by A. N. Wilson
In one of the endlessly repeated rehearsals of his views of life, Benn would recall the example of his mother, a keen Bible-reader who liked to tell him that the Bible was the story of Kings and Prophets. The prophets were called by God to hold the Kings to account – and this was clearly – though he had abandoned a formal allegiance to Christianity – how Benn saw his role, and that of the Left in Britain: holding Kings to account.
Clearly, what was meant by this was holding the Powerful to account. What Benn fundamentally objected to was not the concept of Kings and Queens, but the notion of power being held in the hands of the unelected. ‘The fount of honour has been re-routed from Buckingham Palace and now sprays the holy water of patronage on the chosen few from 10 Downing Street, which appoints archbishops, bishops, cabinet ministers, peers and judges and fills most senior government posts with the people it wants,’ Benn wrote in The Guardian on 11 November 2003. ‘Declarations of war and Britain’s adherence to treaties such as the new European constitution are exercised under prerogative powers by the prime minister who may or may not choose to consult the Commons or the electorate in a referendum.’
This is a trenchantly expressed critique of the way in which Government exercises power in the United Kingdom. It raises two questions, however, in the minds of those who attend to it.
Is it actually a criticism of monarchy, or merely of unaccountable Government?
Secondly, would Government be more accountable if the monarchy were abolished?
Benn’s criticism of unaccountable Government is broadly speaking true. Quentin Hogg (Viscount Hailsham), Lord Chancellor in Margaret Thatcher’s Government, belonged to the opposite side of politics, but it was he who described the British system of Government as an ‘elective dictatorship’. Once a party has won an election in a British General Election, and commands a majority in the House of Commons, its ‘elective’ function is forgotten for five years. The Prime Minister, any Prime Minister, leading such an administration does indeed exercise the power which politeness attributes to the Crown. Everything from the endorsement of international treaties to appointments to minor committees in what is loosely speaking ‘public life’ is influenced, or directly controlled, by Downing Street.
Yet, as Benn made clear, ‘They cling to the monarchy, and would be ready, as in 1936, to ditch the King himself.’
Those who believe themselves to be monarchists do not always grasp this point, and Benn made it very clearly. Benn was right to see 1936, and the Abdication, as a revelatory moment in British public life. In case no one had got the message in 1689, when the monarch was sacked by the Whig aristocracy, Britain has had Heads of State who are, in effect, puppets through which others exercise the real power. In the period 1689 to 1832, those who exercised power were, quite literally, a handful of powerful landed families. In later times, it has been that amorphous but very real body known as the Establishment which exercises power. It is, moreover, perfectly true that monarchs who do not dance to the Establishment’s tune are very easily disposable: witness the dismissal of Edward VIII. Listen to the way ‘they’ at London dinner parties – men in clubs, politicians of Left or Right in the corridors of Westminster – speak about the Prince of Wales if his ‘interference’ in public affairs strikes ‘them’ as indiscreet.
That ‘the Establishment’ runs Britain is not in doubt, and the fact that you could not exactly specify who were members of it, and what it is, does not invalidate such a statement. And that the existence of ‘the Crown’ perpetuates and helps such a system is also every bit as true as Tony Benn believed.
He is no longer here to answer for himself, but those who are convinced by his particular brand of republicanism need to answer a few points and questions.
First, corruption. The Corruption Perceptions Index, an international body which monitors such questions as bribery in public office, does not consider Britain to be an especially corrupt nation. In its index of world nations in 2015, Britain came twelfth, and of the nations which were even less corrupt in public life, incidentally, eight were constitutional monarchies – Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Canada and Luxembourg. One could make objections to the monarchical system, therefore, but it seems unreasonable to suggest that having such a system is inherently unfair, or likely to produce privilege gained in some back-handed or corrupt manner. One reason for this in Britain is that the Civil Service is ‘above politics’, and, as invented and reformed by the Victorians, is detached from party politics. The lack of corruption does not, therefore, descend from the Crown, but nor could it be shown that the Crown encourages favouritism or corruption of any kind, when it comes to making important public appointments.
