by A. N. Wilson
Four years earlier, the Queen visited the Republic of Ireland. She was the first British monarch to do so – the last time a monarch had set foot on Irish soil had been a century before, when King George V went to what was then Kingstown and is now Dun Laoghaire. There were the inevitable protests by Sinn Fein and others, but the overwhelming majority of Irish people were moved by the royal visit. In a way which was comparable to her visit to Bergen-Belsen, it meant so much, not because it was a British Head of State visiting the Republic, but because it was her. Her grandfather, ‘Grandfather England’, had been King during the Troubles. The monstrous history of the English in Ireland is carried by a monarch, for a monarch carries with her many generations – whereas a politician can only represent his or her own generation. At the state banquet in Dublin, the Queen – it had been her own idea to do this – began her speech, ‘A Uachtarain agus a chairdre’ – ‘President and Friends’ in Erse. President Mary McAleese exclaimed, ‘Wow!’ three times, as the assembly burst into applause. Almost as eloquent as this gesture was the Queen’s silence, the humility of the bowed head in the Garden of Remembrance.
After the Queen’s state visit, everyone knew that the Troubles were indeed over, and that whatever crimes and horrors were committed from now on, there was no going back to the state of near civil war which, for thirty years of the Queen’s reign, had raged in the island of Ireland: in the North, of course, but also on occasion in the Republic. The Queen was not able to forget the murder of her husband’s uncle Lord Mountbatten and his family. It was all the more remarkable that, in the June following her visit to Dublin, she met the Sinn Fein Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, and shook his hand. Sinn Fein had refused to have any part in her visit to Dublin, but McGuinness’s handshake was an admission of how badly he and his colleagues had misread the situation.
In both these cases, gestures of great symbolic significance could have been enacted by elected politicians. Of course they could. One remembers Nixon in China. A monarch, however, is different. The thing which makes them so unacceptable as Heads of State to republicans is the very reason they are such eloquent figures in the life of a nation – eloquent not in what they say but in what they are. Why should X or Y be King or Queen ‘just’ because their father was King Somebody? That is the apparently reasonable republican question. The answer is that they are carriers of the past, often of the buried, unremembered or half-remembered past. They are bearers. The Queen was not simply the British Head of State. She was also the bearer of her father’s national leadership in the war, of George V’s salvation of the modern monarchy, of Edward VII’s genial, if catastrophic, wish to extend Entente throughout Europe (placing alliance and treaties with France above his family ties in Germany). She was the bearer of the legacy of Queen Victoria, who, with Prince Albert, pioneered the modern idea of constitutional monarchy. She was the bearer of all the past history of the British Isles: of her ancestors the Hanoverian dynasty, and of the resistance to it by her other ancestors the Jacobite Pretenders. She was the bearer of the Scottish Unionists of Crown and Parliament, and of the Jacobites who rebelled against the English Protestant Germanic Whig hegemony. She was the bearer of all-but-forgotten memories of our Civil Wars. No other being, except the one who had inherited the throne, could possibly exercise this symbolic function.
This is at no time so poignantly clear as on Armistice Sunday, when, with representatives of all the armed forces, and of the political parties, and of those who are still involved in armed conflict in different parts of the world, the sovereign remembers the nation’s dead. Every nation remembers its dead in ceremonial ways. As Prince Philip told Jeremy Paxman in an interview, ‘Any bloody fool can lay a wreath at the thingummy.’107 There is, however, surely something of extraordinary potency about the appearance of the British sovereign as she appears at the Cenotaph in Whitehall each year. She carries the past.
Year by year at Whitehall, she is the first to carry the wreath in remembrance of the war dead. All the dead seem to be there, including the dead of the Civil Wars, and of her own ancestor Charles I who was beheaded just yards away from the site of the Cenotaph.
By the nineteenth century, the British sovereign retained the right to advise and caution her ministers, but power had passed out of her hands. This was something which Queen Victoria on occasion behaved as if she had forgotten. The more tactless of her politicians, most notably Gladstone, rather enjoyed reminding her that she was no longer able to exercise power. The more beguiling of her ministers, such as Benjamin Disraeli, flattered and cajoled her, most notably when he encouraged her to style herself the Empress of India. But Queen Victoria was in essence politically astute, and she knew that the sovereign could not, and should not, exercise real power. The influence which Stockmar and Prince Albert had conceived as being a sovereign’s proper role could not, indeed, be exercised if the sovereign had power in the overt sense of the word.
Victoria’s highly amusing, and long-suffering, Private Secretary, General Sir Henry Ponsonby, was often the go-between who had to spell out the limitations of royal influence. A bone of contention was often the armed services. The Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, was for many years the Commander in Chief of the British Army, and he and Queen Victoria both deeply resented the military reforms of the Liberal politician Edward Cardwell. Ponsonby quite often found himself being asked by the Queen’s sons, especially by Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, and Prince Leopold, whether it was the Minister for War or the Queen who controlled the Army, seemingly unaware that this matter – as Ponsonby put it – ‘had been settled by the late Charles I’.108
Charles I, notoriously, raised an army against his own people, and it was upon this charge that he was tried and found guilty, paying with his head. It was mischievous of Ponsonby to mention that unfortunate monarch, however, since – as the Victorian Liberal Party knew very well, and resented – the Royal Family continued to exercise considerable influence in military matters well into Victoria’s reign, even if, technically speaking, it was the War Office which held the purse strings and made the ultimate decisions.
