Prince Philip’s supposed Greekness is a source of jokes to this day. Soon after the Queen came to the throne, he became infuriated by people asking him how he was coping with life at Windsor Castle, the implication being that it must all have been a bit overwhelming for a rootless pauper born in Corfu. He had a ready response: ‘Well, my mother was born here and my grandmother was born here and my great-great-grandmother lived here so I know the place quite well.’
Another new arrival into the royal fold, Tony Armstrong-Jones, also resented any ‘Cinderella’ treatment – almost as much as he had disliked being steered towards the tradesman’s entrance during his days as a photographer. His subsequent marriage to Princess Margaret and elevation to an Earldom was a source of eternal embarrassment to his former boss, the society writer Betty Kenward, author of Jennifer’s Diary in Harpers & Queen magazine. She had once reprimanded him in public, declaring: ‘My photographers never speak to me at parties.’
The Sovereign can never be ‘one of us’, not least because sixty million people will all have different ideas about what ‘us’ means. Just as the Queen is expected to be above politics, so she is expected to be above that most sensitive, inflammable and confusing issue – class. ‘The Queen is class-blind. If you’re grand enough, it’s much easier to be completely oblivious of the class structure below you,’ observes a former Private Secretary. Whatever one’s analysis of the class structure, monarchs are unquestionably in a class of their own. The Queen’s own accent has changed – less clipped, lower in tone than at the start of the reign – and she has remarked that her own grandchildren speak ‘Estuary’ English (a view supported by the famously plummy critic and aesthete Brian Sewell). Some purists even argue that she has picked up the odd populist habit herself, including her pronunciation of ‘Jubilee’.* Yet it would be absurd to describe the monarchy as ‘classless’. It is an organisation entirely based on hierarchy. It has its own internal honours system, the Royal Victorian Order, with strict gradations. A footman, for example, will never get a knighthood any more than a Lord Chamberlain will get the Royal Victorian Medal. The Queen draws her closest female confidantes, her ladies-in-waiting, from the traditional aristocracy and most of her circle of personal friends are from the same stratum of society, too. But that does not make the modern monarchy class-ridden or, in modern parlance, snobbish. Like most people, the Queen and her family have friends of similar age, background and interests. The institution she runs is, by definition, traditional. But, crucially, what it does not seek to do is represent or lean in favour of a particular order or class, however much others may think it does. And that has been one of the fundamental changes of this reign.
Many commentators continue to follow Malcolm Muggeridge’s argument that the monarchy is the source of class consciousness, that ‘the impulses out of which snobbishness is born descend from the Queen at the apex of the social pyramid, right down to the base’. This neglects the fact that several countries routinely held up as progressive, egalitarian democracies – Holland, Sweden, Norway – are also monarchies. It also neglects the Olympic-class snobbery to be found in every non-royal society, from Ivy League America to the Crillon Ball crowd in Paris. But Muggeridge was on stronger ground in 1957 than he would be today. Because, as in so much else, the social landscape around the Queen has been transformed during this reign. While Muggeridge was damning the monarchy as ‘obsolete and disadvantageous in the contemporary world’, the Conservative peer Lord Altrincham was attacking the ‘tweedy courtiers’ around the Queen and her ‘priggish’ personality. In November 1957, the Palace announced that the Queen would be scrapping presentations at Court at the end of the following ‘Season’. The idea of eligible young women ‘coming out’ into ‘society’ and being ‘presented’ to the Monarch as some sort of imprimatur of marriageability was over. The Queen never liked it much anyway. As Harold Macmillan observed in his memoirs: ‘She does not enjoy “society”.’ The debutante gatherings would be replaced by an extra garden party for eight thousand people. There were few protests, beyond the Chester Herald at the College of Arms who warned that the Queen would be ‘stranded’ socially – and the private grumbles of a number of socially ambitious mothers. But it was a crucial change in that it severed a key link between the monarchy and the old social hierarchy. It was a precursor to that rather more profound rearrangement of the class system by Tony Blair more than forty years later. The removal of the hereditary element from the House of Lords, as we have seen, has not left the monarchy exposed as some had feared. Instead, as both Blair and the Queen’s officials have pointed out, it has served to ‘de-link’ the monarchy from the old aristocratic cadre. Titles have not been abolished, any more than Cowes Week disappeared with the end of presentations at Court. But just as the old ‘Season’ has faded from view, so, too, will the significance of the old aristocracy.
