Over time the power of the monarch has been eroded, the most physical and dramatic coming with the brutal execution of Charles I in 1649. His severed head not only signalled a brief period of Britain’s being run by a form of republican government, but the interregnum ended the concept of the ‘divine right of kings’ – the doctrine that kings derive their authority from God, not their subjects. Since then, the power of the restored monarchy has been significantly reduced over time.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 also significantly changed the relationship between monarch and parliament, demonstrating that parliament could alter the title to the throne in the case of what it saw as misgovernment, as in the case of James II. The Bill of Rights (1689) ensured all Catholics and those married to Catholics would be excluded from the throne, too. The Coronation Oath Act (1688) prescribed that the monarch had to swear to maintain the Protestant religion. The Act of Settlement of 1701 further defined the concept of constitutional monarchy, reinforcing the constitutional rule that Parliament had the right to determine not only the succession to the throne but also the conditions under which the Crown was to be held. The Reform Act of 1832 had the most radical impact on the evolution of our constitutional monarchy, sabotaging any remaining real power of the sovereign. It was a weakened position an immature Queen Victoria failed to understand fully when she ascended the throne in 1837 aged just eighteen.
Bagehot had many cogent arguments and undoubted talent, but seeing into the future was not one of them. When he wrote The English Constitution a depressed Queen Victoria was still dressed in black, mourning the death of her husband and consort Prince Albert, who had died at Windsor Castle in December 1861 aged just forty-two. It was a period that was to last until around 1876 and defined by her withdrawal from public life. It also marked the dawning of a rising republican movement. In the final period of her reign until her death in 1901, she re-engaged with her subjects and her government resumed the palpable bias against William Gladstone’s Liberal Party.
Victoria had relied heavily on her first cousin and husband, Albert, perhaps more than any other monarch before or since. During the day, the royal couple would sit side by side at two desks working through the many red boxes of correspondence. After Albert’s shock death, however, she would not allow her heir apparent, the future King Edward VII, access to the red boxes, much to his frustration (especially as Victoria did give his haemophiliac younger brother Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, her eighth child, who died at just thirty in 1884, a key so he could read).
Queen Victoria’s reign saw the evolution of constitutional monarchy into its modern form. It was her profound scepticism of the spread of liberalism and malevolence towards the expansion of democratic rule that, in many ways, saved the monarchy. Ironically, it was the growth of the power of a sovereign parliament with MPs elected by popular vote, and an executive formed from those elections, that strengthened the reputation and acclaim of the monarch and the system she represented. The kings and queen regnant who followed Victoria adopted the tenets of constitutional monarchy spelled out by Bagehot. Indeed, George V, George VI, Elizabeth II and Prince Charles himself have all been schooled in the English Constitution in depth. Since the end of Victoria’s reign, there would have been no foundational revisions to the monarchal model or to the role of its head.
Perhaps the most significant outside intervention in changing our modern monarchy since Bagehot came from an unlikely source. It seems almost unimaginable that the perceptive writer and historian John Grigg – 2nd Baron Altrincham from 1955 to 1963 until he disclaimed that title under the Peerage Act on the day it received the Royal Assent, and who died at the age of seventy-seven in the Queen’s Golden Jubilee year (2002) – was once regarded as a dangerous revisionist. Denounced as a crypto-republican, he was widely criticised after he penned an article in August 1957 arguing that the Queen’s court was too upper class and British, and therefore harmful to the monarch and the institution it served. Instead, he advocated a more classless Commonwealth court and dubbed Elizabeth’s court both ‘complacent’ and ‘out of touch’. He went on to attack the Queen personally and criticised her style of speaking as a ‘pain in the neck’.
Writing in the National and English Review, a publication that he also edited, he said, ‘Like her mother, she appears to be unable to string even a few sentences together without a written text… The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect and a recent candidate for Confirmation.’ Grigg utterly deplored the way a monarchy that should have been truly national and above class divisions was, in practice and reality, intimately and almost exclusively associated with the British upper classes. His article achieved exactly what they wanted, creating uproar in the popular press and other media. He was dropped by the BBC from Any Questions; the Duke of Argyll, rather extremely, said that he should be ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’ after he had gently reiterated his strictures in a television interview with Robin Day. He was even assaulted in the street when leaving Television House after giving an interview on ITV defending his article, when a member of the League of Empire Loyalists, Philip Kinghorn Burbidge, slapped him hard in the face, saying, ‘Take that from the League of Empire Loyalists.’ Burbidge was arrested and later fined twenty shillings, and outside court the defiant defendant said, ‘Due to the scurrilous attack by Lord Altrincham I felt it was up to a decent Briton to show resentment.’
Grigg was hardly from revolutionary stock, which perhaps made his public criticism all the more serious. He was the son of Edward Grigg, a Times journalist associated with the imperialist circle of Joseph Chamberlain and also a member of Winston Churchill’s wartime government, who was created 1st Baron Altrincham in 1945. Eton, Grenadier Guards and New College, Oxford, meant John Grigg came from the very heart of the British establishment. What seems remarkable today, however, is the degree of outrage Grigg’s reflections provoked considering how mild they were. In the 1950s you could hardly say a word against the royal family, let alone Her Majesty the Queen.
