The Queen

by A. N. Wilson

  The programme, when shown in Britain, had forty million viewers. The population of the entire British archipelago at the time was 55.44 million, so if you exclude babies and young children, the extremely old, and the numbers of people who still did not possess a television set, it would be safe to say that, in effect, almost everyone in Britain saw The Royal Family. It is an anodyne film when viewed today, and the details which seemed so daring in 1969 now seem merely boring. (The Royal Family attempting to light a barbecue; the Queen, Prince Philip and their two elder children at the lunch table; the Royal Family on the Royal Yacht, and so on.) In 1969, what caused the sensation was not what was shown, but the fact of it being shown at all.

  Television is not a medium which easily conveys the truth. Even when it sets out to tell the truth, as Cawston’s documentary did, it produces something which is by definition unnatural. It isn’t natural to see a family eating a meal at which one is not a guest. And it certainly isn’t natural to see a Head of State having a private conversation, however dull, about how to reply to letters from another Head of State. The unnaturalness of filming it in the first place is compounded by the voyeuristic unnaturalness of watching it. Those who had encouraged the Queen to allow the film – the modernizers such as the Duke of Edinburgh and William Heseltine – probably had the rather stupid idea that a television camera would, somehow, convey a, or the, truth – show the monarch and her family to be ordinary beings, and thereby make them more sympathetic to a possibly sceptical public. ‘It wasn’t a soap,’ said Lord Brabourne, the film-director son of Lord Mountbatten. ‘It was a matter of conveying these people as human. Before Royal Family, the public had no idea what they were like.’67 Was television the best means of conveying what anyone is actually like? Was it a good idea to tell the public what the Royal Family is actually like? Has anyone ever fathomed what the Queen is actually like? (‘Who are you?’ asked a Malaysian boy of Prince Charles during another BBC television programme – Charles, the Private Man, the Public Role, shown on 29 June 1994 – to receive the reply, ‘I wish I knew.’)68

  Even at the time of the Royal Family film, there were sage words of caution. David Attenborough, who was famous, even in those days, for observing strange creatures in their native habitats, and using television cameras as intrusive instruments of natural history, told Richard Cawston, ‘You’re killing the monarchy, you know, with this film you’re making. The whole institution depends on mystique and the tribal chief in his hut. If any member of the tribe ever sees inside the hut, then the whole system of the tribal chiefdom is damaged and the tribe eventually disintegrates.’69

  We can now see that Attenborough’s words were true, and that many of the more embarrassing wounds suffered by the Royal Family in the last forty years have been, if not self-inflicted, then very nearly self-inflicted. If the Queen’s children, and even more children-in-law, had not chosen to co-operate with journalists in their indiscreet books and articles, they would have been in a stronger position to complain when their ‘privacy’ was invaded. It is hard to think of any royal broadcasts, other than the Queen’s Christmas messages, and her personal message to the world after the death of Diana, which have not been disastrous. Monarchists would wish to blot from their memories, but cannot, such horrors as It’s A Royal Knock-Out (1987) organized by the Queen’s youngest child, Prince Edward, in which he and his siblings, dressed in supposedly Tudor costumes, played silly games, an incident made more embarrassing by the Prince storming out of a press conference which was failing to treat him with sufficient deference. Then there was Charles’s attempt to put his side of his marital troubles to Jonathan Dimbleby in the 1994 BBC programme, and Princess Diana’s Panorama return match with Martin Bashir on 20 November 1995, in which she said she would like to be known as the Queen of Hearts… Over Princess Andrew’s ex-wife’s many television appearances, including her tearful appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show, kindness draws a veil. The most spectacular example of how utterly television can misrepresent reality was demonstrated in an episode of a BBC fly-on-the-wall series called A Year with the Queen, broadcast in 1997. One episode showed the Queen, in tiara and ceremonial robes, being snapped by the distinguished American photographer Annie Leibovitz. It would seem as if Leibovitz had also asked if she could take the Queen in something less dressy. The Queen was recorded, saying to one of her aides, ‘Less dressy? What do you think this is?’ Later she said, ‘I’m not changing anything. I’ve done enough, dressing like this, thank you very much.’ If this was a little bit tetchy, then anyone who has experienced the tedium of being photographed – even as the guest at a wedding – will surely recognize what tedium it must be for a public figure to undergo it on so regular a basis. The Queen was duly filmed coming into the room, dressed in these robes. In the ‘edit’, however, the incident changed. The Queen’s completely private little complaint to her dresser became a showdown, in which she was addressing these less than civil comments to her American visitor – which she had not done. The film of the Queen, as so often looking rather cross, sweeping into the room dutifully for her photoshoot when she would no doubt have preferred to be elsewhere, became, in the BBC version, the Queen sweeping out of the room in a huff, au Prince Edward. The BBC, when its truly deplorable journalistic practices had been exposed, duly apologized, but it had lost the confidence of the public.70

