Prince Edward, the only one of the siblings still unmarried, was also in trouble. He had made two decisions regarding his future. One was to attend Cambridge University, the other to join the Royal Marines. He was accepted by Jesus College, but it was obvious that he owed this to his position rather than any innate ability. There were protests, and a good deal of public derision. He survived three years there, however, and received a degree. His fees had been paid by the Marines – the sponsoring of officer recruits is usual – and afterwards he had to start the notoriously tough training course. Though he was making good progress, the few weeks he spent with the Corps convinced him that his ambitions lay elsewhere. He pulled out of training, bringing further opprobrium on himself and his family.
He sought a career in the theatre, and was willing to start at the bottom as a general dogsbody in a production company, provoking yet more sneers. Having begun with this, he aspired to be a producer himself. Using his connections, he arranged a television spectacular that would raise money for charity while giving him national exposure. It’s a Royal Knockout, modelled on a much-loved television programme, used teams led by members of his family (Princess Anne, Sarah Ferguson) and filled with celebrities (Jackie Stewart, Cliff Richard, John Travolta) to compete in a series of comical races, while dressed in historical costume. It was not a success. In fact it was regarded as painful, and Edward’s sulking, when he discovered that the press had been unimpressed, compounded his misfortune. The queen disapproved, and those who wish the monarchy well have tried to forget it. Young people are allowed to make mistakes, it is how they learn, but in the case of royalty the media is always there to record and preserve such lapses.
The royal family was by now the subject of widespread ridicule, and it was not simply the mistakes of the younger generation that were the cause.
Throughout the earlier half of the twentieth century other countries had experienced a trend towards satirical humour: the cabarets of Paris or inter-war Berlin, for instance. From the 1950s, however, the United Kingdom saw a fashion for increasingly zany humour – often incomprehensible and bewildering to foreigners – that manifested no respect for anything. The Goon Show, which appeared on radio throughout the fifties, was followed by That Was The Week That Was, a political lampoon. Private Eye, a magazine that poked disrespectful fun at the Establishment, began publication in 1961. Other programmes followed, most famously Monty Python’s Flying Circus. All of them had one thing in common – they were the work of young people. It was in the sixties that youth took over the media. Ludicrously inexperienced men and women still in their twenties – David Frost, Joan Bakewell, Simon Dee – were given access to their own television platform, and used it to lecture their elders. The chief targets of ridicule were the caste of patrician Tory politicians personified by Harold Macmillan, but the satirists also took a swipe at many other aspects of the Establishment.
In view of this, the monarchy got off lightly for a very long time. Writing in 1977 the foreword to a book about cartoon images of the royal family – an historical survey that covered centuries – Prince Charles was to remark that, compared with their predecessors, his family had been treated kindly. This was true up to that point, but it was not to last. The satirical shows had introduced a climate of ridicule that made abuse a generally accepted part of entertainment. The increasing vulgarity of tabloid journalism was a further blow, and this would become worse when the anti-monarchist Australian Rupert Murdoch became proprietor of one of them.
It was in the eighties, with the advent of the ground-breaking television programme Spitting Image, that any deference to public figures was to vanish without trace. The programme used cruelly exaggerated, life-sized latex puppets to lampoon the world’s leaders: Mrs Thatcher, John Major, President Reagan, François Mitterrand. The creators, Peter Fluck and Roger Law, were both former newspaper cartoonists whose irreverence certainly did not spare the members of the Labour Party, but whose strongly-held left-wing convictions meant that anyone who represented the established order was unlikely to be treated gently. The queen, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, Charles and Diana, were all depicted with varying degrees of disrespect. Only when the series spawned a book did the Palace take exception. This depicted Prince Andrew in a nude centrefold, suggestively draped with a string of sausages. There was no outright objection from the royal family, but the Prince of Wales abruptly cancelled a contract with the book’s publisher, for whom he had been producing a volume of his own. When the Post Office produced, some time later, a series of stamps that celebrated British cartoonists, it included a design by Roger Law. All stamps must be approved by the queen, and it seems she simply refused to do so in this case. The story is probably true, though the Post Office Archives cannot confirm it. There are subtle but effective ways in which the monarch can express disapproval.
Satire comes in waves as styles go in and out of fashion, and Spitting Image, which ran on television for no less than twelve years, has not been followed by anything as pointedly cruel. Humour of a much gentler kind has been found in Sue Townsend’s novel The Queen and I, which was published in 1992 and subsequently made into a stage production. This is set during the general election of that year, and imagines the consequences of a victory by the People’s Republican Party.