It wasn’t the first time Grigg had shared his criticisms of the monarchy. He aired these ideas at the time of the coronation in 1953, yet at that time, as the country celebrated the crowning of the new Elizabethan era, nobody paid much attention. But, by 1957, the national mood had shifted, partly because the shine of the new queen had worn off, perhaps, but also because Britain had been through the trauma of the Suez Crisis, which ended in disaster and caused a great deal of soul searching in Britain. Suddenly, Grigg’s ideas struck a chord. The irony about the ‘Altrincham episode’ was that, in reality, he was a supporter of constitutional monarchy, not somebody hell-bent on destroying it. His criticism was directed not so much at the Queen, but at the army of outdated courtiers whom he believed were failing the institution. He clearly spoke not as a revolutionist but as a free-thinking, enlightened Tory and as a strong believer in constitutional monarchy. He made it clear that he had no wish to be disloyal, merely to help what he saw as an outdated institution kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.
The brouhaha had the desired effect. Her feathers ruffled, the Queen did what she does best: she listened quietly and said nothing; but, slowly and surely, changes were made. She accepted that the institution had to modernise to remain relevant so, ultimately, the monarchy adapted. Some of Grigg’s suggestions, such as televising the monarch’s Christmas message (introduced in 1957) and ending the class-ridden ritual of debutantes (upper-class young woman making her first appearance in fashionable society) being presented to the Queen, were also introduced by 1958.
Monarchy is, after all, only as good as the people doing the job. Today, commentators acknowledge that one of the Queen’s great achievements has been to modernise the monarchy seamlessly and without destroying its traditions. As one of her former senior advisers said, ‘She is not the type of person who would throw the baby out with the bathwater. But, when she needs to a
ct, she has always acted decisively.’ For some years she agreed to allow Charles access to all ministerial papers secreted in the Barrow Hepburn & Gale-produced scarlet cases, the so-called ‘red boxes’. She has encouraged him to invite ministers and ambassadors to audiences with him, too.
Crucially, constitutionally, like the monarch as heir apparent, Prince Charles, too, has the right ‘to be consulted, encourage and warn’. Like the Queen, he knows the parameters of his role only too well. Thus, when republican-minded critics complain that he is ‘butting in’ or ‘overstepping the mark’ they are missing the point. For the blunt truth is this dissident prince is simply doing his job.
Monarchy is the oldest form of government in Britain. Charles inherently knows, as does his mother, that its first duty is to ‘inspire’ – another of the Victorian polemicist Bagehot’s observations. Doing nothing is hardly inspirational and, in his view, not an option. As ‘Head of Nation’ our sovereign already does this. She has become the beacon of stability and unity. This role may be less formal than that of head of state, but it is no less important for the social and cultural functions it satisfies. The sovereign provides a focus for national identity, unity and pride; for giving a sense of stability and continuity; for recognising success, achievement and excellence and for supporting service to others. Perhaps this is why Charles feels, before attaining the top job, throughout his life he has tried to justify his existence. His motto as Prince of Wales is the German ‘Ich Dien’. As we saw earlier, this means ‘I Serve’ – an aphorism that sums up Charles to the core. It is what he sees as his duty and what he has been doing all his adult life.
Chapter Eleven
DEFENDING FAITH
‘When you begin to look at what…[they] are saying you find that so much of the wisdom that is represented within these religions coincides.’
THE PRINCE OF WALES IN AN INTERVIEW WITH BIOGRAPHER JONATHAN DIMBLEBY, CIRCA 1994
Successive English (and later British) monarchs since Henry VIII have all been known by the title Defender of the Faith – Fidei Defensor (feminine: Fidei Defensatrix). It was bestowed on the tyrannical Henry by Pope Leo X on 11 October 1521 because he was a good Roman Catholic. His first wife, Catherine of Aragon, had been his sister-in-law, married to his older brother Prince Arthur Tudor in 1501 before his premature death six months later. She too was made Defender of the Faith in her own right as Henry’s Queen Consort. Ironically, the title was originally conferred on Henry in recognition of his treatise Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (Defence of the Seven Sacraments), which defended the sacramental nature of marriage and the supremacy of the Pope. It was a work that was seen as important as it opposed the then radical ideas of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation that was sweeping across Europe at the time.
When Henry broke with Rome nine years later in 1530 and was established as head of his new Church of England, the title was revoked by Pope Leo’s successor, Pope Paul III, and the king was later excommunicated. In 1544 the English Parliament conferred the same title, ‘Defender of the Faith’, on the king and all his successors, now not for defending Catholicism but for his role and position in the new Anglican faith, of which they remained Supreme Governors, with the exception of Henry’s Roman Catholic daughter, Mary I.
