Epilogue
Summer 2014
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is Britain’s 40th monarch, and only the sixth queen to have ruled since William the Conqueror took the crown of England over a thousand years ago. Though she may be taken for granted in some quarters, she has notched up many impressive statistics over the course of her 62-year reign.
Representing the country’s interests abroad, the Queen has travelled to 116 countries and undertaken 261 official overseas tours, including 96 State Visits (in which one head of state invites another to visit his or her country). It is quite difficult to gauge a precise tally, but by conservative estimates, she has undertaken more than 30,000 engagements in the United Kingdom alone, and in doing so has met people from all walks of life. She has welcomed over a million and a half people to garden parties at Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Holyrood House. She has conferred over 410,000 honours at more than 650 investitures, and as the United Kingdom’s second longest reigning monarch, she shows only marginal signs of slowing down, and none of giving up. Queen Victoria reigned for 63 years and 216 days. God willing, Her Majesty will break that record on 9th September, 2015.
It is inevitable, however, that the Queen’s reign will end, and that her place will be inherited by her son, the Prince of Wales. This is the nature of the Monarchy. The cast is ever changing, and there are many royalists who follow those changes avidly. Despite the protestations of cynics and anti-monarchists, the Royal Family’s popularity is far from waning.
At the time of Diana’s death, newspaper reports suggested that there would never be another royal funeral as widely spectated. The assumption was that when the Queen Mother passed away, public sentiment would be fairly indifferent. While it would be met with great sadness, her death at a grand old age would not be as shocking as Diana’s untimely demise. When the Queen Mother did pass away in her sleep at the age of 101 in 2002, it was clear that the press had got it wrong.
A vast majority of the British population had grown up with Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. An estimated 200,000 mourners paid their respects to her as she lay in state in Westminster Hall. On the day of her funeral hundreds of thousands more lined the route from the service in Westminster Abbey to the interment in St George’s Chapel, Windsor.
Similarly, later in 2002, when Buckingham Palace announced plans for the Golden Jubilee weekend (marking the Queen’s 50 years on the throne), the usual newspaper doom-and-gloom merchants suggested that no-one was interested and that the whole thing would flop like a damp squib.
Wrong again. It was in fact cause for national celebration. Between February and August of that year, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited 70 cities and towns across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as 50 counties.
Her Majesty travelled more than 40,000 miles around the world to countries including Jamaica, New Zealand, Australia and Canada.
A special website launched for the Golden Jubilee received over 28 million hits during a six-month period. Over 3,000 members of the media from more than 60 countries were accredited to cover the central Jubilee weekend in London at the beginning of June.
Throughout the weekend, one million-plus people gathered daily outside Buckingham Palace and all the way down the Mall to Trafalgar Square to celebrate the Queen’s distinguished reign. Hardly the ‘damp squib’ the press had predicted at the beginning of the year.
When the 2012 Diamond Jubilee came around a decade later, no-one was surprised that it, too, was a resounding success. Despite the miserable weather over the course of that celebratory four-day weekend, more than a million people gathered every day at Buckingham Palace and at events throughout London. Crowd levels mirrored those of 2002, again trailing all the way down the Mall to Trafalgar Square.
Whatever the media says, a large percentage of the British population loves its Royal Family, and the institution of monarchy continues to endure, always evolving, just as it has done for the last 1,000 years. It is by any standard a robust and resilient establishment.
That’s not to say there haven’t been some blips in terms of the line of succession. Charles I had his head disconnected from his shoulders in 1649, and tragically, despite 17 pregnancies, Queen Anne died leaving no surviving children in 1707, thus ending the reign of the House of Stuart. But due to the Act of Settlement that same year, what followed was a memorable and largely harmonious period with the newly-established House of Hanover having come to eminence. Georges I, II and III followed, but as a result of George IV’s daughter having predeceased him, he was left with no natural successor upon his death in 1830.
The crown passed to his brother, the Duke of Clarence, who became William IV. Although he had ten illegitimate children with Dora Jordan, a very well-known Irish actress in her day, not one of his five legitimate children with Queen Adelaide survived him. Upon his death he was succeeded by his dead brother’s daughter, Victoria, who became Queen in 1837. Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert saw the end of the House of Hanover. The royal house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was established in 1842.
There was another near-catastrophic blip at the end of 1936 when Edward VIII abdicated and his reluctant brother, Albert, or, as he was affectionately known, Bertie, acceded, becoming George VI. It was that momentous event and subsequent change of direction that led to the young Princess Elizabeth succeeding to the British throne in 1952. The new generation of senior royals are now hard at work establishing their own roles within ‘The Firm’ – a moniker coined by Prince Philip. Prince William, having completed his three years as a search and rescue helicopter pilot at RAF Valley in Anglesey, Wales, is playing a more active role, carving out a niche for himself, as well as supporting his grandmother, the Queen. William is also a fiercely private young man aiming to achieve for his own family something he never had growing up – a stable environment for his baby son, Prince George.
Harry has served two tours of operational duty in Afghanistan, one in 2008 and the second in 2013. As has now been widely reported, the first of Harry’s tours was, with the co-operation of the media, kept a tightly guarded secret.
