The Diamond Queen

by Andrew Marr

  For most of its history the British monarchy has been muttered at by artists and intellectuals for being insufficiently interested in the arts, writing or ideas generally. This was considered a problem even during the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, when it was noticed that Britain had nothing like the Prussian Pour le Mérite decoration, or the French honours for cultural and scientific achievement. Eventually Edward VII instituted the Order of Merit in 1902, to mark his Coronation. Unlike most other honours, it carries no aristocratic handle and has no connection with the government; it is in the gift of the king or queen alone and is limited to twenty-four members. Perhaps as a result it is one of the few British systems of award with an almost faultless record. Of all the figures in science, the arts and politics during the twentieth century one might have expected and hoped to be represented, a surprising proportion actually have been. From figures of the Victorian age still alive in the early days, such as Florence Nightingale, the co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace, and Thomas Hardy, through the great composers – Elgar, Britten, Vaughan Williams, Walton – poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ted Hughes, the artists Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Lucian Freud, Anthony Caro, writers such as E. M. Forster, Isaiah Berlin, Henry James and Tom Stoppard and a vast range of scientists, many of them Nobel Prize-winners or world-changers, such as Paul Dirac and Tim Berners-Lee, the roll-call has been very impressive. Even the political choices, such as Attlee and Thatcher, have been well made. In general, it is a club for people who need only their surname to identify them. They get the occasional lunch or dinner, all together with the Queen, and they get their portraits painted; but OM has nothing to do with pomp or pageantry. It is the nearest Britain has to a gathering of ‘the immortals’ – though as one of them put it to the author, beaming happily, ‘There are, I think, rather more immortals than there are of us.’ In 1917, these, plus a special order for diplomats and another for personal service to the monarch, the Royal Victorian Order, comprised the entire honours system. There were military honours too, of course; but nothing for all those ordinary Britons who served in other ways – giving money, giving extraordinary service, doing something ‘above and beyond’.

  Until then it could be argued that being honoured and having ‘an honour’ were different things, and rightly so. Fellow citizens’ approval and private marks of respect, together with the occasional gong from a charity or civic organization, were the most anyone would expect. George V changed that when he instituted the Order of the British Empire on 4 June 1917. It has five classes, running from the Knight Grand Cross to the more humble Member. The top two classes create Knights or Dames and the higher ones are limited in number – the simple OBEs and MBEs are not. The order is divided into military and civilian wings and the latter in particular has had, as it were, a huge influence on the influence of the monarchy. Many of the 404,500 honours conferred by the Queen are OBEs and MBEs: the twice-yearly lists of celebrities, sports stars and others have become a staple for newspaper comment, congratulation and disappointment. The notion of such an honour was almost certainly the idea of Lord Esher, a one-time Liberal MP whose long service as a courtier had started in Victorian times (he installed a lift for Queen Victoria at Windsor and pushed her wheelchair round Kensington Palace) and who had been heavily involved in Edward VII’s reign. Esher was sinuous, bisexual and a bit too much of a crawler, as well as a pusher, for George’s taste; but he was shrewd and saw the need for a more democratic honour.

  The war had seen new military honours being distributed for the vast numbers of front-line heroes, while at home the idea was that the OBE would go to people involved in some way in the huge voluntary efforts being made. Since it was impossible for the Palace to find and assign those to be honoured, this became almost entirely in the gift of the government of the day. Among the first recipients were trade union officials, including the left-wing William Appleton of the General Federation of Trade Unions and Ben Turner of the textile workers. By the end of 1919, 22,000 OBEs had been awarded, many to factory workers and charitable campaigners. The monarchy was putting down new roots in the very areas where it felt threatened. Unfortunately, the post-war Lloyd George government not only sold peerages and knighthoods, but also treated the OBEs as a kind of bargain-basement offer, and they became known for a time as the Order of the Bad Egg. In the decades since then, however, the OBE has risen in status, rather than declined, and is now at least as important to the British honours system as the Légion d’honneur is in France. The similarly republican honours system in the USA is more complicated than the British one, not less.

