Many other royals are objects of monarchists’ admiration. Prince Philip has been respected as the Queen’s dutiful husband and erstwhile companion, supporting her arduous duties and being very much the head of family in contrast to her more expansive constitutional and ceremonial roles. Philip himself has always been a supporter of charitable causes, most significantly through the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, established in 1956 and designed to support young people throughout the Commonwealth in pursuing community service and leadership development through wilderness adventures.
The Queen Mother, moreover, was long adored by monarchy loyalists as the matriarch of the royal family, the devoted wife of George VI, and a symbolic yet real figure of British defiance and resilience during the Second World War. Many persons throughout the Commonwealth who lived through that war remember the story of the Queen being asked at the outset of the war whether the royal princesses Elizabeth and Margaret would be evacuated to safety in Canada. “The children won’t go without me,” the Queen reported to the press. “I won’t leave without the King. And the King will never leave.”[12] Throughout the war, the royal family remained in Britain, experiencing the Blitz and supporting the cause of Crown and country.
And there was Diana, the late Princess of Wales. To her many supporters both in Britain and abroad, Diana assumed an iconic position. She was the beautiful and sensitive newcomer to the royal family, a breath of fresh air blowing through the stale corridors of Buckingham Palace. To a family known for its staid traditions and aversion to public displays of emotion, Diana brought glamour and star power, a wealth of compassion for the less fortunate, and an easy-going rapport with the public. People wanted to meet her, speak with her, be with her, and be touched by her. As with all royals, she also adopted a number of charitable causes. Some were traditional, such as her patronage of the English National Ballet and the Royal Academy of Music, but others broke new ground for the monarchy. She became a fervent advocate for better care for serious illnesses and health matters that all too often bore the weight of stigma. She drew attention to the need for better understanding of drug and alcohol abuse, hospice care, homelessness, and services for mentally challenged children. She also promoted better awareness around the issues of AIDS and leprosy, calling for love and care to replace the fear and hate people often harboured for victims of these afflictions. In the final years of her life, she supported international efforts to ban landmines, those scourges of civilians living in places torn apart by war.[13] Unsurprisingly, by the end of her too-short life, Diana had come to be seen by a worldwide audience not only as a glamorous princess but, more importantly, as an angel of mercy.
Monarchists also extol the lives and work of Elizabeth II’s other children, Princess Anne and Princes Andrew and Edward. They likewise admire the newest generation of royalty, represented by the Queen’s grandson, William, and his wife Catherine. William and Catherine have become akin to royalty rock stars: young, handsome and beautiful, elite but with a common touch, a loving couple and devoted parents. To boot, they are socially conscious in their support of good causes.
When loyalists look back even further, they see the illustrious figures of British Crown history. They see two Georges (V and VI), each sovereign during one of the twentieth century’s world wars; and Lord Louis Mountbatten, cousin to Elizabeth II and arguably the most professionally accomplished member of the royal family. And they see the great women: Victoria, the first of the truly ceremonial heads of state; and Elizabeth I, “good Queen Bess,” who brought peace and order to mid–sixteenth-century England after decades of political and religious strife, gave a compassionate and moderate soul to Anglicanism, and inaugurated England’s rise as a major European and international power. To monarchists, history is most alive when personified, and this role is the perfect function for the sovereign: to be the living embodiment of the royal and constitutional heritage that we have been bequeathed by our ancestors.
Celebrity and Notoriety: Royals Behaving Badly
Not all subjects of the Crown, however, are as enamoured with the lives and lifestyles of the rich and famous, and sometimes infamous, British royals. In answer to the question “how do the royals make you feel,” most republicans respond with equal measures of disdain, derision, and scornful laughter. Since republican thought begins with the premise that monarchy itself is archaic and ultimately illegitimate, republicans see no value in a hereditary monarch bearing the title of head of state. Nor do they see any merit in a royal family being held up as a role model of support for good deeds and charitable causes. When republicans look at the royal family, as people as well as symbols, they find much to criticize. Indeed, the tabloid press in Britain, most notably Rupert Murdoch’s distinctly republican-leaning paper, The Sun, became famous, or infamous, for its unrelenting desire to sniff out and report stories of “royals behaving badly.”
Without a doubt, the monarchist side is vulnerable to attack when they hold up the sovereign as the figurehead of the nation. Her family, as the “first family” of the nation, is likewise supposed to be exemplary, encouraging us all through their behaviour to be aware of our history and heritage, to be better persons, and to care for our communities, fellow citizens, and country. Monarchists themselves have set a high bar for judging the personal worth of the members of the royal family, and many republicans joyfully assert that most royals fall far short of monarchists’ expectations. Far from being paragons of public virtue, the royals are seen by many republicans as overly privileged aristocrats, the elite of the elite, persons far removed from mainstream life, whose private lives and behaviour, all subsidized by common taxpayers, are often an embarrassment to the people they are supposed to serve. Every member of the royal family in recent decades has been the subject of such criticism, with particular individuals facing withering republican attacks. Even the Queen has not been immune from censure.
