The Diamond Queen

by Andrew Marr

  The Queen has certainly thought about all this. She has hinted in speeches over the years that she takes seriously the criticism, as well as the applause, which monarchy attracts. She has personally challenged policy makers about Britain’s decline both economically and as a world power. Closer to home, in family discussions several times a year she has overseen the corporate strategy of ‘the Firm’, as the Windsor dynasty calls itself. She changes. Her voice has changed markedly over the years, becoming less glass-pingingly 1950s, if still ‘upper’. She has ditched quite a lot of royal tradition, from ‘the Season’ to the once inflexible insistence on curtseys and bows. She stopped her children curtseying to her back in the 1960s. She and her husband are well used to being greeted by a democratically fixed eye and an outstretched hand.

  Accepting the need for constant change is firmly rooted in the family. Even in his sixties, Prince Charles, the most conservative senior Royal since his grandfather died, is a restless man, scratching away at the meaning of his life. His son, Prince William, appears to be what royal insiders fondly call The Natural – more in touch than his grandmother, less haunted than his father, and with a reasonably level temperament. By taking into the family its first middle-class recruit he is continuing the pattern of restitching the monarchy into the changing social fabric of Britain – the Windsor knit.

  In the Queen’s lifetime, an Empire has become a Commonwealth; a military monarchy has watched the radical slimming and shrinking of Britain’s military forces; an aristocratic system has been taxed and legislated out of existence; a firmly Anglican Christian monarchy has had to adapt to a multi-faith and partly atheist country; a ‘family monarchy’ insisting on its role as upholders of morality has been hijacked by adultery and breakup; and Royals brought up to show no emotion in public have struggled to adapt themselves to an exhibitionist, emoting, celebrity-crowded culture. Yet bizarrely the British monarchy has emerged from all this not shredded and diminished, but strengthened. ‘The Royals’ have been laughed at, dismissed, harangued, lectured and sometimes even ignored; but under the Queen, they have always bounced back.

  Is she the last of her kind? It is hard to imagine another monarch lasting so long on the throne of an important country that has changed as drastically as Britain has. Her life spans the lost and in many ways unhappy inter-war years of jazz, depression and empire; the titanic struggle which nearly saw democracy capsized and fascism triumph; and the decades of growing material plenty, punctuated by national nervous breakdown. Her reign has lasted through international crises, from nuclear threat, Suez and Vietnam, to Iraq and the ‘war on terror’. When crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, he said: ‘The Lord give you faithful Parliaments and quiet Realms; sure defence against all enemies; fruitful lands and a prosperous industry; wise counsellors and upright magistrates; leaders of integrity in learning and labour; a devout, learned and useful clergy; honest, peaceable, and dutiful citizens.’ Over sixty years, she may at times have wondered how hard the Lord was listening. She has had to make the most of the politicians, clergy and citizens on offer.

  The year 2012 marks the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. The British are good at looking back. Perhaps a little too good. Nostalgia is the vice of an old nation. Yet the jubilee does allow stock-taking of a useful kind. Britain has been strongly marked by monarchy. Without the Queen, that odd alliance of fifty-four countries – rich and poor, democracies and despotisms – known as the Commonwealth would probably not exist. Without the survival of her dynasty, the Windsors, there would be no slightly mysterious ‘Crown’ powers used by the British state. It is true that monarchies exist all round the world, from absolute ones in the Arab world to informal family ones in Scandinavia or Spain. But the British monarchy, in its relative wealth and splendour, and its continuing attachment to an important nation, makes Britain a slight oddity among her natural allies and partners – the republics of the United States, France, Germany, India and Pakistan, never mind China, Brazil and Russia.

  If we have lived through an American century, then it must have been a republican century too. Passionate royalists play what feels like a trump card, by pointing out various dunder-headed or merely controversial politicians who might have been elected president instead. Would we have been better off with X or Y? We may fantasize about ideal presidents. Alan Bennett, who has written so well about the Queen? Helen Mirren or Judi Dench, who have played Queens? We would not get them, though. We would have had a failed politician, whom at least half the nation cordially loathed. The British president would be a man or woman also who would soon return to civilian life – to join the board of a bank, perhaps, or travel the world charging £50,000 a time for speeches to conferences of plastics manufacturers. We would know. It would not feel the same.

