more consistent public defender in British life than the Queen. She has been truly a defender of the faith, and her ‘personal character… personal example’ have entitled her to express her ‘personal conviction’.
God sent into the world a unique person – neither a philosopher nor a general, important though they are, but a Saviour, with the power to forgive. Forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It can heal broken families, it can restore friendships and it can reconcile divided co
mmunities. It is in forgiveness that we feel the power of God’s love…
It is my prayer that on this Christmas day we might all find room in our lives for the message of the angels and for the love of God through Christ our Lord.60
Where else in the world do you hear such broadcasts? Even the Popes, when making their public utterances at Christmas, usually feel they have to throw in hopes for world peace and comments on climate change or the disparity between the world’s rich or poor. For the pure undiluted religious ‘angle’, it is in the Queen’s broadcasts that one must look. As the patronage secretaries of the various Prime Ministers have considered names for future Archbishops of Canterbury, and as one unfortunate clergyman succeeded another in that unenviable role, a rather simple solution must sometimes have occurred to them. Why not double up the roles of Queen and Pontiff? Or, at the very least, why not suggest that just as Prime Ministers write the ‘Queen’s Speeches’, the Queen should write the Archbishops’ sermons?
5
BRENDA
In that red house, in the red mahogany book-case,
The stamp collection waits with mounts long dry.
JOHN BETJEMAN, ‘DEATH OF KING GEORGE V’
‘The press have turned us into a soap opera,’ moaned Prince Philip in 1999.61 Some would say, after the broadcasting of the TV film The Royal Family in 1969, and as his children, throughout the 1970s and ’80s, eagerly sought to tell their version of family squabbles to the media, that the soap opera was a joint creation. The phrase ‘royal soap opera’ appears to have been the invention of that brilliant journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, in 1955. In a celebrated article in the New Statesman, in September of that year, Muggeridge wondered whether there were some people who felt that another photograph of the Royal Family would be ‘more than they could bear’. He deplored what he called ‘the royal soap opera’. For a time it looked as if Muggeridge, one of the best television performers in the medium’s history, would not be employable again by the BBC. When one of his sons died at about this juncture, Muggeridge and his wife returned home to find the house daubed with graffiti telling him he deserved it. At about this era, another intelligent commentator on political and national affairs, John Grigg, was punched in the street for daring to make some quite mild criticisms of the Queen and the ‘tweedy’ courtiers with which she was surrounded. It really seemed as if the Royal Family were inviolable, and as if criticisms, however reasonable, were simply not allowed.
After the truly absurd sycophancy of the 1950s, however, things began to change. During the following decades, very many of the distinctive features of British life were turned on their heads. In the 1950s, for example, those Britons who spoke with regional accents, and hoped for advancement, were sent by their parents to elocution lessons, where they could acquire the tones of what was sometimes called Received Standard, sometimes BBC, and sometimes the Queen’s English (though, as we have already observed, the Queen’s particular way of speaking English was always highly distinctive). By the 1960s, this pattern began to change. By contrast, regional accents and London voices were a positive advantage in many walks of life, not just in photography, fashion or the rock music industry. Those who spoke ‘posh’ at home learnt to change their voices at work. Those who spoke posh all the time began to seem, if not freakish, then, a race apart. Undoubtedly, the way they spoke made the Royal Family seem strange.
Whether or not successful Roman Emperors truly employed a slave to murmur in their ears ‘Memento Mori’ during triumphal processions, to diminish their sense of vainglory, no such figure has been deemed necessary at the court of Queen Elizabeth II. Modern monarchs do not even require, as did their medieval or Renaissance forebears, a court fool to tease them into comparable self-realizations. Who needs a court jester when you have the press? The Fourth Estate knows that if it can pay a paparazzo to capture a royal personage sunbathing in the nude, it will sell newspapers. Royal figures are aware every day of their lives that they are ‘human, all too human’. They are subjected to constant press scrutiny.
When the Queen came to the throne, the conventions surrounding the monarch, her family and their circle were rigid. When her governess, Crawfie, published the almost slavishly sycophantic The Little Princesses in 1950 – a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the upbringing of Lilibet and Margaret Rose – there was outcry. Crawfie was ostracized. Any member of the household who tried to ‘do a Crawfie’ and repeat stories of what happened when the Palace door closed would find themselves vigorously pursued by the law. Anyone who broke the code which decreed that you should not repeat conversations held with royal personages would become pariahs.
Yet, as the 1960s went by and Britain changed, it was inevitable that some embarrassment should be felt about the stuffy, old-fashioned image presented by the Royal Family, with their arcane, upper-class voices, and their apparently rarefied life of privilege. Inevitably, someone would advance the idea that they needed to ‘move with the times’.