Disapproval of Elizabeth II as a person has been muted in comparison to some of her children and her husband. Nevertheless, critics have found areas they deem worthy of rebuke. A number of her biographers, such as Sally Bedell Smith and Sarah Bradford,[14] have commented on her “detached” attitude to child rearing, stating that her commitment to her public duties as sovereign “left her with too little time to fulfill her family care.”[15] In keeping with the tradition of the royal family, her four children — Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward — tended to be raised by royal nannies, with their parents often absent for long periods of time while on official duties and international trips.
Bedell Smith has noted that Prince Charles had a particularly miserable childhood, although much of its wretchedness was rooted in decisions made by his father. At the age of nine, he was “packed off” to Cheam, an elite yet austere boarding school that he came to dread. At the age of fifteen, he was sent to Prince Philip’s alma mater, Gordonstoun, an isolated school in northeastern Scotland remembered by Charles to this day as a place even grimmer than Cheam. Prince Charles still refers to his five years at Gordonstoun as his “prison sentence.”[16] As Bedell Smith remarks, it is harrowing to read the letters young Charles wrote to his parents, telling them of the relentless bullying he endured and pleading with them to allow him to return home. All to no avail. Prince Philip told him to “find strength in the adversity,”[17] and even his mother appears to have expected him to tough it out.
The Queen’s coldness demonstrated itself on other occasions too. In the days following the death of Diana, the entire world observed Elizabeth II’s rigidity. At a time when the British nation was in mourning over the tragic loss of their “Queen of Hearts,” their real Queen was noticeably quiet and seemingly aloof. In their grief, many Britons came to wonder why the Queen had not spoken to her people, why the church service she had attended on the morning after Diana’s death had not mentioned her passing, and why, as previously mentioned, the flag at Buckingham Palace was not being flown at half-mast. To many Britons, the Que
en’s behaviour exhibited disrespect bordering on heartlessness. After days of growing public unrest, fuelled by such headlines in the tabloid press as “Show Us You Care” and “Your People Are Suffering; Speak To Us Ma’am,” Prime Minister Blair advised the Queen to return to London, fly the Royal Standard at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, meet mourners there, and speak to the British people on television.
While public support for the Queen in particular rebounded in the fifteen years following Diana’s death, the same cannot be said respecting public attitudes toward her eldest son. Prince Charles has been the subject of public condemnation and scorn for most of his adult life, precisely because of his beliefs and actions. As Prince of Wales, Charles has had the opportunity, for better or for worse, to garner instant media attention whenever he has voiced his concerns about certain causes he believed in — promoting traditional architecture, organic farming, communing with nature. To critics of these beliefs, Charles quickly became tagged as the “Looney Prince” and a man of “eccentric” and “unorthodox” ideas.[18]
Prince Charles has not been shy in advancing his causes, using public speeches, media interviews, private letters to cabinet ministers, and his own charitable work to encourage public awareness of, and debate about, concerns close to his heart, all the while challenging forces that he believes to be detrimental to humanity’s social and spiritual well-being. Since the 1970s, Charles has habitually expressed his viewpoints on matters of public policy to members of the British cabinet and their senior officials. This practice has garnered mixed responses. Jonathan Dimbleby, an early biographer, explained that Prince Charles “believed that as a Privy Councillor, a member of the House of Lords and, more especially, as heir to the throne, he had a right to warn, protest and advise.”[19] Such communications have always been controversial, with critics questioning the constitutional right of a Prince of Wales to have this type of privileged contact with senior government officials, giving him the opportunity to influence public policy. This issue became the basis of a decade-long legal dispute in the United Kingdom, beginning in 2005 when The Guardian submitted a freedom of information request for copies of twenty-seven letters — known as the “black spider memos” for their scratchy handwritten style — written by Charles to the heads of seven government departments between September 2004 and April 2005. In 2012, a freedom of information tribunal found these letters to be “particularly frank” examples of the Prince of Wales’s interventions on matters of public policy. The tribunal contended that the British public had the right to know how the prince endeavoured to alter government policy, and it ruled for their publication. The British government moved to overturn this judgment before the British Supreme Court on the grounds that these letters were privileged communications between the Prince of Wales and government ministers, thereby deserving privacy considerations. In March 2015, however, this court ruled in favour of the full public disclosure of these letters on account of their public interest value. Long viewed by his critics to be a “meddling prince,” these letters showed Charles seeking to alter British government policy on such matters as genetically modified crops (he was opposed), expanding the number and role of state grammar schools (he was opposed), and plans for the £1 billion renovation to the historic Chelsea Barracks in London (he was opposed on stylistic grounds).
