A Brief History of the House of Windsor

by Michael Paterson

It is the young – as seen in the results of surveys – whose negative views on the monarchy are taken to indicate that its days are numbered. After all, if a sample of the next generation is so lacklustre in its support, so uninterested, so impatient, does this not mean that thirty years hence, when that generation will be running the country, the monarchy will be cast off like an old shoe? The thing about young people is that they get older. As they gain experience, they begin to see the point of things that made little sense to them before. As they enter the workforce and become participants in society instead of spectators, they realize the value of structure and stability and continuity and – in the shape of the honours system – reward. A great many of those who voiced negative views at the time of the latest celebrations may well find themselves cheering on equivalent occasions in the future.

  As for the idea that in a time of austerity money should not be spent on celebrations, that has been shown to be both unfair and unpopular. A host of royal events – the queen’s wedding in 1947, the Coronation in 1953, the Silver Jubilee in 1977 – have been planned with the notion that austerity was necessary in view of the financial situation. In every one of these cases it has been the pressure of public opinion that has forced the organizers to think on a larger scale. It is a proven fact that in times of economic and societal gloom (and 1977 was about as bad as things could get) the British want a party to forget their troubles. It is the people, more than the monarchy, who crave this splendour. For all our cynicism and our preoccupation with everyday concerns, we enjoy these occasions. They provide, as they always did, milestones in the life of the nation and of individuals. Even the most sceptical can be susceptible to the tug of national pride.

  The thing about monarchy is that it can play the long game. It is there for decades, generations, centuries. Its faults are buried by time and forgotten. It has constant chances to redeem its errors, to reinvent itself, to win back approval through new deeds or initiatives, or through the arrival of new people. Because it has faced many of its problems before, it has a wealth of precedent upon which to call in solving them. With the sentiments expressed today about Charles’s fitness to rule – at least insofar as they refer to his personal morality – there is a feeling that we have been here before, since they are uncannily similar to views heard in the reign of Queen Victoria with regard to her eldest son, Albert Edward. There was exactly the same sense then, expressed word for word, that while the monarch had never put a foot wrong and that the monarchy would survive until her death, there was likely to be a review of the situation once she was gone.

  Compared to Edward VII, Charles’s indiscretions are mild. He was unfaithful to his marriage vows only once, and then because he had made a mistake in his choice of wife and was sharing his life with someone he found uncongenial and abrasive, and who took a similar view of him. Having now married a woman whose sympathetic personality complements his own, he has attracted no further scandal or rumour. His predecessor was by contrast a serial adulterer and gambler in an age that was far more censorious of moral lapses than our own. Edward was widely hated by middle Britain for his louche companions, his patronage of the Turf, his hedonistic lifestyle and his flaunting of mistresses under the nose of his popular and long-suffering wife, Alexandra. Yet he became an extremely successful and much-loved king. Why could Charles not do the same?

  The oft-heard argument that the royal family is ‘out of touch’ with ordinary life has been losing ground for an entire generation, and now simply does not bear repetition (just as their increasingly wide choice of spouses will make irrelevant any jibes that they are ‘inbred’). While the queen, as a child and a young woman, did not attend school or look for a job, her grandchildren and their spouses have done these things. All but one of her children married middle-class people, who had some experience of working prior to joining the family, and who had lived anonymous lives. Her grandson William, after joining the – admittedly socially exclusive – Royal Horse Guards as an officer, found a useful role in the more democratic Royal Air Force as a search and rescue helicopter pilot. This is a skilled job and is not without risks. While doing it he lives in relative obscurity in a remote corner of his grandmother’s realm. No one will be able to accuse him in the future of not having lived in close proximity to his subjects or seen at first hand their problems. And this is obviously what he wants to do. There is every reason to expect that the next generation of royals will earn their way as a matter of course. The notion that they get what they want because of who they are has often been something that others have foisted upon them rather than a stance they have taken for themselves.