  A fair account of the Queen is likely to end up putting her case, and therefore a case for monarchy. You would have to have an elephant-hide layer of republican resentment to resist. But this author’s overwhelming belief is that the question – good thing, or bad thing? – is itself pointless. The scale of reinvention required to turn a monarchy into a republic is only likely after a shattering break with the past. The United States was the exception, as a new nation. France, Russia, Germany and China became republics because of some shattering trauma, involving social collapse and revolution. Since no sane person would wish one-thousandth of such a trauma on a stable country, it follows that republicanism in today’s Britain is a sideshow, an intellectually respectable but theoretical position. The monarchy may fall. A future King may make such bad decisions, or have such bad luck, that an infuriated country rises up, tears down the state, and insists on a clean break. But if we lose the monarchy the British will have much worse to worry about at the time. Countries come with history attached, good and bad. What matters is what they make of it. Britain has a monarchy and this means, for most of our lifetimes, we have had Queen Elizabeth II as a kind of mysterious, half-seen shadow-relative of us all.

  The British monarchy could yet be radically curtailed. That would happen if a future monarch put himself at the centre of political argument, and then lost it. (Though winning the argument could be just as dangerous.) Britain might then move to the normal position of drawing up a constitution, which formally limited the Crown’s existence to a few pages of legalese. Parliament could simply take away the traditional lands and wealth which remain as the Crown Estate. Politicians could easily tax the Windsors in such a way that, within a short space of time, they would find themselves severely reduced. The British monarchy has been impressive and useful because it has been popularly supported – and mostly more popular than the elected government of the day. That has been possible because of its human popularity, and because it is not the government of the day.

  For monarchy goes on by acts of individual willpower and choice. Nostalgia makes us very ready to think that ‘it’ was always like that. Peering a little closer, it was not. From the OBE to the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme, the ‘D of E’; from Trooping the Colour to Facebook and Twitter, the Windsors are always on the move. The Queen’s Official Birthday, when Trooping the Colour takes place and an Honours List is published, dates back only to her father’s reign. The Maundy Service, so ancient, so cobwebbed by medieval history, was revived by her grandfather as long ago as – 1932. Garter Day at Windsor, a splendid ceremony featuring the Knights in their ostrich and heron plumes and swaying blue mantles, is as gorgeous a piece of ceremonial as one is likely to see. It does indeed go back to the reign of Edward III of England when in 1348 he initiated days of feasting and praying for this new order of chivalry. Actually, though, in its current form, after a very long break, it goes back only to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when it was revived by the Queen’s father. And as the historian David Starkey has written, the mass investitures, cramming the Buckingham Palace ballroom, ‘are the most important and characteristic ceremonies of Elizabeth’s monarchy. And they are without any historical roots whatever further back tha
n the Windsor monarchy.’14 Reinventing tradition is a key tactic of the British monarchy.

  She thinks about it. She rethinks about it. When the Queen spoke to the meeting of the Mothers’ Union at Central Hall, Westminster in October 1949, she warned against an age of growing self-indulgence, materialism and falling moral standards. Yes, there would be unhappy marriages and there was a shortage of housing for newly-weds, she conceded: ‘But when we see around us the havoc that has been wrought, above among the children, by the break-up of homes, we can have no doubt that divorce and separation are responsible for some of the darkest evils in our society today.’ The relationships of husbands and wives were permanent and they ought to bring up their children as Christians, without worrying about being thought priggish; it was important to show disapproval of what was wrong.

  This was a speech made in the aftermath of a war that had broken up many families, and in a capital city where many children were still living almost feral lives among the bomb sites and abandoned buildings. Much of what the young Princess said then, the older Queen would surely stand by today. But she could not make the same speech now. Like millions of other British families, the Windsors found the gap between principle and life too wide. She has not retreated far from this ground, though. Her annual Christmas broadcasts are shot through with a moral idea of the world, which emphasizes forgiveness, reconciliation and loyalty. In recent years, her bishops notice, they have become more religious, not less.