  The Royal Family film may not have been the sole cause of the change in public attitudes to royalty, but it did not help. By choosing to become, in however distant a sense, television ‘personalities’, the royals were placing themselves at one with any other famous person, and there was little affection or sympathy for them in the subsequent decades. The whole tenor of British life, for the last three decades of the twentieth century, was anti-hierarchical, anti-traditional, anti-deferential. It is astonishing, when one looks back on it, that it took someone (as it happens, it was Tony Blair) so long to reform the House of Lords. In November 1999, the House of Lords Act removed the automatic right of hereditary peers to sit in the Second Chamber as legislators, though some ninety-two remained, as did some bishops.

  By the time this happened, the Royal Family had been through a series of calamities, culminating in the ‘annus horribilis’, in which, in addition to all the marital collapses, we witnessed the fire at Windsor Castle, and the sad figure of the Queen, in a headscarf and mackintosh, pacing mournfully among the smouldering ruins. Although she was a woman in her mid-sixties, she had the pathetic air of a miserable child drawn by E.H. Sheppard. It was little Lilibet among broken toys.

  It was the satirical magazine Private Eye, inspired by the Royal Family film, which first called the Queen ‘Brenda’ and her sister ‘Yvonne’. In particular Auberon Waugh, in what purported to be his diaries, constantly bemoaned the commonness of the Royal Family, claiming that the Queen sought his advice about what to do about her increasingly impossible children.

  The magazine still sometimes refers to her as ‘Brenda’, and among a certain type of metropolitan sophisticate the nickname is still repeated. One of the remarkable things about her, though, is that almost everyone – the press, her children, her court – refers to her as ‘the Queen’. When referring to the Prince of Wales, people as often as not say ‘Charles’. The tabloid newspapers used to try to refer to ‘Liz and Phil’, but no one ever used these nicknames in real life. She is simply ‘the Queen’.

  If jokes have ancestry, then perhaps the ‘Brenda’ joke in Private Eye goes back to Henry James, commenting upon the death of Queen Victoria as that of the ‘old middle class Queen’. In fact, Queen Victoria was not remotely middle class. In birth she was royal, European royal, through and through. In manners and custom, however, she was sui generis. She was truly eccentric and did not belong to any class. She was blind to class prejudice, and to race prejudice. Real members of the Victorian middle class would not, as she did, have wanted to befriend working-class men like John Brown, or brown men like her faithful Indian Muslim servant Abdul Karim. V
ictoria even installed Halal butchers at Windsor Castle to accommodate the tastes of Karim and his family. The Queen, our Queen, as far as we know, has no one in her life who is the equivalent of Karim, whom Victoria called ‘the Moonshie’. Indeed, one of the criticisms levelled at the Royal Household years ago by John Grigg is still valid – that it is extraordinarily unmixed, racially and socially. The Queen is, however, rather like Queen Victoria, sui generis. Her recreations – the long weeks in the Highlands, the deerstalking, the passion for going to the races and owning racehorses – these are the recreations of the rich. Her way of doing her job, by contrast, has been to transcend class distinction. That is why the republican novelist Sue Townsend’s fantasy The Queen and I (1992) succeeded so triumphantly on one level and failed on another. The story takes place after Britain has become a republic and the Royal Family have been made to live in a modest house on a modern housing estate in a provincial town. The novel succeeded as a plausible portrait of Elizabeth Windsor, who, together with Princess Anne, has the resourcefulness and common sense to cope with life in these changed circumstances. The book failed as the piece of republican propaganda which was originally71 intended. Sue Townsend actually came to admire the Queen as she wrote the book. Although Townsend remained a republican, she could see that the institution of monarchy was sturdier than she had imagined, and this, in part, was something to do with the mysterious character of the Queen herself.