At the Queen’s Coronation it was the hereditary members of the House of Lords who played a central role, paid formal homage, brought their wives along and were allowed to buy their Coronation chairs afterwards. Members of the elected House of Commons hardly featured in comparison. Here was a glorious display of the most exotic specimens in the aristocratic aviary. The Earl of Shrewsbury, holder of the obsolete but hereditary office of Lord High Steward of Ireland, was given a place in the procession and a special dispensation to carry a white wand. It is likely that, come future Coronations, future Earls of Shrewsbury, along with almost all the hereditary peerage, will be watching on television. The present Duke of Devonshire has already signalled his intention to stop using his title once the last hereditary peers are removed from the House of Lords on the grounds that the aristocracy will have lost its raison d’etre. When the previous Garter King of Arms rejected a request from a senior Palace footman for a coat of arms because it was felt that the man was not sufficiently ‘eminent’, the Queen’s officials overruled the decision.*
Today the Queen and her family may number old, titled families among their closest friends. In some cases, she grew up with them. Many have a long family history of royal service and, like her, are racing enthusiasts and substantial landowners. But the connection is now entirely personal. She may be like them, but she is not of them.
While much has been said and written about the political defenestration of the old peerage from Parliament, a less audible little social revolution has been taking place out in the shires. It has involved the quiet transformation of the Queen’s ancient network of representatives who serve as her eyes and ears. Every county has a Lord-Lieutenant. Indeed, some counties only continue to exist through their LordLieutenant. You won’t find Banffshire on a map these days because the old county council has been abolished. One chunk is now part of Aberdeenshire and the other has been placed in the new administrative area of Moray. But counties have always been a human as well as a geographic entity. The people still regard themselves as part of Banffshire and the Lord-Lieutenant of Banffshire, Clare Russell, is very much alive and rooting for all things Banffshire from the ramparts of her home at Ballindalloch Castle.
Even an entity as famous as the Royal County of Berkshire no longer exists as far as local government is concerned. The county council has been abolished and replaced by a series of district councils, many of which overlap with other counties. The Post Office no longer uses the county name and the old county road signs are in disrepair because no one owns them any more. The old county regiment has disappeared altogether. Ask anyone in Berkshire where they live and the reply will almost certainly be ‘Berkshire’. Yet the only official remnant of this ancient shire – the Queen’s home county – is its Lord-Lieutenant, Mary Bayliss. When the county council was abolished, the previous Lord-Lieutenant asked Downing Street: ‘Where is Berkshire now?’ Back came the reply: ‘You are Berkshire now.’
Whenever you see the Queen or a member of her family out and about in the United Kingdom, look for a man in late middle age with spurs and a sword and the uniform of a major general or a lady wit
h a large brooch on a white panel. This is your local mini-monarch – unpaid, non-political and with a direct line to Buckingham Palace. Once, the post of LordLieutenant simply went to the most prominent local landowner, regardless of whether he was suitable for the task. As a result, he would be virtually unsackable. In 1944, the Duke of Argyll was found guilty of assaulting the town clerk of Inveraray but remained in office. Nor was diplomacy regarded as a precondition. When Sir Guy Shaw-Stewart, then LordLieutenant of Renfrewshire, was introduced to Nikita Khrushchev in Scotland in 1956, he expressed deep sympathy with the Soviet leader: ‘I suppose you have to deal with all those communists and socialists.’
Today, many Lord-Lieutenants are still substantial landowners, some of them titled. But many are not. The position has undergone more changes over the last forty years than in the previous four hundred since Henry VIII first created Lieutenants to raise militias and uphold the law in his counties. The Queen has been the first monarch to appoint women as Lord-Lieutenants (the title is not feminised), many of whom have made a great impact on their counties. She has also appointed the first non-white and the first openly gay Lord-Lieutenants in history. She does so on the Prime Minister’s advice, although the Palace is closely involved in the selection process. It was John Major who first decided to broaden the social base of this ancient office to beef it up. ‘I was very conscious that the Lord-Lieutenants were doing a very good job around the UK, but no one was taking much notice,’ he says. ‘Although the role is largely ceremonial, it is a really significant one. They are an important part of the social glue, particularly in county areas. I had a series of receptions at Number Ten so that I could meet them all personally. And after that, more trouble was taken in getting a proper balance with regard to their role in the wider community.’