The thinking at the time was that if his presence was publicised, he and his fellow comrades would become a prime target for the enemy. This became an all too real concern when German newspaper Bild and Australian magazine New Idea broke the embargo and documented the Prince’s deployment. In response to this major breach, the UK’s Ministry of Defense decided to err on the side of caution and withdrew Harry after only ten weeks of his planned three-month deployment.
On reflection it was probably the right thing to do. A government doesn’t spend tens of thousands of pounds training a soldier only to have him sit at home twiddling his thumbs.
It was perhaps inevitable that Harry’s second tour as an Apache helicopter pilot with the Army Air Corps was well publicised, and thankfully he completed his tour without incident.
As of this writing Prince Harry has returned to the Household Cavalry Regiment, where he has undertaken a desk job at HQ London District on Horse Guards. His current role involves helping to co-ordinate significant projects and commemorative events that involve the army in London, while at the same time (his military duties permitting), carrying out more official engagements on behalf of the family. Stories regarding Harry’s on-again/off-again romances continue to dominate newspaper columns, but for now his one true passion continues to be his involvement with the Invictus Games, hosted in London in September 2014.
While William is generally regarded as the more measured and serious of the two brothers, Harry has been tagged by the media as a bit of a wild child. In his early 20s he was the epitome of royal paparazzi fodder, often making front page news for all the wrong reasons – leaving night clubs a little worse for wear, being photographed wearing a WWII German Afrika Korps uniform with a swastika arm band and getting caught drinking under-age and smoking cannabis.
On the whole the British press does treat the Princes pretty fairly. Occa
sionally Harry is taken to task for his errors in judgment – accepting a skiing holiday to Kazakhstan, for example. Given the country’s less-than-stellar human rights record, and considering there were any number of ski resorts he could have visited, his advisors should have given Kazakhstan the thumbs down. Likewise, it wasn’t a particularly brilliant decision for Prince William to go hunting in Spain in February 2014, the day before he was due to launch a high-profile campaign to end the illegal wildlife trade.
Unfortunately, there is still a belief within the Royal Family that the details surrounding private visits or holidays are on a purely need-to-know basis. In other words, to them private is private and their advisors don’t need to know.
Prince Harry is quick learner, however, and he doesn’t make the same mistake twice. Another of his attributes is his ability to muck in as part of a team. In 2013 he joined the Walking With the Wounded South Pole Allied Challenge, for which he joined 12 injured servicemen and women from the UK, USA and the Commonwealth. He took on the expedition in his own right, as a serviceman rather than as a royal. The teams trekked 200 miles in appalling conditions before finally reaching the South Pole on December 13th – proof that with the right team and the right attitude, anything is possible.
This particular generation of royals rising through the ranks is made up of doers. No longer are royals merely showing up to cut ribbons, unveil plaques or plant trees. Today they are getting stuck in at ground level. In December 2009 Prince William spent a night sleeping rough on the streets of London in an effort to highlight the work of the homeless charity Centrepoint of which he is patron. In March 2011 Prince Harry joined a team of injured servicemen for the first five days of their trek to the North Pole, and in early 2014 the Princes showed up announced in Datchet, Berkshire to help the local community with flood relief. This commitment to others is something for which Diana would have been especially proud. That the Princess left this world too soon goes without saying, but she was with her sons just long enough to ingrain in them a deep seeded understanding of those less fortunate.
One area in which the Princes continue to struggle is in their relationship with the media. They know they need the press in the same way the press needs them, but they wrestle with what truly is private, and what is worthy of public interest. Diana did court the attention of the media from time to time, but the flip side of that coin was that she often complained of feeling hunted and haunted. William and Harry saw it all, and they are savvy enough to avoid falling into the same trap. For now they are striking a good balance, working to their own agenda rather than one set by the media, but it is a delicate balance that can shift at any time.
2014 has seen the Queen’s popularity riding higher than it ever has in her 62 years on the throne. The British monarchy has survived executions, divorces, illicit affairs, illegitimate children and wildly eccentric behaviour on the part of its kings and queens, but it continues to persevere. Republicanism, with a popularity rating in the region of 13 percent, has been around for centuries, but the anti-monarchist group Republic declared in 2012 that, ‘The Queen is untouchable.’
In spite of her many public triumphs she has endured many personal sorrows. Having been brought up to believe that divorce was un-royal, during her own tenure the Queen has had to deal with the divorce of her sister, Princess Margaret, as well as the subsequent divorces of three of her four children. In 1979 Lord Louis Mountbatten, beloved uncle of Prince Philip, was assassinated by IRA terrorists while out on his fishing boat in County Sligo, Ireland. In 2002, the Queen also suffered the loss of her own much-loved mother and sister within a seven week period. All of this occurred under the watchful gaze of the media. I don’t believe any elected head of state would survive or even tolerate the constant media scrutiny, invasion of privacy and irrational prejudice that the Queen has had to abide decade after decade. With no alternative but to carry on, she has done so unflinchingly.
