Read The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor Online
Authors: Penny Junor
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Royalty
The question is why? Why did so many thousands of people flock to Buckingham Palace in their grief rather than to Kensington Palace, which was where Diana had lived after all? Why did the nation want to see the Queen so badly? Strictly speaking, at the time of her death Diana was no longer a member of the Royal Family, and anyway, ought it not to have been her former husband to whom they should have looked?
The reason, I suspect, goes to the very heart of what monarchy is all about. It goes far beyond the constitutional. The Queen provides the focus for the nation’s emotion. When the nation is in mourning, it looks to the monarch to lead the process. In every major disaster, from Aberfan in 1966, where schoolchildren were buried beneath tons of coal slag, to 9/11, in 2001, when al-Qaeda suicide bombers flew passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, or the Asian tsunami that killed over
120,000 people on Boxing Day in 2004 and left millions homeless, the Queen or another close member of the Royal Family has been there to express the nation’s grief. When the nation is jubilant at having won the World Cup or gold medals at the Olympics, the Queen congratulates and honours the winning teams on our behalf. When the East End of London and other cities were bombed during the Second World War the Queen’s parents, George VI and Queen Elizabeth, went to visit the devastation and much of the warmth that attached to the Queen Mother throughout her life came as a result of the solidarity and concern she and the King showed to the people of London.
The magic of monarchy is in the seeing. And it
is
magic – despite what cynics might say. Many of the people who work for the Queen and accompany her on away days and foreign tours describe their jobs as being the ‘Feel-Good Business’. And there is no doubt that people do feel good when they meet her. It doesn’t seem to matter that the papers have been filled with tawdry details of her children’s domestic disasters – the day she comes to town they stand for hours in all weathers clutching Union Jacks. They cheer when her gleaming Bentley with its royal flag on the roof appears with its police motorcycle outriders down the car-free high street. They cheer again when she steps out, smiling and waving; they reach forward at perilous angles to offer flowers and posies, proffer their children, and click frantically at their pocket Pentaxes when she comes within range. Everyone is smiling, everyone is elated and everyone takes away with them a memory to treasure for the rest of their lives. And for those who strike lucky and are the ones the Queen stops and talks to, they will probably never have an experience to match it.
Of course, the people who want to see the Queen on these visits already like her and probably approve of the institution.
If they didn’t they wouldn’t bother standing and waiting in all weathers. But there are other occasions on which the Queen meets people when that is not the case. Not every worker in a factory, hospital or school is a monarchist; not everyone who is invited to a garden party or a reception at Buckingham Palace is a devoted fan, but there are not many who fail to be impressed when they meet the Queen, or who are indifferent to the recognition of their work and worth that such a meeting implies.
Recognizing, thanking, praising and rewarding citizens for their bravery, dedication, charity or work is another part of the monarch’s job. At one end of the scale outstanding service is rewarded to an individual with a peerage or a knighthood – although most of that is on the Prime Minister’s say-so and overtly political – but at the other end a visit to a factory is no less significant, and for the people on the production line to be asked to explain what they do by the Queen or the Prince of Wales, her heir, or even another member of the Royal Family, is a real fillip. It’s like as a schoolchild being singled out for praise by the headmistress when you didn’t even think she knew your name. People feel that their effort has been noticed and is appreciated, and in the lower-paid jobs that tend to be vocational, such as nursing or care work, that matters.
During the nineteenth century the family became an important part of monarchy, as Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister in 1868 and again from 1874 to 1880, acknowledged: ‘The influence of the Crown is not confined merely to political affairs. England is a domestic country. Here the home is revered and the hearth sacred. The nation is represented by a family – the Royal Family; and if that family is educated with a sense of responsibility and a sentiment of public duty, it is difficult to exaggerate the salutary influence they may exercise over a nation.’
Walter Bagehot was the first to note this. A Victorian economist and political analyst, Bagehot is often quoted from his book
The English Constitution
, first published in 1867 and which still provides the most enduring analysis of monarchy to date. ‘A family on the throne is an interesting idea,’ he wrote. ‘It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life. No feeling could seem more childish than the enthusiasm of the English at the marriage of the Prince of Wales. They treated as a great political event, what, looked at as a matter of pure business, was very small indeed. But no feeling could be more like common human nature as it is, and as it is likely to be.’
The Prince of Wales he was referring to was the future Edward VII and the marriage that of Edward to the Danish Princess Alexandra in 1863, but he could just as easily have been writing about the first marriage of the present Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, 112 years later. There was a great display of childish enthusiasm for the event: the newspapers talked about little else for weeks beforehand, London’s Oxford Street hosted the biggest street party in the world in the couple’s honour, there was a massive fireworks display in Hyde Park and celebratory beacons were lit up and down the country. On the day of the wedding – declared a public holiday – millions lined the route between Buckingham Palace and St Paul’s Cathedral; the first arrivals had staked their claim to a piece of pavement three days before the wedding and an estimated seven hundred million more watched it on television. The Royal Wedding, as it was referred to for many years, notwithstanding the fact it had not been the only one, was a major landmark in most people’s memories, and until the cracks began to show it was an event that reaffirmed the monarchy’s place in people’s hearts.