The Queen keeps a keen eye on her Lord-Lieutenants. As well as meeting them on her travels, she invites them to the Palace, holds conferences for them at Windsor and usually confers a CVO, a knighthood or a damehood on the longer serving ones. Like her, they have to be above politics – at every level. When one Lord-Lieutenant learned that a major road project was due to run through his own garden, he did not even complain. He feared it might be misconstrued as an abuse of office.
The first duty of all Lord-Lieutenants is to be dressed up and on duty whenever there is a royal visit to the county, although that is only a tiny part of their work. They must attend official events on behalf of the Queen, hand out medals and prizes and generally lend a sense of official recognition to county life. Their annual meeting in London used to be arranged alongside the Eton v Harrow cricket match for everyone’s convenience. That’s all changed. But there remains something otherworldly about their gatherings where they often introduce each other by county rather than name: ‘Hello, Suffolk. I’m Gwent. Have you met Kincardineshire?’ They can also appoint a Vice-Lieutenant to help them plus a quota of Deputy Lieutenants (around fifty DLs in an average county) to spread the load at a more local level. The old joke is that DLs spend most of their time attending the funerals of other DLs. Again, this post has been completely revised during the Queen’s reign. It used to be little more than a local badge of honour, a sort of shires MBE, conferring the right to place the letters ‘DL’ after one’s name. Until 1966, all DLs had to be ex-Forces and ex-officer class. When the Lord-Lieutenant of Hampshire attempted to appoint the supremely distinguished lawyer Lord Denning as a DL, the proposal was blocked by the Ministry of Defence on the grounds that Denning’s military career had been in the ranks. If those were the rules, it was time to change the rules. Since the seventies, the MoD has no longer had any say and today’s DLs are drawn from every level of society. Today, most Lord-Lieutenants expect their DLs to earn their keep. This nationwide diaspora of unpaid local worthies is actually a cheap intelligence service which provides the Queen with a direct line of access from county hall right down to village hall. When the Palace wants nominations for garden party guests or interesting ideas for a royal awayday, it is the Lord-Lieutenant and his emissaries who find them. What all ninety-eight Lord-Lieutenants have in common, aside from enforced neutrality and no pay, is that they must actually work for their counties. The days of grand symbolism are over. Just like the monarchy itself, it is no longer enough simply to ‘be’. One has to ‘do’.
William Tucker had been enjoying a well-earned retirement when he was suddenly called upon to be the Queen’s man in Derbyshire. A thoroughly modern Lord-Lieutenant, he was born in Scotland, left school at fifteen, joined the Co-Operative Movement and rose to the top. He was living in Derbyshire, running all the Co-op’s Midlands activities as well as chairing its insurance arm, when a previous Lord-Lieutenant rang him up one day. The Queen’s representative knew Tucker and reckoned that a man with a £1 billion turnover and eight thousand staff could help him with a particular task. ‘He rang me to say he was retiring and wanted his legacy to be a lifeboat. He said to me: “I want you to help me raise half a million pounds to buy it.” I thought: “I don’t know how to do it and we’re landlocked.” But we raised the money, the Spirit of Derbyshire is now stationed at Ilfracombe and then he asked me if I would be a DL.’ Eighteen years later and four years after retiring from the Co-op, Tucker picked up his post one morning to find a letter from Downing Street. The Prime Minister was asking if he would be happy for his name to go forward as the next Lord-Lieutenant of Derbyshire. Tucker had known the hunt was on because, as a Deputy Lieutenant, his views had been canvassed by the man from the Cabinet Office. But it had never occurred to him that he was in the frame. ‘I was shaking,’ he says. ‘I needed time to talk to my wife and consider it. I was four years into retirement and I would be doing this for twelve years.’