Charles I, who stepped out on to the hastily constructed scaffold on that freezing 30 January 1649, died a martyr’s death. His statue, at the south side of Trafalgar Square, looks down Whitehall – the scene of his death – towards the Victorian House of Commons. At the beginning of her superb book, The Trial of Charles I, C.V. Wedgwood wrote, ‘the conception of monarchy for which King Charles both lived and died has vanished from the earth. Where the institution survives today, it does so in a form that he would not recognize.’109
This is true. If it were wholly true, however, and if absolutely nothing survives of the concept of monarchy since the days of the Royal Martyr, then is it not the case that Britain does not really have a monarchy any more – rather, an hereditary presidency, or, even more derisory, a pretend monarchy? Modern monarchists often like to quote the Victorian constitutional wizard Walter Bagehot – ‘We must not let in daylight upon magic’ – to justify the keeping of the Royal Life a little bit secret. Nothing wrong with this, but the phrase can sometimes put one in mind of the scene in the film The Wizard of Oz, when the ‘Great Oz’ turns out to be simply an old man hiding behind a curtain and trying to project a magnified version of his voice and face upon a credulous world. Not a very bad man, as Dorothy Gale calls him, just a very bad wizard.
Bagehot’s phrase about ‘magic’ suggests that if we saw too much of the Royal Family we should not be able to believe in monarchy. Many members of the public in 1969, who had sat through the film of The Royal Family, probably thought this. It must, however, be remembered that Bagehot, as well as being a constitutionalist, was also a journalist. And journalists always like gossip about royalty. It sells papers. They therefore have a tendency to concentrate on the gossip and ‘miss the many-splendoured thing’. That ‘thing’, for a small minority of monarchists today, is a religious concept, a sense that the monarch i
s indeed ‘the Lord’s anointed’. For a much larger number of monarchists, however, it is also something much more obvious, and less contentious: a continuation of history, a link with the nation’s past, both remembered and, almost more important, forgotten.
The Establishment dresses up the individual who has inherited the role in a crown and with ceremonial roles, but it is they, the people of influence, the elected dictatorship of the political classes, the civil servants, the politicians, the quangos, the journalists, the Vice-Chancellors and the Chattering Classes who exercise power and influence in the land; and it is the Prime Minister who exercises all the real power. That is the view of things which we considered in the last chapter, and which was championed by Tony Benn. It is the view which inspires idealistic republicans to wish to rid us of the undignified spectacle of someone who happens to be the heir to a long royal line from enacting a farce: reading a ‘Queen’s Speech’ which has been written by the Government, appointing generals and judges and bishops who have been chosen by the Establishment, and for the rest of the time appearing, sometimes in ceremonial costumes to please the tourists, and sometimes merely going through the motions, supporting charities, visiting schools and hospitals, laying wreaths at the memorials for wars in which most of the people who died had not wanted to fight.
Of course, to keep the ‘magic’ element of monarchism, it is necessary to protect the person of the monarch, and not to expose them to constant press scrutiny. At the same time, there is truth in what Queen Elizabeth II is herself quoted as saying – ‘I have to be seen to be believed.’ If she had not been prepared to spend so many days of her life on parade, visiting every corner of the Commonwealth, as well as of the United Kingdom, tirelessly going through her ceremonial duties, laying foundation-stones, cutting ribbons, releasing bottles onto the prows of ships, there would have been irresistible calls to abolish the monarchy. (They were all but irresistible when Queen Victoria refused to go through these ceremonial and public duties.)
But when a monarch is ‘seen to be believed’, it is not the same as when a politician or a pop star is seen. When the Pope appears in public, he does so not as an individual, but as the inheritor of the Fisherman’s Ring. The Popes go back in a (more or less) unbroken line to the Apostle who was told by Jesus Christ, ‘Upon this Rock I will build my Church.’ That is what the crowds go out to see.
In a comparable way, that is what the crowds go out to see when the British Queen is on parade. They are not going to see Elizabeth Windsor, a dutiful public servant with an interest in horses. They are going to see an embodiment, not of ‘magic’ or fantasy, but of an historical reality. The Pope, whether or not you believe in God (let alone Roman Catholicism), really is, historically, the successor of St Peter. The Queen, whether or not you approve of the fact, really is the descendant of William the Conqueror.
When she was crowned in Westminster Abbey, in a ceremony which still, when you watch it, has the power to electrify the viewer, she was taking upon herself the mantle of the past.
We began this short book recalling the murder of the Queen’s cousin the Emperor of Russia, and the deposition of her cousin the Emperor of Germany; we recalled the extremes of political horror which were suffered by countries such as Russia and Germany, when they replaced Queen Elizabeth II’s relations with governments which were headed, eventually, by Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. It was suggested that those who found George V and his stately wife Queen Mary a little less than interesting would much prefer to be in a country of which they were the titular Heads of State than to live under the monster-dictatorships.