Further – Benn’s idea that the Crown appoints many such public figures is true, but it would be fanciful in the extreme to suppose that ‘the holy water of patronage’ was ‘sprayed’ as in the old days when, for example, officers bought their commissions in the British Army, or courtiers and politicians did accept bribes to offer promotion. In the armed services, appointments are clearly made with at least the intention of choosing the best person for the job. It would be ludicrous to suggest, as Benn did, that the judiciary was ‘sprayed’ with ‘holy water’, and that judges were appointed from the ranks of Government apparatchiks; quite the contrary, the judiciary in Britain has a good tradition of holding the Government to account, and, for example in the area of human rights law, frequently infuriating both politicians and the Conservative press by decisions from the bench. Long may this continue.
Opinions might differ about whether or not the Crown should appoint bishops and deans, but, again, only in Benn’s dream-land are these appointments made with any political or sinister intention. The reality of the matter is that the Church keeps its own eye on who it wants to be its senior administrators, and there are very few British politicians who would have the competence or the desire to ‘place’ favourites into deaneries and bishoprics, as they might have done in the days of Anthony Trollope.
The Establishment does exist, yes. But the institutions which form part of this nebulous body of men and women – the universities, the judiciary, the Church, the Civil Service, the BBC and the higher ranks of ‘serious’ journalism – are not in any realistic sense affected by the Crown, still less in an actual sense by Queen Elizabeth II herself.
Furthermore, Bennite republicans would have difficulty in persuading me that a republican style of government in Britain would necessarily be freer or more open. True, in an ideal, beautiful world, it might be possible for every member of a quango, every Governor of the Bank of England or of the BBC, every Principal in the Civil Service, every university Vice-Chancellor only to be there by popular acclamation or election, but it is to be doubted whether many people would turn out to vote for such figures; and even more doubtful whether the characters occupying these (usually very boring) positions would in fact have an identity which differed from those who occupy them at present. It is true that the House of Lords is a shambles, but the way in which Tony Blair as Prime Minister (and, to a numerically smaller degree, David Cameron) cheerfully packed the second Chamber with their own stooges does not reflect poorly on the monarchy – we all know that this sort of shabby political influence would be more powerful, not less, without at least the theoretical restraints imposed by the Crown.
A footnote to Andrew Marr’s The Diamond Queen. He quotes the (unintentionally) comic episode in Tony Benn’s Diaries (10 March 1965) in which Benn, at the time the Government Minister responsible for the design of new postage stamps, had an audience with the monarch. Until this point in history all stamps and coins bore the head of the sovereign and Benn, as what Marr calls a ‘soft’ republican ‘at this stage’,102 went to the Queen with designs for some stamps to commemorate the Battle of Britain. The designer was another republican, David Gentleman, and the Queen’s head had been omitted from his drawings. Marr takes up the tale: ‘For forty minutes or so, Benn seems to have done all the talking,
and left the Palace believing the Queen agreed with him, or at least would not confront him.’ He was now ‘convinced that if you went to the Queen to get her consent to abolish the honours list altogether she would nod and say she’d never been keen on it herself and felt sure the time had come to put an end to it’. Marr wrote, ‘Many people have left the Queen’s presence, before and since, having mistaken her cautious politeness for agreement.’ He added that ‘her private office went quietly to work on Harold Wilson and the civil service. Benn’s own civil servants more or less ignored his plans. In July, the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, told Benn she was “not too happy” about a set of six Battle of Britain stamps with her head missing from five, and Benn made a small tactical retreat, “in view of the bad press I’m getting”.’103
This is doubtless all accurate. A small addendum to the incident might, conceivably, be of interest to the philatelically minded. On one of her visits to Oxford, Princess Margaret told those with whom she was dining that the Queen did not trust her own judgement in aesthetic matters and always showed designs for new stamps and coins to her mother and sister. In 1965, when the Benn–Gentleman proposals for the Battle of Britain stamps were shown to the Queen Mother, she was adamant that they should be rejected, reminding the Queen, ‘You are the Head of State!’104
The Queen Mother once went out to dinner in London during a week when there was an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of portraits of the Queen. Someone asked if she had seen them. ‘I have not been to the exhibition, but I have seen most of the pictures, I expect,’ replied Her Majesty. ‘There have been no nice portraits since Annigoni, and that is for two reasons. One is that the Queen is devoid of egotism, so she does not care about how they depict her; the other is that she has no aesthetic sense – as she’d be the first to admit – and so she does not notice that they are all bad paintings.’105
Some years later when the tiny, splodgy portrait of the Queen by Lucian Freud went on display at the Queen’s Gallery, one of her courtiers, an acquaintance of mine, found a friend staring at the picture quizzically. ‘Even she noticed it was hideous,’ said this loyal courtier. ‘I ventured, however to say to her – Well, there is one thing, Ma’am, at least he hasn’t—’
‘I thought of that,’ the Queen had quickly interrupted. ‘He might have painted me in the nude.’106
9
‘REMEMBER.’