Only with respect to the barracks issue was Prince Charles ultimately able to exert influence, but that influence did not come through any of the black spider memos. Rather, it arrived through his intervention with Qatari investors involved in the project.[20] As Graham Smith, chief executive officer of Republic (the lead organization in the United Kingdom pushing for Britain to become a constitutional republic), pointed out in relation to the Supreme Court’s ruling against the prince, it is “completely unacceptable in a democratic society” for members of the royal family to try to influence government policy, and the royals “should stay out of politics completely.”[21] In acknowledging their own legal victory, The Guardian argued on their editorial page that if it is both desirable and accepted that the future head of state is “going to have opinions” and perhaps “give them an airing,” then there is a logical next step: “Not any longer to allow the job to be filled by accident of birth, but instead to select for the post by democratic means.”[22]
For all the debate over past decades about Prince Charles’s ideas, the manner in which he has expressed them, and whether they suggest he would or would not make a good king, none of these matters have ever come close to rivalling the intensity of passion running against him on account of his marriage to and divorce from Diana, Princess of Wales. If many people in Canada and other Commonwealth realms are leery about the idea of Charles reigning over them as king with Camilla at his side, it may be in large part due to Camilla’s place in a three-sided marriage and the scandalous nature of Charles and Diana’s marital collapse. Seemingly happily married in July 1981 after a fairy-tale romance, the Prince and Princess of Wales became one of the world’s most famous couples and poster stars for the next generation of the monarchy. With the birth of two sons, William in 1982 and Harry in 1984, the public love affair with the future king and queen seemed secure. But all was not as it appeared.
In a BBC interview in November 1995, Diana was asked whether Camilla Parker Bowles had been the cause of her marriage’s failure. “Well,” she famously replied, “there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”[23]
Charles first met Camilla Shand, the daughter of an upper-middle-class wine merchant, in 1972 and quickly fell in love with her. They shared interests in nature, horses, and polo, and were both quirky, with self-deprecating senses of humour. With the hindsight of history, they should have wed one another sometime in the mid-1970s. Their lives, however, took different paths. The young prince was busy pursuing his career in the Royal Navy, and Camilla, perhaps sensing the challenges and difficulties of becoming closely interwoven into the royal family, accepted the marriage proposal of a former suitor, Andrew Parker Bowles, in 1973. Throughout the 1970s, Charles and Camilla remained close friends, even after Charles had met nineteen-year-old Diana, daughter of the eighth Earl of Spencer, in 1977. By 1980, Charles was thirty-one years old and facing enormous family pressure to marry a woman of aristocratic lineage and produce an heir. Against his better judgment, as he has since admitted, Charles proposed to Diana in February 1981. As the wedding day drew closer, Diana aired concerns about her fiancé’s relationship with Camilla. “I asked Charles if he was still in love with Camilla Parker Bowles,” she confided to some girlfriends, “and he didn’t give me a clear answer. What am I to do?”[24]
Cracks in their relationship began to appear soon after their wedding. They shared few interests, and while he came to resent her star power and easy grace with the media, she became increasingly worried about his continuing friendship with Camilla. Within a year and a half, they were fighting openly in front of his family. As these arguments increased in intensity, friends and supporters of the princess would characterize Charles as an unfaithful, unloving husband and a cold and distant father. Defenders of the prince, though, would paint Diana as a troubled young woman prone to depression, volatile mood swings, and self-destructive behaviour. According to Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton, the princess always knew that her husband loved another woman, and she feared that from the very beginning of their marriage Charles was cheating on her.[25] According to Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, however, the prince stressed that for the first five years of their marriage he was loyal to Diana and faithful to his marriage vows, only reaching out to Camilla for companionship in the fall of 1986 once his marriage had “irretrievably broken down.”[26] Diana was also turning her romantic attention to other men. The first affair, which she herself admitted in 1995, was with Barry Mannakee, one of her bodyguards, in 1985. Here begin the infidelities and adultery on both sides of the marriage equation that were to be unveiled to the public in 19
92, ultimately leading to the agreement by Charles and Diana that they should separate in December 1992 and divorce in August 1997.
In the aftermath of this very public collapse of Charles’s marriage, critics within Britain asked serious questions about his fitness to ever be king. On December 7, 1993, BBC Radio 4 interviewed the archdeacon of York, the venerable George Austin, with respect to Prince Charles’s moral claim to the throne. “Charles made solemn vows before God about his marriage,” noted the second most senior Anglican cleric in Britain, “and it seems — if the rumours are true about Camilla — that he began to break them almost immediately. He has broken the trust of one thing and broken vows to God of one thing. How can he then go into Westminster Abbey and take the Coronation vows?”[27]
The problem for faithful Anglicans is that not only will Charles become king when he succeeds his mother, but he will also become the supreme governor of the Church of England. Should a man who has lied about adulterous acts be permitted to rise to such an august theocratic position? But the troubles do not only worry the religious. Republicans in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth gleefully recounted the trials and tribulations of Charles and Diana and Camilla. To them, this scandal exposed the hypocrisy of the royal family — a family that is supposed to be a manifestation of regal elegance, an archetype of honour and duty that promotes respect for public morality and service to others. Instead, they were presenting themselves as profoundly dysfunctional, wallowing in scandal and deceit, lies and immorality. Rather than filling the public with a sense of awe and majesty, republicans argued that the royal family was a joke, the subject of sordid tabloid exposés, and worst of all, an international embarrassment that deserved to be put out of its misery.
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