From time to time the ugly word ‘abdication’ creeps in, never more so than when Queen Beatrix of Holland abdicated in January 2013. At 75 she thought it was time for the younger generation to take over. King Albert II of the Belgians, aged 78, followed suit shortly after, stepping down in July 2013 after a string of scandals and controversies. Most recently, 76-year-old King Juan Carlos of Spain stepped down citing ill health in June 2014. Will the Queen, an octogenarian, follow suit? In a word, no.
She was never destined to become Queen, but she has dedicated her life to service and duty. During a radio address on the occasion of her 21st birthday, Princess Elizabeth said – ‘I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong’ – a declaration she reaffirmed at her Silver (1977), Golden (2002) and Diamond (2012) Jubilees.
The Queen’s public image has noticeably softened in recent years, as made apparent during her visit to Northern Ireland in June 2014. It was an open visit, meaning it was announced, and not shrouded in secrecy due to security concerns, as had been the norm in the past. This time much of her itinerary was made public, which gave the Queen the opportunity to engage with the people of Belfast.
The headlines said it all:
Queen ushers in new normal!
The Queen, up close and personal thrills the crowds!
The Queen makes astonishing jail visit with former IRA commander, Martin McGuinness!
Her Majesty would be the first to accept that no matter how painful, life moves on. By building bridges in Northern Ireland, the Queen is ensuring that she leaves a monarchy in good stead with friendships reaffirmed and hands of forgiveness shaken. The world is changing rapidly and, like their grandmother, Princes William and Harry must continue to adapt and evolve to meet the needs of the 21st century. During the Diamond Jubilee’s Buckingham Palace balcony appearance, the Queen sent out a very clear message regarding the future of the Monarchy. Instead of the entire family stepping out as is custom following the Trooping of the Colour ceremony, she was joined only by her heir, the Prince of Wales, his heir, the Duke of Cambridge (along with their wives) and Prince Harry, who was third in line at the time.
With the 2013 arrival of its newest member, HRH Prince George of Cambridge, the Royal Family can take comfort in knowing that the Crown is secure for generations to come. Though still only a baby, George stands to be the first British Monarch of the 22nd century.
As for me, I very much doubt I will be around to see George crowned King George VII, but what I do know with certainty is that the day it happens, the whole world will be watching.
Dickie Arbiter, June 2014
Glossary
Belgian Suite, The: Named after Leopold I, uncle of Prince Albert and first king of the Belgians, this suite of rooms is used by all State Visitors, guests of the Queen, and is where the Obamas slept during their visit in 2011
Bow Room: The Bow Room is familiar to the many thousands of guests to Royal Garden Parties who pass through it on their way to the garden
BP: Buckingham Palace
BST: British Summer Time
Chinese Dining Room, the: Originally called the Chinese Luncheon Room during the reign of Queen Victoria its furnishings come from George IV’s 19th Century folly – the Brighton Pavillion
Civil List: Royal income – money given by the state to support the Queen, indirectly from the taxpayers. This has now changed to the Sovereign’s Grant, which comes direct from the Crown Estates
DCMS: Government Department of Culture, Media and Sport
Equerry: Military officer on personal attendance to the Queen or senior male member of the Royal Family
FCO: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; a government ministry responsible for foreign affairs – similar to the state department in the USA
Folly: An elaborate and eccentric building that’s of absolutely no use to anyone
HM: Her Majesty
KP: Kensington Palace
Narwhal: A small Arctic wha
le, the male of which has a long forward-pointing spirally twisted tusk developed from one of its teeth
PPO: Personal Protection Officer – armed Scotland Yard police officer
Privy Purse: The finance section responsible for the financial management of the public funding granted to the Royal Household in the form of the Sovereign Grant
Scruff Order: Casual dress code, usually trousers and open necked shirt, no tie or jacket required – jeans acceptable occasionally
Spare: When Harry was born he was called a spare to his brother, in other words a third in line to the throne. Now he is fourth in line, and when and if the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have more children, Harry will move further down the line of succession
Suite car: A car used to carry members of the household in attendance on the principal/s – press secretary, equerry and lady in waiting, if the latter two were not individually travelling with the principal
SUV: Sports utility vehicle (or 4x4)
TRH: Their Royal Highnesses
Yachtie: Royal Yacht seaman
1844 Room: So named after its occupation by Emperor Nicholas of Russia in 1844 as a guest of Queen Victoria
1855 Room: So named after Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie who stayed in the room when they visited Queen Victoria
Index
Adelaide, Queen 1
Adler, Prof. Michael 1
Airlie, Lord 1, 2, 3, 4
Albert, Prince 1, 2, 3
Allen, Peter 1
Andrew, Prince, Duke of York 1, 2, 3
at Charles–Diana wedding 1
press secretary of 1
and Windsor Castle fire 1
Anita (au pair) 1
Anne-Marie, Queen 1
Anne, Princess Royal 1, 2
and Britannia 1
press secretary of 1
Anne, Queen 1
Anson, Charles 1, 2
On Duty With the Queen: My Time as a Buckingham Palace Press Secretary Page 20