A Brief History of the House of Windsor (34 page)

One thing that critics also seriously underestimate is the sheer entertainment that the royal family provide. Everyone knows who they are. The public have followed the doings of the principal characters all their lives. They like to know how the younger generation are getting on at school and university, what they will go on to do for a living, how they meet their spouses and when and where they are going to settle down. Births and other new arrivals are greeted with interest. Any comparison of the Windsors with a soap opera – a comment first made in the fifties – need not be seen as derogatory. They are indeed like a long-running television series, but such programmes are immensely popular with millions (far more people watch them than would vote for any single political party or support any movement), and are a very important part of national life. The characters in the royal family, like those in
Coronation Street
, are expected to earn the attention of viewers through their entertainment value – by being interesting, loveable, villainous, eccentric, controversial, by both leading and following social trends.

More importantly, the entire mindset of the British people is unsympathetic to the notion of removing the monarchy. Not that there are not intelligent and articulate people who disagree with the system, but these are not in anything like a majority, and they are not likely to be. The great mass of the populace is against them. The feelings of the public, whether conscious or subconscious but reflected in the results of opinion polls over decades, are in favour of an institution they respect and a non-political head of state to whom the Civil Service, the armed forces, politicians and the judiciary owe allegiance.

Many people – probably the majority – in any country are more interested in their own affairs than in the doings of the government except when these impinge upon their lives. Americans may well think about the presidency only every four years when they are subjected to electioneering. So it is with the monarchy. It is quietly there for the whole of British people’s lives, taken for granted. Only when some
great occasion makes it conspicuous do the general public start to think about it. When a royal occasion is coming up, the preparations always start slowly. They gather momentum gradually, until at last, on the day or the weekend itself, there is an explosion of enthusiasm. That is, again, not contrived – nobody tells these millions to celebrate – it is simply true that the party mood is not and cannot be sustained over weeks. That is why a number of people interviewed beforehand sound apathetic. They have not yet made their plans, or thought about the matter properly. They may go along to see the festivities, they may not. It would probably be the same in any free nation. What anti-monarchists see as apathy among the great majority is more accurately a quiet and undemonstrative approval of the way things are, and an inability to see any good reason to change them. In the opposite corner, what is actually passive indifference is sometimes angled to suggest positive, even passionate, views.

Foreign news coverage often has its own peculiar perspective. In 1969 when Prince Charles was invested as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle, media in the Soviet Union – wishing to present the monarchy as unpopular and despotic – conveyed the impression that bombs were going off all over the Principality (there were two, planted by attention-seeking nationalists, and neither was anywhere near the event). Less dramatically, the angle is often to show the quaintness of British tradition, but sometimes it is to suggest – because such things make a good news story – that the institution is about to collapse. Watch this television coverage or read this newspaper, the media is saying, because the event it records may never happen again. The whole thing may soon vanish.

This is not going to happen, suddenly or soon. The monarchy is an older institution than almost any other. It has already withstood a successful revolution that got rid of it for a dozen years, yet it came back invigorated as if nothing had happened. It has survived a host of unpopular sovereigns, major scandals, national emergencies. Two long and costly
wars simply – and greatly – increased its popularity. It outlasted the upheavals that swept away most of the European thrones, and the age of Bolshevik revolution that followed. It also came through the Great Depression. It has, in other words, already faced every type of attack, in more serious forms than are experienced today. If these things could not shift, or even seriously threaten it, why would the grumbling of present-day malcontents succeed in its abolition?

It is very unlikely that a monarchy would ever be abandoned in peacetime and in normal circumstances. The European Crowns that have fallen have all been toppled, directly or indirectly, by violence. The French emperor through a disastrous war with Prussia; the German kings and emperor, and the Habsburg dynasty of Austria–Hungary, through the loss of the First World War; the Romanovs through Russia’s collapse after three years of the same war. Two other countries, Italy and Greece, lost their monarchies through plebiscite, but only after either war or military coup had rendered the Crown ineffectual. Other countries – Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia – became Communist. No similar circumstance has arisen in Britain. The loss of some monarchies has no lessons to teach a country whose conditions are so different.

The abdication of Edward VIII in 1936, which was the gravest test it has faced in a century, simply enhanced the popularity of his successor, George VI, for whom the nation felt a surge of sympathy. As an institution, the Crown has come largely unscathed through the era of debunking and has even weathered the latest scandals in the 1990s. It just is not true that this form of government is on the verge of collapse or that anything will seriously alter the way Britain is governed. If mature democracies throughout the world – Canada, Australia, New Zealand – still opt for monarchical government despite the distance between themselves and Buckingham Palace, is the country in which the House of Windsor actually resides likely to abolish them? They will not fade from history, but what we can be sure of is that they will adapt, and
go on adapting. They always have, and they have survived. It’s what they do.

It is usually the elderly, and especially women, who favour the monarchy. Their connection is, naturally and principally, a sentimental one. They have grown up with this family, they recall the milestones in the queen’s life and may have been married or had children at approximately the same times. They are the group least likely to want to see change and the one most likely to appreciate the old-fashioned virtues that royalty represents. They are also the most prepared to recognize the element of selfless duty that has characterized the lives of the queen and her husband. They are, on the other hand, more likely than the rest of society to wonder what will become of the monarchy once the present generation that has championed these values has gone from the scene.