It is, indeed, a very serious undertaking for both the Lord-Lieutenant and the family – years and years of dressing up to attend formal events when you might prefer to be doing something else (or nothing at all). It certainly gives Lord-Lieutenants an extra insight into what it is like to be royal. People do refuse the post and it emerges that they are almost always women. ‘They are worried about the impact it will have on their families,’ says one Cabinet Office insider. ‘It doesn’t seem to bother the men so much.’ William Tucker discussed it with his family and realised that he could not turn it down. ‘The moment I agreed, I suddenly became patron or president of thirty organisations. But I’d never worn a uniform since I left the Boy Scouts.’ All new mini-monarchs join the Association of Lord-Lieutenants and receive a thick file of official documents.* Male ones also receive a list of gents’ outfitters. Tucker found a former Savile Row tailor in St Albans who produced an immaculate uniform in four weeks (he prefers not to discuss the price but the going rate is somewhere around £4,000). His next task was to find a sword with the appropriate Mameluke hilt. ‘I bet you don’t know what this is. I had to look it up.’ Fortunately, a local DL – a retired major general – had one he could borrow. Tucker found that he had actually inherited thirty-six Deputy Lieutenants from his predecessor, including the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire at nearby Chatsworth House. The Dukes of Devonshire are Derbyshire’s very own royalty, obvious Lord-Lieutenant material in the old days. As well as being the most famous landmark in the county, Chatsworth is a major employer, too. But today’s Duke is very happy to play a supporting role. ‘He’s very helpful and always introduces himself as “Stoker”,’ says Tucker. ‘He always says: “Don’t hesitate to pick up the phone if there’s anything you need.” I do hesitate, of course, but they have been very supportive.’
Since taking up the post in 2009, Tucker has been busy most days of most weeks and has not looked back. ‘You have to be quite careful what you accept or you could be out every day and night of the year.’ He has been particularly proud to be involved in the homecoming parades for the local regiment, the Mercians, who have recently been in Afghanistan. ‘We did seven parades across the county recently and they were all marvellous. Even at eleven on a Monday morning, the streets were packed. Part of my job
is to present campaign medals to local lads which is a very nice ceremony.’
The military dimension can be a serious challenge for male Lord-Lieutenants who did not enjoy a spell in the Forces, so much so that the Association of Lord-Lieutenants has now produced a DVD for new boys. It features one of the most revered men in the British Army, Garrison Sergeant Major Billy Mott (the man who supervises all the Queen’s parades) and it explains how a Lord-Lieutenant should wear his uniform, carry his sword and look like the major general that he isn’t. ‘It’s quite complicated knowing when to salute, especially if, like me, you haven’t been in uniform since the school cadet force,’ says Lord Shuttleworth, the Queen’s man in Lancashire and the chairman of the association. ‘If the Queen steps off a plane, I salute her but then I’m not supposed to salute her for the rest of the day. And that can take a lot of nerve if you’re standing next to her, the National Anthem is playing and there are a thousand soldiers all saluting.’ Lord Shuttleworth’s top tip to all newcomers is a simple one: ‘Lord-Lieutenants walk. They don’t march.’ He also advises a spot of sword practice – not in combat but in getting in and out of cars. ‘If you use an ordinary car and you’re in uniform, it can be very difficult getting out of the back,’ he recalls. ‘I was sitting in the back with the Prince of Wales who’s as fit as a flea, the car stopped and he leapt out. My sword was stuck under the seat, I gave it a tug and the bottom half of the scabbard came off He pressed on, hoping no one would notice, until a policeman appeared halfway through the Prince’s speech to present him with the missing half of his scabbard.
The uniform presents other occupational hazards, as Miles Jebb records in his excellent history of the office. The Duke of Wellington was once mistaken for a postman and attacked by a dog, while Sir Thomas Dunne, a Lord-Lieutenant for more than thirty years and a Knight of the Garter, was greeted at one event with the words: ‘Hey, you’re not allowed in here. The band have their tea downstairs.’ But beyond the uniform – or the brooch – is a quietly energetic extension of the royal machine. There are not enough members of the Royal Family to cover every new citizenship ceremony or Territorial Army parade or memorial service but the Lord-Lieutenants ensure that these occasions do not go unrecognised by the Sovereign.
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