  The final founding act of the House of Windsor merely took a habit of earlier twentieth-century monarchy and pushed it further. Edward VII had known the importance of being seen by his people, and making regular visits to open hospitals, launch ships and inspect regiments. The Victorian Royals had had their names appended to almost anything built in brick, or granite, with a large door. But George and Mary were in a different league. During the industrial strife of the pre-war period they made major visits to industrial areas of England, Scotland and Wales. George went down a coal mine and visited bereaved miners’ families. On a visit to poor housing in Kennington, he got into trouble in the home of a Labour MP when his party noticed a picture of ‘the beast’ Keir Hardie on the wall, and made a disparaging remark, only to be told by the spirited daughter of the house that Hardie was of ‘one of the best men I know; and if anyone does not like him they need not stay in our house’.

  But war brought a far greater drive to get out and visit ordinary people. Wartime Britain depended on voluntary organizations in a way that is hard to appreciate today; around 10,000 new ones were formed during 1914–18. Having a royal patron or connection, or even visit, helped raise money and the renamed Windsors put themselves at the centre of an endless flurry of fundraising and morale boosting. Those 300 hospital visits mentioned before were only part of the story.

  Recently George V has not had a good press. He is remembered as a philistine, obsessed by outdated rules of dress and etiquette, and over-enthusiastic about his world-class stamp collection. He was certainly a naval martinet, equally capable of intimidating visitors and his children. His official biographer, while writing his life, gloomily confided to his wife that he had a ‘down’ on him: ‘He is all right as a gay young midshipman. He may be all right as a wise old King. But the intervening period when he was Duke of York, just shooting at Sandringham, is hard to manage or swallow. For seventeen years in fact he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.’9 But like others who waited long to become king, George greatly improved when he finally got the job. After his bumpy start, many of his later political interventions were well judged. His already short temper became shorter still following a bad fall from his horse during the Great War, after which he was often in great pain; but he coped well with a changed world in which socialist politicians arrived at Buckingham Palace and the aristocracy was losing its power.

  On becoming king before the First World War he loathed having to side with the democratically elected radical Liberal government against the House of Lords. But he bit his tongue and grimly got on with it. He found young Winston Churchill an impudent puppy and never took to cocky Lloyd George, particularly when he began to debase the honours system by selling off titles. But there was no public protest: George sat them both out. Later he made a truly important intervention in Northern Ireland after the creation of the Irish Republic, which did much to soothe things when it seemed to many a wider war in Ireland was unavoidable.

  Later in life, remembering the ‘Great War’ with horror, he was too soft on the subject of Hitler and too sceptical of Churchill as he began to rumble warnings; but he was hardly alone in that. For this story, what matters most is how he remade the monarchy itself. How the Queen reigns today; what she does; how she is seen and described, all have their origins in decisions taken by her grandfather when Europe was writhing i
n bloodsoaked turmoil, and Britain was facing starvation and defeat at the hands of U-boat captains. This is the first man who really matters in the Queen’s story – the cigar-scented, bearded old naval officer with whom she played as a child and still remembers well. George V was the founder of ‘the Firm’.

  He was greatly helped by his wife. In press photographs and formal pictures Queen Mary looks about as grandly stony-faced as any Royal could be. She was born at Kensington Palace in the zenith of Queen Victoria’s reign, surviving both her husband and her son King George VI and living, just, to see her granddaughter Elizabeth be crowned queen in 1953. Her birth had been communicated around the Royals of Europe in handwritten German letters; she watched her son’s funeral on television. Queen Mary’s influence on today’s British monarchy is big, if mostly forgotten. For although she was imposing, like the frosted prow of some ancient warship, and over-enthusiastic about being given presents by those she visited, Mary was a keen social reformer. As her husband reshaped the monarchy she formed a close alliance with a radical female trade union leader called Mary Macarthur who had led campaigns to raise the wages of the ‘sweated labour’ of Edwardian women sewing blouses, working in jam factories or forging chains. Macarthur was married to the Labour Party chairman Will Anderson and was a notorious firebrand. When Queen Mary invited her to Buckingham Palace she, in Macarthur’s own words, ‘positively lectured the Queen on the inequality of the classes, the injustice of it’. She concluded, rightly or not, that ‘The Queen does understand and grasp the whole situation from a Trade Union point of view.’10