It is the young – as seen in the results of surveys – whose negative views on the monarchy are taken to indicate that its days are numbered. After all, if a sample of the next generation is so lacklustre in its support, so uninterested, so impatient, does this not mean that thirty years hence, when that generation will be running the country, the monarchy will be cast off like an old shoe? The thing about young people is that they get older. As they gain experience, they begin to see the point of things that made little sense to them before. As they enter the workforce and become participants in society instead of spectators, they realize the value of structure and stability and continuity and – in the shape of the honours system – reward. A great many of those who voiced negative views at the time of the latest celebrations may well find themselves cheering on equivalent occasions in the future.

As for the idea that in a time of austerity money should not be spent on celebrations, that has been shown to be both unfair and unpopular. A host of royal events – the queen’s wedding in 1947, the Coronation in 1953, the Silver Jubilee in 1977 – have been planned with the notion that austerity was necessary in view of the financial situation. In every one of
these cases it has been the pressure of public opinion that has forced the organizers to think on a larger scale. It is a proven fact that in times of economic and societal gloom (and 1977 was about as bad as things could get) the British want a party to forget their troubles. It is the people, more than the monarchy, who crave this splendour. For all our cynicism and our preoccupation with everyday concerns, we enjoy these occasions. They provide, as they always did, milestones in the life of the nation and of individuals. Even the most sceptical can be susceptible to the tug of national pride.

The thing about monarchy is that it can play the long game. It is there for decades, generations, centuries. Its faults are buried by time and forgotten. It has constant chances to redeem its errors, to reinvent itself, to win back approval through new deeds or initiatives, or through the arrival of new people. Because it has faced many of its problems before, it has a wealth of precedent upon which to call in solving them. With the sentiments expressed today about Charles’s fitness to rule – at least insofar as they refer to his personal morality – there is a feeling that we have been here before, since they are uncannily similar to views heard in the reign of Queen Victoria with regard to her eldest son, Albert Edward. There was exactly the same sense then, expressed word for word, that while the monarch had never put a foot wrong and that the monarchy would survive until her death, there was likely to be a review of the situation once she was gone.

Compared to Edward VII, Charles’s indiscretions are mild. He was unfaithful to his marriage vows only once, and then because he had made a mistake in his choice of wife and was sharing his life with someone he found uncongenial and abrasive, and who took a similar view of him. Having now married a woman whose sympathetic personality complements his own, he has attracted no further scandal or rumour. His predecessor was by contrast a serial adulterer and gambler in an age that was far more censorious of moral lapses than our own. Edward was widely hated by middle Britain for his
louche companions, his patronage of the Turf, his hedonistic lifestyle and his flaunting of mistresses under the nose of his popular and long-suffering wife, Alexandra. Yet he became an extremely successful and much-loved king. Why could Charles not do the same?

The oft-heard argument that the royal family is ‘out of touch’ with ordinary life has been losing ground for an entire generation, and now simply does not bear repetition (just as their increasingly wide choice of spouses will make irrelevant any jibes that they are ‘inbred’). While the queen, as a child and a young woman, did not attend school or look for a job, her grandchildren and their spouses have done these things. All but one of her children married middle-class people, who had some experience of working prior to joining the family, and who had lived anonymous lives. Her grandson William, after joining the – admittedly socially exclusive – Royal Horse Guards as an officer, found a useful role in the more democratic Royal Air Force as a search and rescue helicopter pilot. This is a skilled job and is not without risks. While doing it he lives in relative obscurity in a remote corner of his grandmother’s realm. No one will be able to accuse him in the future of not having lived in close proximity to his subjects or seen at first hand their problems. And this is obviously what he wants to do. There is every reason to expect that the next generation of royals will earn their way as a matter of course. The notion that they get what they want because of who they are has often been something that others have foisted upon them rather than a stance they have taken for themselves.

Some of the great positions they hold are equally accessible to more or less anyone. There have been members of the family who have been Chancellors of universities – Prince Philip of Cambridge, the Queen Mother and now Princess Anne of London. These are popular appointments and have been conscientiously filled by their incumbents, but the majority of such positions go to commoners and it is of course equally
possible to have Chancellors who are ‘the people’s choice’. At the University of Durham the post is currently held by Bill Bryson, an American travel writer, who appears to have won the job on the basis of a single kind reference to the city in one of his books. There can, in other words, co-exist both royalty and democracy. There is room for both.

The queen and her husband – indeed her whole family – have been gently mocked with comments on how middle-class they are.
Private Eye
, the satirical magazine, christened the monarch and her husband ‘Brenda and Keith’ for their resemblance to archetypal next-door neighbours. Princess Margaret was similarly dubbed ‘Yvonne’, the sort of name, according to satirists, a suburban hairdresser would have and one that was seen as fitting her lifestyle, her friends and her outlook. Prince Charles was ‘Brian’ and Princess Diana was ‘Cheryl’, a name typical of a supermarket check-out girl. These nicknames came into widespread use, well beyond the university-graduate readership of
Private Eye
, and can still be heard today. If they were inspired by the family’s resemblance to a middle-class family, why are the royals simultaneously accused of being ‘out of touch’?

The family has recruited, through marriage, members of the middle class – the centre of the social order – who have been accustomed to leading ordinary lives. The royals themselves, while they may never have queued in a Jobcentre, have had other valid experiences. Several of them have fought in wars: George VI at Jutland, Prince Philip in the Mediterranean, Prince Andrew in the Falklands, Prince Harry in Afghanistan. They have also, through an unending series of visits to cities, factories, housing estates, seen more of everyday Britain, its homes and streets and places of work, than most politicians and most members of the public do. Though these encounters are contrived – they could not be anything else, given security concerns – they allow a more comprehensive picture of the nation to be formed than many appreciate.