  Some of the great positions they hold are equally accessible to more or less anyone. There have been members of the family who have been Chancellors of universities – Prince Philip of Cambridge, the Queen Mother and now Princess Anne of London. These are popular appointments and have been conscientiously filled by their incumbents, but the majority of such positions go to commoners and it is of course equally possible to have Chancellors who are ‘the people’s choice’. At the University of Durham the post is currently held by Bill Bryson, an American travel writer, who appears to have won the job on the basis of a single kind reference to the city in one of his books. There can, in other words, co-exist both royalty and democracy. There is room for both.

  The queen and her husband – indeed her whole family – have been gently mocked with comments on how middle-class they are. Private Eye, the satirical magazine, christened the monarch and her husband ‘Brenda and Keith’ for their resemblance to archetypal next-door neighbours. Princess Margaret was similarly dubbed ‘Yvonne’, the sort of name, according to satirists, a suburban hairdresser would have and one that was seen as fitting her lifestyle, her friends and her outlook. Prince Charles was ‘Brian’ and Princess Diana was ‘Cheryl’, a name typical of a supermarket check-out girl. These nicknames came into widespread use, well beyond the university-graduate readership of Private Eye, and can still be heard today. If they were inspired by the family’s resemblance to a middle-class family, why are the royals simultaneously accused of being ‘out of touch’?

  The family has recruited, through marriage, members of the middle class – the centre of the social order – who have been accustomed to leading ordinary lives. The royals themselves, while they may never have queued in a Jobcentre, have had other valid experiences. Several of them have fought in wars: George VI at Jutland, Prince Philip in the Mediterranean, Prince Andrew in the Falklands, Prince Harry in Afghanistan. They have also, through an unending series of visits to cities, factories, housing estates, seen more of everyday Britain, its homes and streets and places of work, than most politicians and most members of the public do. Though these encounters are contrived – they could not be anything else, given security concerns – they allow a more comprehensive picture of the nation to be formed than many appreciate.

  Through a combination of advice, necessity and, above all, personal inclination, the present generation of young royalty is to a large extent avoiding the mistakes of the previous one. Their detractors might be on firmer ground if the monarchy stayed the same, but it provides a constantly moving target. What is said about it one year is seen to be inaccurate and irrelevant by the following one. The House of Windsor is far more well informed about the state of public opinion than most of us think. It can disarm criticism not only by deliberate action but by natural desire. For example, the two sons of Prince Charles have shown every indication of wanting to live like other people. When sharing a flat while undertaking flying training with the armed forces, they bantered in a television interview about who was worst at remembering to wash the dishes.

  Both of them, like other members of their family, have undergone a military training that has often been extremely tough, and their background has been of no help. That they have come through this suggests that they have already paid their debts to ‘normality’. Even their vices – the much-photographed visits to nightclubs that will b
ecome rarer as they get older and settle down – merely serve to remind the public that they do the same things as other young men.

  Not everyone is impressed by the informality that characterizes the contemporary royal family and there is a sense in which they can seem too ordinary, for the line between approachability and absurdity can be a thin one. The American website Yahoo! Sports reported during the Olympics that: ‘The queen acted in an Opening Ceremony video. The rest of them mugged it up for every camera available in a shameless bit of look-at-us-we’re-normal-fans. What is it they do again?’ Critics may see it as shameless but it is their duty, after all, to be seen on important public occasions. If they were at fault for looking excited and enthusiastic during the proceedings, imagine the carping if they had seemed bored instead!

  When news of the Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancy was announced, Andrew Morton wrote that: ‘The prince or princess born next summer will be the most proletarian, and English, since . . . Alfred the Great. [He or she] will boast miners, fish-and-chip shop owners, carpenters and bakers among the bloodline.’ This may be true, and it will doubtless increase public approval, but it will make no difference to the young person’s upbringing, which will be in accordance with the traditions of the monarchy.

