The Queen

by A. N. Wilson

  The Hanoverians have been spectacularly bad about this. Think back only as far as George III, who made no secret of detesting the future George IV. Queen Victoria’s dislike of Bertie, the future Edward VII, was no secret. Indeed, it was only by the Queen attending a public service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s for his recovery that the monarchy began to be popular again. George V hated and bullied Edward VIII, and perhaps if he had not done so, Edward would not have felt a compulsion to pull down the whole house of cards by abdicating.

  By the standards of their forebears, the Queen and Prince Charles have not made too bad a fist of this difficult relationship, monarch and heir. Prince Charles from time to time made public, or semi-public, declarations that his parents had not loved him enough as a child, using Jonathan Dimbleby’s The Prince of Wales: A Biography as a vehicle to suggest that the Queen had been cold and Prince Philip a bully. That was in 1995, and many years have passed since then. The Prince of Wales has made many gallant allusions to his mother and his speech to her at the Diamond Jubilee in which he called her ‘Mummy’ (perhaps one should spell that ‘Mummie’) was surely rather touching, the more so if he does not actually call her ‘Mummie’ in private. (The Duke of Edinburgh’s leaked letters to Diana suggest that the Prince and Diana were encouraged to call her ‘Ma’.)

  It is a fair question, whether the Queen has been a ‘good mother’. Much more to the point is whether she and her husband have enabled her heir, and his heirs, to carry on as plausible constitutional monarchs in the future. One comes back to Queen Mary’s dismay at the poor education of her own husband, George V.

  If they were to look back, Prince Charles’s parents might think that they made a mistake in selecting the hellish Scottish boarding school Gordonstoun. He was evidently very unhappy there, and it could scarcely have been a good preparation for acquainting himself with the life of the kingdoms he was to govern. Since then, however, Charles went to Cambridge, and he has also had a wide and varied experience, both of friendship at every level of society, and of social usefulness. The Prince’s Trust has helped thousands of young people into work. His sponsorship of an art school – The Prince’s Drawing School in Shoreditch (now the Royal Drawing School with three other London sites) – was also an imaginative and bold thing to do at a moment in British history when many of the mainstream art schools had all but given up on teaching the traditional skills of draughtsmanship. Pricked by the example and success of the Prince’s school, many art schools have gone back to teaching their students to draw.

  Whether or not you agree with the Prince of Wales’s many views on architecture, on the environment, on the place of the faiths in public life, and on so much else, it could hardly be argued that he has not been deeply engaged with his mother’s realm, in a way which has neither bitten impatiently at her heels, nor implied criticism of her very different way of being a royal personage. Those who dislike Prince Charles’s way of engaging with public life – writing ‘black spider memos’ (so called because of the supposed resemblance of his handwriting to spidery-spinnings) to Government ministers about matters of the day, for example, or using his very considerable influence to promote highly contentious architectural views – like to say that the Queen has been very ‘worried’ by his outspokenness; consider it likely that he would imperil the future of the monarchy; wish he would imitate her habits of restraint and silence. One day, perhaps, her diaries will be published and we shall know what she actually thought about her son and heir. Given her way of conducting herself, however, it would not be surprising if her diaries turn out to be as restrained and impenetrable as she has been in person.

  While it is not necessary to pass judgement on the Queen’s maternal skills, as, by implication, The Prince of Wales: A Biography did, it is surely legitimate to look at the Queen’s children and ask – Does the monarchy have a plausible future? The general consensus seems to be that Princess Anne is a sensible, down-to-earth, unpompous person, who has done good things with Save the Children, and would have made an excellent monarch had her brothers not existed. This view can sometimes be voiced as a positive expression of admiration for the Princess Royal, and sometimes as a none too subtle judgement on her brothers. The characters of Prince Andrew and Prince Edward might be of interest to those who follow the ‘soap opera’, but they are not directly relevant to those who ask whether the British monarchy has a future. All that matters, in that regard, is whether the institution can plausibly be carried on by the Prince of Wales and his descendants.