  On the broader meaning of her reign the Queen has never tried to assert herself rhetorically, or argue her case. A succession of image-makers, from Cecil Beaton, Pietro Annigoni, Lucian Freud or Andy Warhol in pictures, to Winston Churchill, Richard Dimbleby, Ted Hughes or Gyles Brandreth in words, have provided colour and glitter. But given the amount of time and attention paid to the monarchy, there has been precious little intellectual argument made for it. What there has been has tended to be a rather desperate clutch back at Victorian hand-me-downs. The vivid arguments have been on the other side, from writers such as Willie Hamilton and Tom Nairn. This is potentially dangerous for the monarchy, though it may not seem so. Monarchy is, as we have seen, a perpetual act of reinvention, always behind the times but never very far. The case for monarchy, similarly, needs to be rethought, generation by generation. It cannot afford to become something generally tolerated but privately acknowledged as silly.

  What might the Queen say, if she let fly? I think she might say that actually her case was a radical one. Modern democratic society claims to value special talent – for business, sporting prowess, dexterity – and to share out the rewards accordingly. It claims to honour the useful and the gutsy. But this is pious nonsense. Modern market democracies are webs of special connections, riven with unfairness, hidden conspiracies and family deals. The children of successful lawyers, bankers, journalists and so on tend to rise to the top of the moneymaking professions, apparently convinced they are there ‘because we’re worth it’. What does this mean for the millions who do not get the leg-ups and do not make it? How humiliating can the rhetoric of this false meritocracy feel? Is it a coincidence that the most fervent Royal-worshippers tend to be the quieter, getting-on-with-it majority, the very people ignored by the elite?

  Modern monarchy can be a system which places a family at the top of the social pyramid as a kind of release valve. They are there because they’re there because they’re there. If they do the job well, this makes many people happy because it doesn’t seriously ‘put down’ or demean anyone else. The little formalities of bowing, curtseying, ‘ma’am’-ing, are no longer obeisance to the mighty. They are simple politeness. One man who has worked closely with her says the Queen and the Duke have ‘the humility of the hereditary principle; because they know they have done nothing to deserve getting to their position, it poses a huge obligation of duty on them, to fulfil this extraordinary thing that has happened to them. It makes them in a funny way dutiful, almost humble’. The British electorate, adds one Palace servant, is prepared to admire the grandness of the British monarchy because it believes its members understand they are as individuals not special: ‘they want a communism beneath the skin, and that is what she gives them’.

  This may sound overstated but the more one observes the Queen, the truer it feels. She understands that the respect is first for the sovereign and only second for the individual, though she must realize how much her individual service is now admired. It is a vocation but it is also a job. At eighty-five she always knows where the cameras are. She dresses to stand out. When it rains, she uses see-through umbrellas so she can be observed and photographed. She is acutely aware of the opportunities and pitfalls for picture-making: when in Norway opening a British Council exhibition of large, explicit nudes by the painter Lucian Freud, she told one of the organizers that she had spent some time making quite sure ‘I was not photographed between a pair of those great thighs’. She directs her lightbulb-on smiles to where the cameramen are waiting. She loathes being late, not least because punctuality is part of the technique of being seen by as many people as possible. She has never gone looking for personal publicity, given interviews or tried to explain her ‘side of the story’. When something hurtful or wrong is reported she bites her tongue. As a young woman she was a global superstar; but she does not play to cameras in a gushing way and certainly does not court the media. She has never ‘confessed’ or reinvented herself. Monarchy is a parade of images – castles, state occasions, flags, anthems, ritual celebrations. But the Queen, in the modern self-conscious sense, has no ‘image’

  Are we then saying that the Queen is ordinary? Of course there is nothing ordinary about her life, circumstances or sense of duty. She is one of the richest people on the planet, attended by staff from her earliest years, whose private pursuits, from breeding racehorses to shooting, are not ordinary. She had no school education, no middle-class friends and has never had to ask herself how to earn money. Nor are her interests middle-class. She may keep her breakfast cereal in Tupperware boxes, watch the same television programmes as the rest of the British and enjoy gossip, but as the ‘fount of honour’ she is far more interested in titles, orders, uniforms and decorations than most of her subjects. The royal family lives in a world where precise rankings of this Cross or that Order, and the correct buttons, really matter; and this is not perhaps the most engaging feature of the institution.