  Now, it is clear, the way is fully open for any young woman to join the royal family, regardless of background. In a generation’s time a royal bride could easily be not middle class but working class, not from a well-heeled commuter village but from a council estate. If she were, and if she met her husband through some chance encounter, both the media and the public would be delighted, for they now expect such romances. Whoever she was, she would need exceptional qualities of patience and stamina, for she could well be subject to an exhaustive makeover that would leave little of her tastes or personality intact. Nevertheless a nation that is now accustomed to deciding, through its votes on television talent shows, who will win recording contracts or leading roles in West End musicals would be comfortable with the notion of having royals chosen from among its own.

  The popularization of the monarchy has now gone as far as it can. The royals are as informal and as just-like-the-rest-of-us as they are able, or likely, to get. However casually they dress in off-duty moments, whatever slang they use or teams they support, however many celebrities they are seen with, there will continue to be distance between them and their subjects. This will be the result of their wealth, the duties they perform, the uniforms in which they dress and the deference of the entourage that surrounds them. It is a very good thing that this distance is there. There must always be more magic than daylight.

  Anti-monarchical arguments come down to two things: the cost of the monarchy and the fact that under this system no ordinary person can aspire to be head of state. Part of the trouble republicans experience is the fact that they have no clear ideas about what they would replace the monarchy with. They offer little but a reprise of the drab Puritanism that followed the beheading of Charles I, and certainly not any clear and straightforward plan as to how the country could be governed. As a republican website points out: ‘The method by which the head of state should be chosen has not been agreed upon, with some favouring an elected president, some an appointed head of state with little power, and others supporting the idea of leaving the political system as it is but without a monarch.’

  When there are complaints about the cost of the royal family, the amount that they bring into the economy is often wantonly ignored. The annual cost to the public of maintaining them has been estimated at something over £41 million, about 51p per taxpayer, though anti-monarchists have estimated a figure five times as much. Yet this is seldom balanced by an estimate of their earnings for Britain. Sometimes they are derided as a ‘tourist attraction’, though this aspect is not to be sneezed at. The sale of wedding memorabilia in 2011 injected £163 million into the British economy. The royals bring more visitors to Britain than any other attraction, and for this reason alone casting them off would be quickly regretted. It is not simply the amount earned by the television rights for the great public occasions, but the vast expenditure on train and plane tickets, hotel beds, restaurant meals, souvenirs, books and magazine sales, that would be lost. The invisible earnings too from those who, hearing or reading about them, and seeing their weddings and funerals and anniversaries on television around the globe, decide to visit Britain in the months or years ahead, make any talk of their cost to the taxpayer seem rather one-sided.

  Without them would Britain opt for an executive president as there is in France or the United States, wielding political power and giving jobs to cronies? Every republican seems adamant that this is not what the country wants. The notion would go entirely against the grain of British thinking. The British prime minister is too established a figure of authority, and it would be difficult for any other official to achieve acceptance if inserted above that. The alternative is a ceremonial president, such as exists in several neighbouring countries. The job tends to become an elephant’s graveyard for senior politicians, a reward for long service. They have little to do other than greeting official visitors, launching occasional ships and presiding over, without participating in, sessions of Parliament. Their elections arouse little excitement and a significant number of citizens know nothing about them. It is also important that any such person has a political past. If they are a former Conservative politician, they will be disliked by Labour supporters, and so on. It would mean that the head of state was not politically neutral, as is the case with the queen. They would owe favours, or would support government initiatives, or would have been responsible for unpopular legislation in the past, and none of these things would help.