The Windsors are stripped of their properties and titles, and sent to live on a council estate in Leicester (Miss Townsend’s home town), in order to experience ordinary life. The older generation are pensioners, the younger members have to find something to do. The humour comes from imagining how the various family members cope with their change of lifestyle. Prince Philip, despite a real-life reputation for no-nonsense pragmatism, cannot make the adjustment. He takes to bed and effectively goes on hunger-strike; Princess Margaret complains endlessly; the Queen Mother befriends an elderly West Indian widow and enjoys long afternoons reminiscing with her about their respective families (she later dies and is buried with her new neighbours in attendance). Charles becomes not only an enthusiastic gardener but a political activist, jailed for a crime he did not commit – punching a policeman. He asks Diana to look after the plants in their modest garden, but she is more interested in forming a close friendship with a successful black accountant. William and Harry attend the local primary school and quickly slough off any signs of ‘poshness’, learning to talk in ungrammatical slang for protective colouring. Princess Anne, displaying the tough practicality for which she is known, drives her own removal van to the small cul-de-sac (Hell Close) in which the family have been settled. She immediately sets to work on repairing the plumbing with the aid of a household manual, and later takes up with a shy and unpersonable local handyman. Prince Andrew features only incidentally. He is at sea on a submarine. And neither does Prince Edward who, in his capacity as a production assistant in the theatre, is touring New Zealand with a musical called Sheep!
As for the queen herself, she does remarkably well. She has, after all, been described as ‘riddled with common sense’, and would probably deal with such a change of lifestyle in much the way that is described in the story. She is shown as a much stronger character than her husband, and emerges as something of a heroine. She has been assigned a social worker to help her adjust, but is exasperated by the woman’s jargon-heavy and patronizing counselling, and shuts her out of the house. When, in the dramatized version of the novel, she berates a local government official in the manner of any outraged housewife, the audience cheers.
Meanwhile the republican government has broken its electoral promises, run out of money and sold the United Kingdom to Japan. One component of the deal is that Prince Edward will marry the Japanese emperor’s daughter. The story ends with the queen waking up to find that the whole situation has simply been a nightmare and that the Conservatives have won the election after all. Despite this, a sequel was written nearly fifteen years later. Queen Camilla continues the original plot, with the royal family still living on their council estate, but it has not had the same su
ccess as the original.
Meanwhile, in reality, the family was living through its most difficult years since the abdication crisis.
The queen’s forty years on the throne were celebrated in a 1992 documentary, Elizabeth R. It was well made, and widely watched. It concentrated on her work, its purpose being to show how busy she is, how well she does her job, and what a pleasant personality she has. It was, however, a book rather than a film about royalty that was to make this year memorable. Andrew Morton, a journalist with some experience of covering the royals, published a book entitled Diana: Her True Story. It revealed to an astonished readership that the Princess of Wales was desperately unhappy in her marriage to Charles who was still seeing his former ladyfriend, Camilla. His family were portrayed as uncaring and unsympathetic towards Diana, who suffered from bulimia, an eating disorder, and had even attempted suicide.
It was later discovered that these revelations, attributed to friends, had come from the princess herself. She and Charles had reached the end of their marriage. They had never had anything in common. He had no patience with her vacuous cultural tastes and lack of serious thought. She was tired of his friends, his family, his courtiers, and above all his mistress. She briefed Morton because she was sick of living a lie. She wanted to hurt her husband, and she had found a way to do so.
Unfortunately she hurt others too. The queen, whose discretion had prevented her from prying into the lives of the couple, was as horrified by the revelations as she was by Diana’s trumpeting them in the media. She summoned them both and asked them to give their marriage one more try, though it was obvious to intimates that matters had gone too far.
This turned out only to be the beginning. Andrew and Sarah announced that their marriage, too, was over, and they were followed by Anne and her husband Mark, though in this case the couple had already been separated for years. Yet another blow came in August, while the family were at Balmoral. The Daily Mirror had on its front page a photograph of the Duchess of York having her toes sucked beside a swimming pool, by a man identified as her ‘financial adviser’. Her daughters were shown nearby. And then the dam burst: another newspaper revealed transcripts of telephone conversations that seemed to be between Diana and a man, James Gilbey, with whom she was clearly intimate. His pet name for her caused the scandal to be known as ‘Squidgygate’. There were even more revelations to follow concerning Charles and Camilla, whose private telephone conversations were now published for all the world to read (‘Camillagate’). It seemed impossible that so much could have gone wrong so quickly – that such disaster could befall almost an entire generation at once. The year ended with one final tragedy: Windsor Castle caught fire on 20 November. The blaze was ferocious, caused initially by a light bulb coming into contact with a curtain. By a miracle the flames were put out before they spread to the Royal Library, and equally fortunately the rooms gutted, which included the great St George’s Hall, were largely empty because redecoration was going on. Nevertheless, the queen was clearly utterly dejected.