  So – not normal. But the key point is that the grandeur, the gilt and the wealth, the history and the pomp, surround people who have been accidentally selected by history to fill a special national position and who are well aware of it. Had ancient battles gone the other way, or now forgotten people changed their faith, or had different marriages occurred, other people entirely would have been the Queen and the Duke. When was the last time in European history that somebody became a monarch purely by virtue of his personal qualities? Napoleon, perhaps – and look how long his dynasty lasted. Chance put this Queen on her throne. In a brutally competitive world, many will find that a kind of consolation. Today, democracy and monarchy are no longer in opposition. Odd as it might seem, they support one another.

  The Future

  The Queen is blessed with a strong constitution and the calmness of someone who knows they are useful. If she lived as long as her mother, she could reign for another fifteen years. That would make her the longest-reigning British monarch too, easily outstripping that earlier great Queen, Victoria. The British monarchy remains physically Victorian. The palaces and their decoration still reflect the taste of Queen Victoria; the ceremonial uniform of the Guards remains essentially Victorian; most of the grand events of today are modelled on Victorian predecessors. But Queen Victoria was an empress, whose reign saw her small archipelago of damp, sooty towns and newfangled farms stretch its power across the world. She was Great Britain’s figurehead during her super-stretched and confident heyday. Elizabeth II was dealt not this royal flush but lower-value cards. She has reigned during the final demolition of empir
e when the republican United States, formed in reaction to British monarchy, became the dominant world power. She yet may live to see China challenge for that role.

  Queen Victoria had to do hardly anything towards Britain’s continued expansion. She was more of an executive monarch, in the sense of having more of the state’s business to transact herself, than her great-great-granddaughter; but Elizabeth II has travelled relentlessly to keep alive the spirit of the Commonwealth, the legacy of her imperial ancestress. She works at least as hard at her papers as did Victoria, determined to demonstrate her relevance to the politicians and civil servants who rule in her name. Unlike Victoria, who closeted herself on the Isle of Wight and at Windsor and Balmoral for so long she fomented republican feeling, the present Queen constantly shows herself. Queen Victoria, though a doughty woman, would have demanded the smelling-salts and headed for home in a carriage had she faced her descendant’s schedule.

  Being Queen these days is simply a harder job. The Duke of Edinburgh, who has seen it at closer hand than anyone else, has reflected that it is a life nobody would choose or volunteer for. In a sense, of course, the Duke did volunteer for it because he married Princess Elizabeth when he knew she would become Queen. Since then his role has been to support her and act as the head of the family, working behind the scenes to keep ‘the Firm’ together.

  The central thing which makes monarchy different in kind from republicanism is that it stitches family life into the public realm. Every monarchy has found this difficult. From the archaic struggles of Chinese imperial families or Byzantines, Ottomans, Habsburgs or Mughals, weak characters, jealous children, conniving mothers and star-crossed love affairs have brought political instability, regime change and murder. Life for the Windsors has been, thankfully, calmer than that. Today’s constitutional monarchies are lower wattage and lower risk. Yet any danger to the Windsors in the future will come not from political turmoil of the kind that created the dynasty in 1917, but from inside the family. Unlike the bereaved Victoria, Elizabeth has had the great good luck to have a long and happy marriage, which is part of the secret of her success. Like Victoria, she has produced a large family, who have had their share of scrapes. Like Victoria, her heir has had to wait until his own old age for the chance to reign, while struggling to establish an independent role.