CHARLES I’S LAST WORD
On the last day of her state visit to Germany, 26 June 2015, the Queen, with Prince Philip, visited the Second World War concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, where tens of thousands of prisoners had been killed – among them, the diarist Anne Frank. They passed the mounds which contained mass graves – over 20,000 bodies. The Queen was eighty-nine, her husband ninety-four. Both had been alive during the war, her husband, at its close, serving in the Royal Navy, she in the ATS. They walked vigorously up the long path to the camp, and they spent quite some time in silence. Afterwards, when various elderly people had been presented to the Queen, both camp survivors and former British servicemen who had helped to liberate the camp, her minders told her it was time to leave. She did not do so at once. Instead, she paused, and asked if she could spend a few more moments of reflection.
Such a place cannot fail to stir profound emotions. Naturally, it would have been moving, whichever world leader had visited the camp, and, especially, if it were one who lived through the horrific war which Hitler brought about. Nevertheless, there was a particular eloquence about this visit. The BBC commentator, when the report appeared on the television news, said, ‘There was no pomp or ceremony; just a couple from the wartime generation taking their time to reflect and to pay their respects.’
It is clear what he meant, but this statement misses so much. They were not ‘just a couple from the wartime generation’. As the British mockers never tire of pointing out, their Royal Family is German. Most of Prince Philip’s extended family are German, he speaks German as fluently as he speaks English, and he descends directly from Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Alice, the Grand Duchess of Hesse-Darmstadt.
Queen Elizabeth II became the Queen because, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, a German Prince named Leopold, from the Franconian Duchy of Coburg, had been married to Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince Regent of England. Although King George III had fifteen children, and innumerable illegitimate grandchildren, it had begun to look as if none of his descendants would produce a legitimate heir. Princess Charlotte, unlike her father, was extremely popular in Britain, and all hopes for the future of the monarchy hung upon her and her handsome young German husband. In 1817 Charlotte gave birth to a son who was dead, and she herself died a few hours later.
There followed the strange scramble during which Charlotte’s uncles abandoned their mistresses and tried to produce a legitimate heir instead. The uncle who won the race was the Duke of Kent, who married Prince Leopold’s sister, Princess Victoire, originally of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Her daughter, Alexandrina Victoria, became Queen Victoria, who did not merely rescue the British monarchy, but became the mother and grandmother of so many of the royal dynasties of Europe: the grandmother of both the Russian Empress, whose murder we remembered in the opening paragraphs of this book, and of the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, in whose arms she died on the Isle of Wight in 1901.
What we call the First World War could be seen, in its origins, as, among other things, an appalling family quarrel. The militaristic ambitions of Wilhelm II clashed with the Imperial power of Great Britain. (Look at a map of Africa in 1914 and then reconsider the sheer preposterousness of British fears about ‘German imperialism’: the land mass of the German colonies could fit into one tenth of the territory claimed by their supposedly decent, moderate British cousins.) Prussia had long regarded Russia as a rival in power, and resented its strength. So had Britain, but by the series of treaties and alliances into which sides had locked themselves, the European nations found themselves at war – on a superficial level, for the comparatively minor disturbances in the Balkans, and, a little later, because the Germans had invaded Uncle Leopold’s kingdom, Belgium.