It meant too that the monarch was formally of higher rank than the sitting Archbishop of Canterbury as primate. When Elizabeth II was crowned Queen Regnant at Westminster Abbey in 1953, she was styled Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. Fidei Defensor is even represented on all British coins by the abbreviation, ‘F D’ or ‘FID DEF’. It is therefore embedded in our history and the history of our royalty.
In 1952, when the Queen ascended the throne on the death of her father, she too, became Defender of the Faith and her coronation confirmed that. It was a very different, more religious and faithful society back then – an Anglican-led Christian society. Many of her subjects still believed that the Queen had actually been appointed by God.
The Prince of Wales will become head of a very different, multidenominational nation, and where, by the time his son succeeds him, according to census analysis, Christianity could already no longer be the prevailing faith. Indeed, authoritative studies predict all Christians, including both Protestant and Roman Catholic, will be in the minority in the UK by the middle of this century amid surging growth in atheism and those who follow Islam. According to projections, the proportion of the British population identifying themselves as Christian will reduce by almost a third by 2050 to stand at just 45.4 per cent compared with almost two-thirds in 2010. The number of Muslims in Britain is predicted to more than double to 11.3 per cent, or one in nine of the total population, during that time.
Charles’s more persistent detractors still cling on to half-truths and flimsy myths as proof that he is not made of the right stuff to reign. One such often-cited falsity centres on his ‘faith’, or, rather, his supposed lack it, and what it claims is his less-than-solid relationship with the established church, the Church of England. Unlike his mother, who is a devout High Church Anglican, Charles displays a willingness to embrace and work alongside other faiths, and that is frequently seen as a weakness rather than something to be encouraged.
Charles has even been accused of being a secret Muslim. Soundbites plucked from long, detailed speeches make headlines, claiming to show his conversion. He said in a speech titled ‘Islam and the West’ at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies on 27 October 1993, ‘Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is poorer for having lost.’ This was widely quoted as some kind of proof that he had abandoned Christianity.
It is fair to say that he has long espoused the positives about the religion where others have focused on the negatives. When he was widely criticised for this in the early 1990s at the time of the extremist militant Islamic factions, Charles, to his credit, was quick to point out, ‘Extremism is no more the monopoly of Islam than it is the monopoly of other religions, including Christianity. He caused more controversy when he said on 20 June 1994 of Christianity, ‘It has no right to challenge Islam or any other religion. It is merely a Western face of God.’
In that same keynote speech in 1993, he was even more supportive, calling on the West to recognise Islam as a part of its culture not a thing apart. ‘Medieval Islam was a religion of remarkable tolerance for its time, allowing Jews and Christians the right to practise their inherited beliefs, and setting an example which was not, unfortunately, copied for many centuries in the West,’ he said. ‘The surprise, ladies and gentlemen, is the extent to which Islam has been a part of Europe for so long, first in Spain, then in the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed so much towards the civilisation which we all too often think of, wrongly, as entirely Western.’
In a 1997 Middle East Quarterly article entitled ‘Prince Charles of Arabia’, Ronni L. Gordon and David M. Stillman bizarrely examined evidence that Charles had actually secretly converted to Islam. They sifted through his public statements, some where the prince in their view defended Islamic law, praised the status of Muslim women and, apparently, saw in Islam a solution for Britain’s ailments. Their conclusion was fudged but put on the record that, ‘Should Charles persist in his admiration of Islam and defamation of his own culture’, his accession to the throne would indeed usher in a ‘different kind of monarchy’. That, of course, would go without saying. The key word in this conclusion is ‘should’. The prince has long faced criticism over his acceptance of other faiths and willingness to embrace and understand other views and beliefs. It is something for which he should be praised rather than seen as having a failing.
Since 1993, he has been patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, where he gave a speech in that year on ‘Islam and the West’ that was reprinted enthusiastically in newspapers across the Middle East and earned him
widespread praise. But does an ability to see what is good in another religion make him a convert?
In truth, he is a very natural adapter, a broad-centred man, deeply aware of others. He sees the commonality between different faiths as a positive, not a negative. His religious life began conventionally enough. He was only thirty days old when Geoffrey Fisher, then the Archbishop of Canterbury, christened him in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace on 15 December 1948. His mother, then Princess Elizabeth, chose the first hymn to reflect the sacred significance of the event: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’.
Twenty years later, as an undergraduate student at Cambridge, however, he began writing to Mervyn Stockwood, then the Bishop of Southwark, who refused to dismiss ‘psychic happenings’ and believed that the miracles of Jesus demonstrated ‘the Saviour’s oneness with nature’.
Later, in his twenties, Charles grew close to Laurens van der Post, the South African-born writer and explorer, whom he would later ask to become one of Prince William’s godparents. Van der Post introduced the prince to mysticism and encouraged him ‘to see the old world of the spirit’. The prince was entranced by his adviser’s history of bushmen in the Kalahari Desert, and travelled with him to spend a week in the Aberdare Mountains in Kenya. The friendship left a lasting impression on the prince’s faith. He once spoke up for respecting the natural world for the glory of God.
Charles at Seventy Page 21