  The first ‘situation’ was the shock effect of the early days of the war on trade and business, which meant huge numbers of female workers losing their jobs. Queen Mary and her aristocratic friends had encouraged a great surge of knitting and needlework as war-work, which of course simply made life harder for female employees of the clothing industry. Macarthur begged one friend to do everything in her power ‘to stop these women knitting!’ Queen Mary got the point and launched The Queen’s Work for Women Fund to raise money to subsidize projects for unemployed women. An all-party committee was set up, and though the Queen herself did not join the MPs, she heckled it from the sidelines and interested herself in the problem, in ways new to royalty.

  As the war dragged on, more and more women were recruited to replace fighting men, and the problems changed. Queen Mary, like the King, became a relentless visitor of food centres and hospitals, insisting always on seeing the worst wounded and those with the most distressing injuries, including the dying. She worked to raise money for relief funds and Christmas boxes for troops, and was affectionately described as ‘a charitable bulldozer’. In her paperwork and replies to charitable requests she was equally tireless. She was later said to have retorted to an exhausted princess complaining about yet another boring hospital visit, ‘We are the royal family – and we love hospitals.’ And she noted in the margin of one biography of her, which said she was easily bored, ‘As a matter of fact, the Queen is never bored.’ It is an attitude the current Queen shares.

  After the war ended, all this activity became part of the early Windsors’ unending effort to demonstrate royal relevance. There was plenty of evidence of the need for change. Lord Cromer, a kind of ancient crocodile of public service, had warned that ‘the Monarchy is not so stable now’. In November 1918, George V was visiting a rally of 35,000 ex-servicemen in Hyde Park and noted that he, with other members of the royal family, was duly cheered. But then men broke through to press round the King, complaining about their poor pensions, joblessness and lack of decent houses: he was mobbed, not in a particularly friendly way, and nearly pulled off his horse. Protest banners were raised and it was a narrow squeak for the police to get him safely out. After silently riding back to Buckingham Palace with the Prince of Wales, he dismounted and said: ‘Those men were in a funny temper,’ before shaking his head and striding into the building.

  So, under political pressure, for the first time, the charitable and visiting parts of the monarchy became its most notable aspects, as important as its ceremonial state functions. The future King George VI was made president of the Boys Welfare Association and the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, became patron of the National Council of Social Services. He was sent on visits across the more depressed parts of Britain, showing the charisma he would become famous for.

  George V began to compile a map showing the charitable public work being done by the family, almost like a military campaign, with flags to show where they had been; and later produced a chart, showing the productivity of its individual members, which would be brought to him each Christmas at Sandringham. One writer describes ‘the King poring over his charts like a sea captain over his log books’.11 Not all the early reform ideas were immediately accepted. Clive Wigram, a former Bengal Lancer who became equerry to George and later his private secretary, argued shortly after the war that it was time to open up Buckingham Palace and its garden to ‘people of all classes’ including schoolteachers and civil servants ‘on the lines of the White House receptions’. With that idea, Wigram was too early by about eighty years. But in all this we can see what was, effectively, the creation of a new kind of monarchy. The crisis of 1917 produced a royal family, which cut itself off from its German origins and its Russian relatives, and which made determined efforts to dig itself into the subsoil of British life more snugly than before. Lord Stamfordham, apart from choosing its name, gave the House of Windsor its founding principle when he wrote in the same year, ‘We must endeavour to induce the thinking working classes, socialist and others, to regard the Crown, not as a mere figurehead and an institution which, as they put it, “don’t count”, but as a living power for good . . . affecting the interests and well-being of all classes.’ That was the job George set out to do, and which his son and granddaughter then took on. It is the most important sentence a British courtier has ever written, and remains the most influential.