It may be a point too easy to make. Clearly, other factors – economic factors, primarily – can be adduced as reasons why Britain did not find itself, in the 1930s, dotted with a Gulag Archipelago, nor ruled by Nazis. Had Britain lost the First World War, had its economy suffered as Russia’s and Germany’s suffered, it would have taken more than Queen Mary, in her prettily veiled toque, delighting the crowds at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, or George V shooting industrial quantities of Norfolk pheasant, to prevent a brigand dictatorship occupying Whitehall.
Yet, I should like to end this book by suggesting that the monarchy is a little more than might appear to be the case by a glib rehearsal of arguments for a republic. Before we end, we should answer some rather simple questions. What does a monarchy supply which a republic does not? And, more specifically, what has the subject of this short book brought to British public life, which an elected President would not have been able to do?
For, the Queen, in her own person, is the best argument for monarchy. Her way of conducting the monarchy over the last sixty years is itself an argument which outshines the apparently reasonable demands of republicanism.
In his diaries, there is a touching moment – 31 May 2007 – in which Tony Benn noted, ‘The Guardian this morning published a poll of its readers, who had nominated the “greatest Britons” of the last fifty years. John Lennon came top, Barbara Castle came ninth and, believe it or not, I came equal twelfth ahead of Churchill and Ted Heath and the Queen herself, who were equal thirteenth. It is a quite extraordinary turn-up for the book.’110
The Guardian began its history as The Manchester Guardian, a Liberal newspaper so staunchly puritanical that it used to refuse to report the racing results. It was therefore unlikely ever to have been Elizabeth II’s favourite reading. The paper now is what would be called Centre-Left in politics. It is possible that a similar poll, conducted among the readership of a Conservative newspaper, would place the Queen above John Lennon, as one of the ‘greatest Britons’. In a sense, however, it would not affect an argument for monarchism if she was still level-pegging with Ted Heath at equal thirteenth, or even if she slipped down the scale with lesser mortals. Fervent monarchists sometimes spoil their case by hero-worshipping the occupant of the throne, or claiming what can only be true of infallible beings or fantasy figures, that she has ‘never put a foot wrong’. What could that mean, and how, if it meant anything, could it be true of anyone? If the system is worth defending, it would not matter precisely who was the constitutional monarch, so long as they performed the functions with a modicum of dignity, did not involve themselves in party politics, or scandalize public opinion by gross behaviour. In this sense, George V’s example, of being as dull as possible, was a good one to follow. The monarch should not be ‘popular’ in the sense that a crooner or an actor is ‘popular’. Confusion arose during the lifetime of Diana, Princess of Wales because she was a superstar, who was enormously venerated and loved in her own person. In this, she was enjoying the sort of public esteem offered to heroines – Marilyn Monroe, or Mother Teresa. Public feelings about her were worlds away from what most people felt about Queen Mary or Elizabeth the Queen Mother. When she died, therefore, in horrific circumstances – but also, tragically and confusingly, the sort of death which one expects not of royal personages but of superstars – the reaction was similar to the public feeling when Elvis Presley or John Lennon died.
The Royal Family, during the last few decades, were given painful lessons, by the press and the public, about what happened when they antagonized public opinion. The scenes in the Mall during the week following the death of Princess Diana took the Queen’s closest advisers by surprise. They were ringing up newspaper editors in despair, saying, ‘Tell us what to do!’
‘WHERE IS THE QUEEN WHEN THE COUNTRY NEEDS HER?’ was the banner headline of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun on 4 September 1997. The next day, the Queen flew south to London from Balmoral, and broadcast to the world, from Buckingham Palace. You could see, through the window behind her, the long street lined with an extraordinary display of makeshift shrines to her daughter-in-law’s memory. Outside Kensington Palace, where Diana had lived, mountains of flowers piled up. One of Diana’s friends said to me during that week, ‘The Queen is respected, but not loved. Diana was loved.’
During the interview given to announce their engagement, Prince Charles had st
ood beside a winsome, shy young Diana and been asked whether he was in love with his fiancée. He replied, ‘Whatever love means.’
Ever since Diana’s friend told me the Queen was respected but not loved, I have thought about those words, and felt there is something wrong with them, even though I knew what he meant. ‘Respect’ is too cold a word to describe what the Queen, through a very long period of time, and over a vast global spectrum, has inspired.
Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian sage, gave a series of lectures entitled ‘On Heroes and Hero Worship’, the last of which was on ‘The Hero as King’. The ‘Kings’ whom he most admired were Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon – ‘our last great Man’.
Tony Benn, scanning The Guardian and being proud that he was a ‘greater Briton’ than the Queen, might well have thought that this was what being a monarch meant – being a ‘great man’ or a ‘great woman’. Since monarchs are not given power any more, and since the power of the Crown in fact resides with the Establishment, there would surely be a case for discarding the monarchy altogether.