  Let us give a very simple disyllabic answer to that question – Why Not?

  The monarchy could be imperilled if the occupant of the throne, or the next in line, started to behave in such a grossly inappropriate way that public opinion simply would not stand for him, or her, as Head of State. Let us suppose in the rather unlikely event that the Prince of Wales’s leaked letters to politicians were full of racist abuse, or that he turned out to be an enthusiastic and unashamed paedophile. Needless to say, we are a very long way from this.

  It is a mistake to confuse the popularity of the Prince, or of his son or grandson, at any one moment in the newspapers, and the popularity of the idea of monarchy.

  Clearly, the two are connected, for if the Royal Family were not merely treated with healthy British disrespect and derision much of the time, but instead with outright hatred and contempt, then they would be in trouble. That is because, in the end, the monarchy only survives in Britain for one reason. People want it to do so.

  One of the reasons that the Queen’s custodianship of a constitutional monarchy has been so successful is that she has not been the object of any kind of personality cult. Indeed, her personality, as such, remains totally mysterious, not only to the public, but to many who think they know her best. Her, on occasion, flashes of good humour, her dutifulness, her virtue, her unchangeability – these are not, as such, ‘qualities’. There was a long, ironical Austrian novel called The Man Without Qualities, and it could be said that Elizabeth II was ‘the Queen Without Qualities’ – if by ‘quality’ is meant a characteristic which you would say was ‘typical’ of them. Even though so few of us have met any of the Royal Family, we all know – and are certain of the rough accuracy of our knowledge – what Prince Charles and Prince Philip and Princess Anne are ‘like’. You could not make any such statements about the Queen beyond listing the same curious pastimes – dog-walking, jigsaw puzzles and going to the races, combined with religion and a passionate devotion to duty.

  This makes the impersonal machine of Government work much more easily than it could do with a more pronounced ‘character’. Probably, had George VI’s tantrums or George V’s outbursts of rage and sailor’s language been known to the public, it would have changed public perceptions; but, of course in those days the newspapers would never have reported them.

  What personal characteristics of any future monarch – Charles, William or George – will or won’t be helpful to the future preservation of the institution, this we must leave to the future to decide. What we can do, in the remaining two chapters of this book, is to answer the question – Why Not? Why should Britain not continue to be what it has been since the time of the Saxon Kings, a monarchy, since the Norman Kings, an hereditary monarchy, and since Victorian times, a constitutional monarchy?

  Why should the Prince of Wales and his descendants not hand on the monarchy to the future, as George VI handed it to Elizabeth and Elizabeth to her heir?

  Strangely enough, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, British republicans have been fewer proportionately than they were in the nineteenth century, when Queen Victoria’s supposed idleness and withdrawal from public duty encouraged the revival of older republican views. In 1899 many Members of Parliament had tired of all the monarchist enthusiasms of the two Jubilees and it was with joy that they commissioned the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft to make a giant image of Oliver Cromwell – one of his best – which they defiantly erected outside the Houses of Parliament. T
his also had the added bonus, for some of the more belligerent parliamentarians, of infuriating the Irish.

  The Victorians in large numbers felt the attraction of the republican idea. The idea has never died in Britain and it would not take much to make it flicker back into popularity. Suppose the Royal Family themselves, worn out by over-exposure in sadistic newspapers, reached a point where enough was enough, and they chose to step down; and the mood in the country at large – perhaps by then, a country divided, with a separate Ireland, Scotland and Wales – was republican? Britain was a republic once before – from 1649 to 1660. Could it, should it, not be a republic again?

  8

  THE GOOD OLD CAUSE

  ‘I did desire to speak for the liberties of England.’

  CHARLES I AT HIS TRIAL

  ‘[Colonel Harrison] went to his death with equanimity, the first

  of the Regicides to suffer. The crowd was hostile and derisive.