Her mood was not improved when the prime minister announced that taxpayers’ money would fund the restoration – the cost would be £37 million – and the news was greeted with a chorus of outrage. She was the world’s richest woman, said the press, why was she expecting her people to pay? ‘When the Castle stands it is theirs,’ wrote one journalist, ‘but when it burns down it is ours.’ The queen was shocked by the hostility shown toward her over this issue. It was the more painful for being so unexpected. In the end she paid most of the bill, but the opening to the public of Buckingham Palace for a few weeks each autumn, commencing the following year, was begun to help cover the cost. The queen also announced that she and Charles would in future pay income tax. That they did not had been a source of continuing resentment, and she had been in the process of arranging to do so. Now she appeared to have been stampeded into the decision to assuage public opinion, which was humiliating.
Only four days after the fire she made a speech at the Guildhall that summed up, with gentle self-mockery, the awful twelve months she had endured: ‘This is not a year on which I will look back with undiluted pleasure,’ she said. She went on: ‘No institution, including the monarchy, should expect to be free from scrutiny. It can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness and understanding.’ For a stoical and self-contained woman to make such a plea is an indication of the level to which her spirits had sunk.
The troubles of Charles and Diana would continue for several years. There were more cruel and disturbing revelations – both in turn were interviewed on television and Diana revealed much, not only about her own recent past but about Charles’s fitness to rule. As soon as the programme was released, the queen gave up any hope of a reconciliation between them and asked that they divorce to save further damage. They did so, but the public had already taken sides in the matter and the mud-slinging simply went on. Charles returned to Camilla; Diana took up with a man many considered appallingly unsuitable.
And with him she died, on an August night in Paris. Pursued by photographers, their car crashed into the side of an underpass. The royal family were at Balmoral, where Charles had to break the news to his two sons. In the world beyond the estate walls, grieving was ostentatious and widespread. Diana’s gifts of empathy and compassion had been an enormous benefit to the monarchy. She had been able to reach out to people – especially the dispossessed and vulnerable – in a way that the Windsors could not. For a few months she would be treated like a saint, though after that the magic would start to wear off.
Her husband’s family, meanwhile, had done their grieving in private. Because they were not on view, people thought them callous, and even glad, that Diana had gone, and there was a stirring of public anger when the queen did not appear in London to share in the general mourning. Eventually she did return, and broadcast to the nation. The queen had, for the second time in a matter of years, misjudged the mood of her people. It was later suggested that general hostility was so intense that the monarchy might have fallen, but that is the wildest of exaggerations. When she returned to London, she was forgiven within hours, even minutes, for her absence. The death of Diana was a body-blow to the nation, but it was not a crisis severe enough to threaten the constitutional system.
By the start of the twenty-first century, these difficulties already seemed distant. The millennium began with a celebration of the Queen Mother’s hundredth birthday, and two years later there would be the queen’s Golden Jubilee. In the months before this, however, both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret died, bringing a sudden end to the affectionate and tightly knit family circle in which the queen had spent her whole life. Margaret, who had not been revered by the public for decades owing to her self-indulgent lifestyle and unsuitable friends, had in any case been out of sight, suffering from illness, for some time. Her mother, who had carried on with undiminished lucidity if with waning energy, had just seen her great-grandson off to university, with the request that if there were any good parties he was to let her know. She had never, in the whole of her long life of service, known anything but the adoration of the British people. She was mourned by a million on the streets of London.
The Golden Jubilee was much like its predecessor a quarter of a century earlier, and like the Diamond Jubilee would be a decade later. There were the same tours of Britain, the same chain of bonfires, the same service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s. The royal family now included Camilla, married to Charles and created Duchess of Cornwall, as well as Sophie Rhys-Jones, Countess of Wessex and wife of Prince Edward. Much attention focused on Charles’s two sons, William and Harry. New generations, new personalities. The monarchy is constantly renewing itself. That is why it remains strong.
The populism of the monarchy can produce some surprising moments. The queen took part in the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics by appearing in a film sequence with the James Bond actor Daniel Craig. She did this without any loss of dignity, though some courtiers m
ust have thought that the situation would be touch and go. In the film she was called upon at the Palace by 007, and then accompanied him to a waiting helicopter, from which both of them, apparently, parachuted into the Olympic Stadium. The pink dress she had been wearing was clearly visible to the thousands below, who could not initially be sure that this falling figure was not Her Majesty rather than a (very masculine) stuntman. Minutes after the landing, the queen herself appeared and took her seat. Endearingly, she was later to ask the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, what the public reaction had been. The answer is that, in the context of the occasion and the whole atmosphere of the Games, it worked – though it might not have done. A Japanese commentator, apparently believing the monarch had actually made the parachute jump, remarked that the emperor would never have been persuaded to take part in such an event. The image will surely be one of the best-remembered of her reign, and certainly one of the most important royal photographs of the year. Since she volunteered to take part in the event, might it be hoped that this will banish forever the popular misconception that Queen Elizabeth II has no sense of humour?
6
CHARLES, PRINCE OF WALES
‘All the time I feel I have to justify my existence.’
Prince Charles, musing on his role
‘Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.’
A Brief History of the House of Windsor Page 20