  The third option is one which has been seriously considered, despite the fact that it would be highly impractical. This is that the head of state be chosen, or appointed, to represent the nation for an annual term and recruited from any walk of life – perhaps applications would be considered by a committee and based on nominations from members of the public. There would without question be a strong element of farce in any such process. Many of them would, by definition, be people ‘in the news’ – the sort of nine-days’ wonder thrown up by media exposure. While there are many entertainers, sports personalities and courageous sufferers from illness who have won the nation’s heart or become part of popular folklore, they would not cut a credible figure in the world of international affairs. Candidates would include those whose names or faces were most familiar to the masses, and therefore footballers, television personalities, celebrity chefs, pop singers and greedy executives would feature heavily. The process of nomination, and voting, would almost certainly become corrupt to the extent that it would swiftly lose all credibility. People chosen who were not celebrities, including no doubt the occasional housewife (astonished at being proposed by her neighbours) to show how democratic the whole thing was, would excite little public interest. Even the well known would cause a few raised eyebrows.

  One has only to imagine David and Victoria Beckham waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace, Elton John hosting a state banquet for the president of Uganda (in whose country same sex relations are illegal), Cheryl Cole (whose regional dialect would surely challenge the translators!) addressing a session of the United Nations or Jamie Oliver receiving the credentials of a foreign ambassador (‘Cheers, mate!’), to realize that this might not work. Any number of people who have talent and who have won recognition within their profession simply do not have the gifts of presence, patience, dignity, intelligence or self-control that are necessary to be an effective national leader. Indeed the last of these is something that celebrity prima donnas notoriously lack. A person who had earned fame within Britain but was entirely unknown outside (Coronation Street, for instance, is not watched by Americans) might well not cut a very awe-inspiring figure on the international stage.

  In addition there is the issue of continuity. Every year or, if the system were less rigid, perhaps every few years, a new
incumbent would have to be educated from scratch in the tasks of office and start all over again, making contacts and friendships and gaining experience. A great many thoughtful people want the country to be represented by the best that it can produce – good manners, good intentions, no questionable past or connections, a sense of history, an ability to speak well on important national occasions – an entire range of old-fashioned virtues. Past monarchs either had these qualities naturally or were able to acquire them.

  Nevertheless a sort of ‘Buggins’ turn’ authority figure exists in some societies. In Scotland, the queen is represented by a High Commissioner at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland – an annual gathering in Edinburgh to discuss Church business. The post is filled by some suitably worthy, or important, Scot, who for the two weeks of the Assembly acts as sovereign – living at Holyrood, travelling by carriage, receiving salutes from soldiers, visiting schools or hospitals and opening bazaars. It has a serious purpose but it is a fantasy existence, not ‘king for a day’ but king for a fortnight. Though the position was once held by the novelist John Buchan, the appointees are more usually unfamiliar to the public, and their term of office arouses little interest.

  One country is permanently run like this. Switzerland is ruled by a committee of seven people, who act in rotation as president. Many citizens, let alone foreigners, have no idea who the incumbent is, and the officials themselves are virtually invisible. A Swiss recalled seeing his country’s head of state on a crowded commuter train one morning. Unable to get a seat, the man was perched on the steps of the double-decker carriage, typing on his laptop, unnoticed by those around him. This may be precisely the type of national leader that some British levellers want, but it simply does not fit with the people’s wishes or their sense of nationality. They crave pomp, tradition, majesty, and they will not give up these things. When they did have a republic, in the 1650s, it is interesting to notice that the head of state – Oliver Cromwell, the ‘Lord Protector’ – came to behave more and more like a king. The royal palaces, which had been sold off (Windsor Castle was turned into apartments), were bought back by the government and once again became the residences of the leadership. Servants were again attired in livery with coats-of-arms (though the colour chosen was grey rather than the scarlet of the Stuarts) and state banquets resumed. When Cromwell died, he was even succeeded by his son. What republicans today do not apparently realize is something that was obvious enough during the years of the Commonwealth – that the new regime would be constantly and unfavourably compared to the old (especially if it increasingly took on the same trappings), and that there would be an unending chorus of complaint that things were not as grand, as convincing, as worthy of respect, as much fun, as they had been in the past. Any modern republican government would have a mountain to climb in winning loyalty, and maintaining it could prove even more challenging.