  The Windsors were still extremely rich, of course, attended by aristocratic servants and most of the time physically remote in their castles and palaces. At Buckingham Palace during the 1920s a brown Windsor silence descended, heavy curtains and country-life routines shutting out the febrile noise of the Jazz Age. After the war, George and Mary stayed in Britain, travelling abroad for just seven weeks during the sixteen years between the Armistice and the King’s death. He preferred the company of his own immediate family to that of anyone else, a pious countryman whose day was run with clockwork precision, attended by a pet parrot and emotionally dependent on a daily phone call to his sister, Princess Victoria. (In one of the many good stories about George, she was put through to Buckingham Palace and began the conversation: ‘Hello, you old fool,’ only to be interrupted by the operator: ‘Beg pardon, your Royal Highness, His Majesty is not yet on the line.’12) He was contemptuous of literary types and intellectuals generally, dismissing them as ‘eyebrows’ – until he discovered the word was highbrow.

  Yet politically, the man Princess Elizabeth came to know as ‘Grandpa England’ had proved himself an astute operator, a master of the strategic retreat who was determined to win over working-class critics, if not eyebrows, and who was soon succeeding. When Britain’s first, short-lived Labour government arrived in 1924, George speculated privately on what his grandmother Queen Victoria would have made of it (not much); but he went on to do his very best to make the new cabinet ministers – described by one as ‘MacDonald the starveling clerk, Thomas the engine-driver, Henderson the foundry labourer and Clynes the mill-hand’ – feel welcome at Buckingham Palace, Windsor and Balmoral.13 He developed real friendships with several of them. Under George V the imperial pomp of the nineteenth century and the angry confrontations of Edwardian Britain had faded, and, despite all those predictions, the monarchy had again become a symbol of unity, easing itself away from the political fray.

  That was no mean feat, and another monarch might not have pulled it off. Had George’s weak, rackety
elder brother Eddy, Duke of Clarence, not died of flu in 1892, the story of the British monarchy might have ended long ago. George V, who married the woman who had originally been betrothed to Eddie, had many traits which reappear in the current Queen’s reign. He was quietly devout, emotionally reserved, with an utter belief in duty and family. More than seventy years ago the super-patriotic historian Sir Arthur Bryant said of George V that he and his Queen represented the secret convictions of every decent English person at a time when other more intellectual leaders of the nation were ‘preaching the gospel of disintegration and many of its social leaders were making bad manners and loose living a social fashion’.14 Despite the florid language it is a judgement which applies also to the Queen. This is not surprising. Grandpa England was part of her life for her first ten years, waving at her from his window in Buckingham Palace, playing with her as he had not with his own children, and delighting in her company. After his death, which moved her greatly, his widow, Queen Mary, was heavily involved in Elizabeth’s education. She is her parents’ child; but her grandparents’ grandchild, too. When Elizabeth was born in 1926, she was joining not just a family, but a family campaign. Ten years later, it was a campaign being derailed.

  Uncle David’s Crisis

  The Queen’s ‘Uncle David’, as King Edward VIII was known in the family, was the Bad King, the Windsor Who Got It Wrong. He was the vain, self-indulgent celebrity who demonstrated that charisma, while useful in politics or entertainment, is a flimsy material from which to build a constitutional monarchy. King Edward was bored by duty and sought pleasure. For a senior Royal to be truly badly behaved wrecks everything. The dreadful warning of Edward VIII is one of the foundations of the Queen’s world-view. She knew him quite well up to the time when she was nine as the engaging, cheerful Uncle David who would romp into her parents’ home and play games. Then he stopped romping and vanished into newspaper headlines and exile.