  Reading the book, some readers will have wondered whether the deadliest legacy left to the modern monarchy by Queen Victoria was wealth. Victoria grew up, by royal standards, poor. Her widowed mother relied entirely on handouts from the King, William IV, and it was only when Victoria had become Queen that the money started to roll in. This came not, as was supposed by an increasingly hostile public, from the Civil List, but from her income from the Duchy of Lancaster. By the end of her reign, she was, in her own right, the richest person in the kingdom, even richer than the Duke of Westminster or Lord Rothschild.

  Much of the unpopularity of the Royal Family stems from their wealth – Charles complaining about ‘uncomfortable’ seats in a section of an aircraft which most passengers could only dream about; Prince Philip considering himself poor because he might have to give up polo; Prince Andrew being given grotesque sums of money by his mother to build the hideous Sunninghill Park as a marital home with his greedy wife – whom Lord Charteris described as ‘vulgar, vulgar, vulgar’. (The house has since been demolished.) And the Prince of Wales wallowing in money from the Duchy of Cornwall, and buying Highgrove as a country residence for himself, rather than moving into Sandringham, the traditional seat of the Prince of Wales since Victorian times.

  Only after the ‘annus horribilis’ did the Queen or the Prince of Wales start to pay tax on their private income. She also agreed to strip the minor royals of their income from the Civil List and to pay for them herself – chiefly from funds from the Duchy of Lancaster.

  Andrew Marr in his book The Diamond Queen calculates that the Queen costs the tax payer the equivalent of half a cup of cappuccino per annum.72 This could well be true; and it is also worth bearing in mind that any Head of State, whether a monarch or an elected President, is likely to cost a lot of money – in terms of the upkeep of residences, entertaining foreign dignitaries, maintaining staff, and so forth.

  There is, however, a distinction between private and public wealth. No one supposes that the state coach in which the Queen rides to Parliament is her personal property, any more than she owns the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. Plato thought his Philosopher-Guardians, who ruled over his ideal Republic, should have no possessions at all. There would undoubtedly be a much greater purity about the relationship between the British people and the Royal Family if the Windsors were similarly dispossessed. This is not to say that they should be put into small houses on council estates, as in Sue Townsend’s fantasy. Rather, that those in a direct line of succession should be dedicated beings, beings apart, from the rest of us, unfettered by actual possessions. Their houses, land, even their clothes, horses and dogs, should hold the same status as the Crown Jewels, mere accoutrements of the role. If this were to happen – a voluntary dispossession by the heir to the throne and by his heirs – much of the wind would be removed from the republican sails. The personal wealth of the Queen remains the only scandalous thing about her.

  When Queen Victoria ascended her throne, the monarchs were very nearly in the position of Plato’s Guardians, even if they scarcely behaved like Philosopher-Kings. They depended for money on Parliament, and they lived in their palaces as grace-and-favour dwellings, just as modern Popes, say, are placed to live in the Vatican, but do not own any of the priceless treasures in the Vatican Museums and Galleries.