  “Where is your Good Old Cause now?” they jeered. “Here in my

  bosom,” said Harrison, “and I shall seal it with my blood”.’

  C.V. WEDGWOOD, THE TRIAL OF CHARLES I96

  In some countries, the civil wars of the past repeatedly resurface. In France, the defeat of the monarchy and the decapitation of large numbers of its aristocratic adherents in the period between 1789 and 1793 is a gruesome melodrama which is re-enacted over and over again. You see it in the convulsions of 1830 and 1848. You see it at the time of the catastrophe of the German war in 1870. You see the divisions reappearing during the Dreyfus affair, and you see it in the reactions to 1940. Those who supported the King and/or the Church in 1789 were resurrected to fight the old battles – or, in the case of 1940, not to fight.

  Similar echoes can be seen from time to time in the United States when the old South finds itself forcibly reminded of its defeat at the hands of the Federal Government in 1865 – witness the relatively recent outlawing (by the Senate of South Carolina in July 2015) of the Confederate flag, following the murder of nine black people at a church in Charleston.

  The English Civil Wars left a paradoxical legacy (I use the word ‘English’ advisedly – perhaps the recent election of fifty-seven Scottish Nationalists out of fifty-eight possible Scottish Parliamentary seats in Westminster tells its own story). One benign way of looking at them is to think that, when the monarchy was restored in 1660, that merry monarch Charles II healed all the wounds of the previous eleven years, and, by his judicious toleration of the Puritans, he taught the English to forget their differences. Another view is that those who had supported the Parliamentary cause (at any rate in the early stages of the First English Civil War), those who would become the Whigs, sort of won. Charles II came back on sufferance of the Army, and he could not have governed without what became the Whig establishment. When his brother James II ‘went too far’ – by trying to force the universities to accept Roman Catholic appointees, and by evidently undermining the very concept of the Church of England – he was in effect dismissed. Certainly, no monarch since crowned in Westminster would have been able to suppose for a moment that they were absolute rulers in the old Stuart or Bourbon pattern. ‘The Good Old Cause’ saw to that. How far, however, has the Good Old Cause got to run? In our own day, is the republicanism which slept in 1660 due for arousal?

  On 25 January 2016 General David Morrison, the former Head of the Armed Forces in Australia, threw his support behind the Australian Republican Movement, whose aims and intentions are clearly spelt out for anyone who joins the cause: ‘We as Australians affirm our allegiance to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs we share and whose rights and liberties we respect. We propose, as a great national project involving all our citizens, that Australia becomes an independent republic with one amongst us chosen as our Head of State.’97

  There can be no doubt that the Australian Republican Movement is gaining ground in that country, and that more and more Australians, many of whom are not of British descent, see no reason why the British monarch should be their unelected Head of State.

  The Queen recognizes this. Back in 1999, when Paul Keating, Australia’s Labour Prime Minister, put the matter to the vote, the result was 55 per cent in favour of the status quo and 45 per cent in favour of a republic. But that was nearly twenty years ago. When a figure like General Morrison – who has, after all, sworn an oath of allegiance to the Queen as his Head of State – comes out as an uncompromising republican, something has definitely happened: he said he was ‘proud’ to lend his voice to the cause.

  ‘With great respect to those who don’t share my views and recognizing our proud history of European settlement in this country and beyond, over 200 years and more, I will lend my voice to the Republican movement in this country,’ he said. ‘It is time, I think, to at least revisit the question so that we can stand both free and fully independent amongst the community of nations.’98

  ‘I committed my life to the service of the Commonwealth,’99 the Queen said in Durban at the fiftieth anniversary Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. Yet, as everyone present on that occasion knew, Elizabeth’s commitment had been made in very different circumstances. Nor was her commitment, when she spoke the words, to a ‘Commonwealth’: it was to an Empire. It was in Cape Town in 1947, on a visit to South Africa with her parents, the King and Queen, and her sister Princess Margaret. The visit coincided with her twenty-first birthday, and she made a broadcast, not to the Commonwealth, which did not yet exist, but to the Empire.