For, after Princess Charlotte died, Prince Leopold was made the first King of the new realm of Belgium. He had married a Princess of the Orleanist dynasty, and continued to exercise influence over the fledgling Victoria, and over his nephew, Victoria’s future husband, Albert – also of Saxe-Coburg. (Albert was the son of Leopold and Victoire’s brother, Duke Ernst I.)
Otto von Bismarck coarsely joked that Coburg was the ‘stud farm of Europe’, and he was right. Even before the ‘stud farm’ produced the future Queen Victoria, it had married into the Russian and Spanish royal houses. Almost more important, however, than the blood-line was the political idea which Coburg gave to Britain and to the rest of Europe. Prince Leopold’s doctor and political adviser was the redoubtable Baron Stockmar. Between them, they looked at Europe post-1815. On the one hand, they saw the burgeoning Communist movement, which would very nearly bring successful revolutions to so many European capitals in 1848, which brought about the Paris Commune in 1870, and which would eventually topple the Imperial governments of Berlin and St Petersburg in 1917–18. On the other hand, they saw, after the fall of Napoleon, absolutist monarchism resurrected – in France, with the restoration of the Bourbons (this would last until 1830), and above all in Austria-Hungary.
Stockmar and Leopold felt that both forces – those of autocratic reaction, and those of Communistic revolution – were potentially calamitous. They were liberals. They believed that it ought to be possible to develop a Parliamentary system of government modelled on the British one, only a Parliamentary system of government which would eventually evolve into the democracy which we enjoy today. It is surely no accident that the European countries where such systems have evolved most successfully, and without going through phases of fascist or Communist tyranny, have been the Protestant monarchies – Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherl
ands and Britain. What was so distinctive and remarkable about Stockmar’s vision was that he saw that it would be perfectly possible to retain a modified form of monarchy while Parliamentary democracy came into being. This was the vision of Britain, and of Europe, which Stockmar and Leopold gave to Prince Albert. When Albert married Victoria, he taught the idea to her, and, when he died at the age of forty-two in 1861, she laboured to bring the idea to pass, not only in Britain but on the European continent. It was with this ambition in mind that she and Albert had begun to marry off their children to the daughter of the King of Denmark, to the son of the King of Prussia; eventually, other children would marry the heir of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt in southern Germany, the daughter of a Tsar of Russia, and so on.
If Victoria and Albert’s vision had been realized, there would have been no First World War. Their first-born daughter Vicky, who became the German Empress, was married to a man who entertained liberal views, and who would never have pursued the hawkish policies of his son, the aggressive Wilhelm II. Alas, Fritz – Wilhelm’s father Friedrich Wilhelm, who ruled as Friedrich III from March to June 1888 – died of throat cancer aged just fifty-six. His father had lived to ninety. Had Fritz lived so long – until 1922 – Prussia might well have evolved into a more liberal place, in which Parliamentary government put a check on the militarists. Fritz would never have gone to war with his cousins Nicholas II of Russia and George V of Britain.
The dark, spectral wraith of all this history followed the old couple who walked up the path to Bergen-Belsen. That was what made it so moving, and so unlike ‘just a couple from the wartime generation’. They were incarnations of what Germany might have been… Had the Emperor Friedrich III not had throat cancer, had Nicholas II and Alicky (Prince Philip’s great-great-aunt) not had a haemophiliac child, and not fallen prey to the pathetic delusion that he could be cured by Rasputin… It was the war provoked by Elizabeth and Philip’s cousin Wilhelm II and the revolutions which followed that led directly to the rise of Hitler, to Belsen and to Auschwitz, to the tens of millions of deaths of the twentieth century. The alternative to despotisms or revolution, which was Baron Stockmar’s benign vision, was there, incarnate, a sad old lady and her husband, walking up the narrow path towards the last resting place of Anne Frank.