  That arch-royalist, and superb royal biographer, Elizabeth Longford wrote in 1993 that the only reason Prince Charles might refuse the throne would be if Parliament ‘deprived him of personal independence’ financially, that is, behaved as Parliaments have done ever since the reign of William and Mary. ‘I think it of absolute importance that the Monarch should have a degree of financial independence from the State,’ she quoted him as saying. ‘I am not prepared to take on the position of sovereign of this country on any other basis.’73

  If he still believes this, then some kind friend of his, and of the monarchy’s, should urge him to think again. The colossal private wealth of the Windsors, and its abuse – witness the life and times of Charles’s brother Prince Andrew, and of his estranged wife, witness the behaviour of Princess Michael of Kent, to name only a handful of examples – is the prime reason that republicanism even gets a hearing. The most sordid part of any of the books about the Windsors, past or present, is not their marital misfortunes – any decent person sympathizes with them over these, and in particular sympathizes with them having to play out their private lives on such a public stage. What sticks in the throats of many members of the public, even the most ardent royalists, is the realization that, as well as being hereditary Heads of State, the sovereigns of this House believe themselves to be somehow entitled to live like multi-millionaires. The wranglings between George VI and Edward VIII about how much rent they owed the exiled Duke for Sandringham and Balmoral (the privately owned property of the monarch), and who owned which particular jewels, snatched from Queen Alexandra’s treasure-trove, make for unedifying reading.

  Princess Anne is highly respected, the world over, as President of the charity Save the Children. Think what use could be made by that organization by the sale of just one item in the Queen’s personal wealth – George V’s stamp collection, which has probably been scarcely looked at since the 1930s.

  6

  PRESIDENTS

  ‘Don’t you think the PM ought to be at the north door?…

  He must have more of a role, surely?’

  STAFF AT NUMBER TEN, BADGERING BLACK ROD

  BEFORE THE QUEEN MOTHER’S FUNERAL

  Nobody quite realized, during the long premierships of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, the effect that these two individuals, and their quasi-presidential style of leadership, would have on the monarchy and the British people. Under Thatcher, and even more under Blair, the British could develop a sense of what it might be like to have a President. There must be a connection between this fact and the growth in popularity of the monarchy. For, in spite of all the own goals scored by the Royal Family, in spite of their catastrophic mistakes in public relations, there can be no doubt that the monarchy, as the Queen’s reign draws to its close, is more popular than ever before.

  Two things might have been predicted about the British monarchy from the late 1970s onwards. Both would have been false predictions, but they might have seemed like common sense at the time. One would have been that as Britain developed into a classless, multi-racial, pluralist European society it would have become tired of its monarchy. The public mood would decide that it was unnecessary to have a King or Queen. Why should not Britain, in common with its partners in Eu
rope, France and Germany, have become a republic, with an elected President, serving limited times in office? Would this not be more sensible, more ‘grown-up’, more rational?

  The other development, which would have gone hand in hand with such a public mood, would have been that the monarchy became the exclusive enthusiasm of the ultra-conservatives. In France, after the calamities of 1870, monarchism went hand in hand with politics of the extreme right. Charles Maurras, though a non-believer in God, supported the Church and believed in the restoration of the monarchy. One could imagine such a ‘high Toryism’ having developed in Britain – or at any rate in England, with, perhaps, T.S. Eliot (an enthusiastic reader of Maurras) as its most eloquent prophet. Eliot, it will be remembered, said, ‘I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics’.74

  Evelyn Waugh, though in a more humorous vein, tapped into a similar area of political consciousness; when asked in the 1950s how he was going to vote in a General Election, Waugh replied that he would not presume to advise his sovereign in her choice of ministers.

  In fact, as the old Britain changed out of all recognition; as the class structures altered; as religion ebbed and flowed, but chiefly ebbed; and even as the Royal Family became, for long periods, objects of simple derision, the monarchy, as embodied in the person of the Queen, remained popular. The upsurge in republicanism which was sometimes predicted never took place. Those who supported monarchy no doubt included the English equivalents of Maurras, right-wing ideologues. The huge majority of those who believed in monarchy, however, as well as supporting the Queen, did not come from any narrow ideological background, but were nevertheless quite steady in their support. They came from both Left and Right of the party political spectrum.