  There is a motto which has been borne by many of my ancestors – a noble motto, ‘I serve’. Those words were an inspiration to many bygone heirs to the throne when they made their knightly dedication as they came to manhood. I cannot do quite as they did.

  But through the inventions of science I can do what was not possible for any of them. I can make my solemn act of dedication with a whole Empire listening. I should like to make that dedication now. It is very simple.

  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…

  No one could doubt either the sincerity of the young woman who made this vow, nor, even more impressively, the fact that the ninety-year-old woman who is still committed to her role as Head of the Commonwealth has been tireless in fulfilling the role. She has been what two commentators astutely named ‘the benign Great Mother’.100

  In South Africa, where the speech was made, it was always felt that there was a bond between ‘the Head of the Commonwealth and liberal opinion’.101 President Mandela, on his state visit to Britain in 1995, made it clear how warmly he felt towards the Queen for her support for the Commonwealth – in the face of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party’s suspicion of Mandela and opposition to sanctions in the apartheid years. Indeed, one of his first acts as President had been to apply for the democratic Republic of South Africa to be readmitted to the Commonwealth, after its long years in the wilderness.

  The Commonwealth is a strange anomaly. It could not exist had not the Empire once existed. Many of its members, however, including the independent republics such as South Africa, value the co-operation of its members and feel that they can achieve things together which would not be possible apart.

  The United States of America declared itself to be an independent republic in 1776. The Irish Free State, which was a dominion of the British Commonwealth from 1922 to 1937, ratified a new Constitution in 1937 and became an independent republic.

  There comes a point when children are children no more, and when they do not wish to have a ‘Great Mother’, however ‘benign’. In Canada, Jamaica, New Zealand, as in Australia, there are vigorous movements to follow the way of Ghana in 1960, Nigeria in 1963, or Zimbabwe – which eventually became a republic, under the presidency of the Reverend Canaan Banana in 1980, after fifteen years of uncertain international status following the UDI of the government of Ian Smith (‘Smithy’).

  The
Empire became a Commonwealth of loosely federated independent states and some dependencies. If, as would seem to be overwhelmingly probable, the remaining countries of the Commonwealth declare themselves to be republics in the future, we could ask what future there could, or should, be for a monarchy in the ‘Mother Country’.

  One of the most eloquent, and certainly one of the best loved, exponents of British republicanism in recent years was Tony Benn – the Right Honourable Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, Viscount Stansgate, call him what you will. He inherited a viscountcy from his father who had been a Labour MP like himself and who was ennobled by Clement Attlee, and lurched, as a ‘moderate’ member of the Labour Party, to being the firebrand of the supposedly ‘extreme’ leftists in the movement. Fascinatingly, Benn set out to become not merely the darling of the Left, but the darling of almost everyone else in Britain as well. Audiences on such radio shows as Any Questions are composed of a wide range of political opinions, and would receive firmly left-wing views from other political speakers with a mixture of emotions. When Benn spoke, however, calling for the abolition of the House of Lords, or of the monarchy, and the introduction of, in effect, Communist controls of the economy, the audiences would erupt into the sort of rapture normally reserved for pop idols. However often he repeated his anecdotes, they laughed and cheered, as if they had never heard the ancient jokes and watchwords before – or perhaps because they had heard them, and enjoyed the almost liturgical reassurance of repetition, like the after-dinner stories of a favourite uncle. Of course, republicanism was a sine qua non of his creed. He never played this down to those audiences, and when he attacked the hereditary principle, or the inequalities encouraged in Britain by having a monarch, he always received thunderous applause.

  Benn was a gentle figure, and was never personally ill-mannered or unkind about anyone, least of all about his monarch. His version of republicanism was not personally vindictive, and it is one which surely needs to be addressed, since it cut to the nub of why the British monarchical system is so profoundly offensive to significant numbers of British citizens.