In 1969 the Duke of Edinburgh was in the United States. In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press he said, ‘We go into the red next year, now, inevitably if nothing happens we shall either have to – I don’t know, we may have to move into smaller premises… for instance we had a small yacht which we had to sell, and I shall have to give up polo fairly soon.’62 It is not difficult to imagine the derision with which these remarks were greeted on both sides of the Atlantic. It was comparable to the moment (22 February 2006) when the Prince of Wales distributed copies of his journal (entitled ‘The Great Chinese Takeaway’) to some trusted friends, and it was, inevitably, leaked to the press. In this account of his journey to Hong Kong to witness the return of the colony to China, he mused, ‘It took me some time to realise that this was not first class (!) although it puzzled me as to why the seat seemed so uncomfortable.’ The Prince and his party had been put in the Business Class of the aeroplane because the larger First Class area was needed to accommodate the much larger party of politicians, former foreign secretaries, Prime Ministers and so forth. ‘Such is the end of Empire, I sighed to myself.’63
No such story has ever been told about the Queen, and one suspects that it never will be. When, in late 1981, the Queen, through her Press Secretary, set up a meeting with editors and royal correspondents to discuss what she felt to be excessive pursuit of the Princess of Wales, she was asked, by the editor of the News of the World, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to send a servant to the shop for Princess Diana’s wine-gums?’ Her tart response was, ‘Mr Askew, that was a most pompous remark.’64
The use of the word ‘pompous’ was suggestive. People might use many harsh adjectives about the Queen – stiff, unsmiling, awkward, detached – but she is not pompous. (Perhaps pomposity is nearly always a male vice?) She shares her father’s quite genuine simplicity. It does not seem like ‘humility’, if by that is implied something affected. Ryan Parry, an undercover reporter for the Daily Mirror, managed to get a job for two months working as a footman at Buckingham Palace, where he snooped into bedrooms, and took photographs of private living- and dining-rooms. Among the more arresting details were the Tupperware containers which the Queen used to keep her breakfast Cornflakes. Other snaps revealed old-fashioned one-bar electric fires used to heat enormous rooms.
Her unsophisticated tastes, which were apparent to those who met her when she enlisted in the ATS during the Second World War, remained with her throughout life. Whereas most educated Britons begin their day either silently, or listening to one of two radio stations – Radio Four for its news content (the Today programme) or Radio Three (classical music for the news-allergic) – the Queen, together with eight million others, used to tune in to Wake Up to Wogan on Radio Two, a light music show cheerily hosted by the Irish broadcaster Terry Wogan. At a reception at Buckingham Palace where she showed visible delight at meeting him, she cried ‘Flab!’ to Wogan in reference to his ‘fight the flab’ campaign.65
There has never been any need for the Queen to pretend to a simplicity
of life. True, she is on some levels a very rich woman who owns racehorses. In most respects, however, she is an embodiment of simplicity. Those who have been privy to seeing her private living quarters have seen the simplicity on display. A peer of the realm and his wife were asked to stay at Sandringham, and arrived early. They pushed open the front door and walked into the hall. The hall appeared to be empty and the peer looked around him. He had never been to the house before, and soon he began to laugh, calling out to his wife to see some fine old pictures hung on the panelling, but surrounded by appalling pastel drawings of corgis, or horses – the sort of pictures which would not even be seen for sale on the railings surrounding Hyde Park on a Sunday morning. As they allowed themselves the luxury of outright amusement, the two visitors heard a familiar voice cutting through the laughter.
‘You must be Lord ******,’ said the sovereign, who was sitting, quietly unseen in a corner of the hall, with an unfinished jigsaw puzzle spread out on the table in front of her.66
By the end of the 1960s, it was felt that she who was paraded on state occasions in a gold coach and wearing a crown should be made to reveal a more ‘human’ side to the public. In 1969, when the Queen was still in her early forties, a new Press Secretary, an Australian named William Heseltine, persuaded Her Majesty to allow the making of a film to be entitled The Royal Family. You could imagine what courtiers of the old school, such as Tommy Lascelles, would have thought of this idea, had it been suggested fifteen years earlier. It was a flyon-the-wall documentary. The head of the documentary department at the BBC, Richard Cawston, was the director. They filmed for a year, shooting forty-three hours of footage which were edited down to an hour and a half. Here was ‘the royal soap opera’ indeed. Fifteen years after Muggeridge was vilified for using the phrase, now, in 1969, the Royal Family themselves seemed eagerly to embrace the role of soap opera characters.