Those were halcyon days. For the first thirty-five years of
the Queen’s reign the Royal Family had been everything the nation could have wished for, a model for us all. But since then three of her four children have been through a divorce, with all the tawdry details paraded by the press, and the influence they exercise over the nation today is perhaps less than salutary. The troubled private life of the Prince of Wales, who finally, in February 2005, announced his intention to marry Camilla Parker Bowles, has made international news on and off for nearly twenty years. The breakdown of his marriage to Diana – according to her because of his obsession with Camilla – her revelations about their life together, his admission of adultery on prime-time television, their divorce and her subsequent death, split the nation’s loyalty. Some people recognized it to be an ill-starred match from the start and felt nothing but sympathy for everyone involved. Others, for whom Diana was an icon, roundly blamed the Prince, as Diana had done, for having destroyed her happiness. And the question of whether he should marry Camilla Parker Bowles, the figure at the centre of it, caused even greater division in the country.
But their private lives are a distraction. What the Royal Family does do, divorced or not, is work tirelessly for the people of Britain. First and foremost they give an inestimable boost to charity. The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and each of their children, as well as several more distant relations, are all attached to charities – hundreds of them – to which they give time and support, and those charities benefit demonstrably from their royal connection. The profile goes up and so too do the donations; and there are many areas of national life, including education and health, that rely heavily upon the charitable sector.
Then there is tourism. Again, it is demonstrable that having a real live Royal Family who walk the corridors of Buckingham
Palace, the Palace of Holyroodhouse and Windsor Castle is much more of a draw to visitors than empty buildings steeped in history; in Britain visitors get the best of both worlds. Hotels, shops, restaurants, pubs, trains, planes, taxis, car hire firms, not to mention galleries, museums and the regular tourist attractions and street stalls, all reap the rewards of having a town full of tourists.
But there are other functions of monarchy. Representing the nation to itself is another important one. The fact that the Royal Family has been a fixture in the life of everyone born and bred in either Britain or one of her dominions means that we associate the Royal Family with our roots, with home. They are familiar, just as red telephone boxes and double-decker buses are familiar, or driving on the left-hand side of the road, and for many people those familiars are comforting and define who we are and what we stand for. You may dislike buses, think phone boxes old-fashioned and think we would be better off driving on the right, but those fixtures still denote home and form part of our identity.
And because they are a fixture and change only imperceptibly, their very presence creates stability and continuity. The Queen has appeared in our living rooms on Christmas afternoon for more than fifty years; she has been Trooping the Colour on her official birthday on Horse Guards Parade for as long, and laying a wreath at the Cenotaph every 11 November. She and the Royal Family spend August in Scotland, Christmas at Sandringham, Easter at Windsor Castle and the Queen hasn’t missed Royal Ascot since 1945. It takes a birth, a death or a disaster to alter the routine of the Royal Family, and when so much else in life is turning upside down, that permanence and predictability provides an anchor, a national reference point, which makes people feel secure.
But her most obvious role is Head of State; she is also
Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Colonel-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and Head of the Commonwealth. As a constitutional monarch, the Queen has no executive power – everything is done on advice from her ministers – and she reigns rather than rules, but she has great capacity for influence. She keeps her ministers in check and the system keeps the monarch in check. She undertakes ceremonial duties such as opening Parliament – and has the prerogative, among other things, to close it too should the need arise – she receives visiting heads of state, goes on state visits to other countries, receives diplomats, holds investitures and keeps abreast of affairs of state by weekly audiences with her prime minister and ‘doing the boxes’, her daily digest of Cabinet papers, Foreign and Commonwealth telegrams and ministerial papers. And having spent more than fifty years steeped in state papers, travelling the world, visiting cities, towns and villages, meeting everyone from presidents to farm and factory workers, she has more experience than anyone else in government. She has worked with eleven prime ministers and was discussing affairs of state with Winston Churchill before Tony Blair was even born.
That, in a nutshell, is what monarchy is for. Its critics say the system is outdated, that the hierarchical and hereditary nature of the institution is unacceptable in modern society, that the Royal Family lives a life of privilege and luxury at public expense and does nothing to earn it; individuals have been accused of abusing their position. All points that need to be addressed in assessing whether the monarchy is relevant in twenty-first-century Britain and whether it is likely to have a future beyond the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
What follows is highly subjective. Having written about the Royal Family on and off for more than twenty years I have seen a lot of change, met a lot of people who have worked
with and for members of the Royal Family, and seen the effect that they and their work and activity have had on individuals and society as a whole. I was not a dedicated monarchist when I started twenty years ago, and I am certainly not without criticism now. Nor am I without fears for the future. But I am convinced that this system that has stood the test of time, hierarchical and hereditary though it is, enriches our community beyond measure and Britain would be a poorer place without a monarch at the helm. And this is why…
My first encounter with Buckingham Palace was in 1981. The Prince of Wales had just married Lady Diana Spencer in a spectacular ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral; the country had been in a fever of excitement for months and I had been commissioned to write a biography of the bride. I approached the Palace and was instantly rebuffed. A letter on thick cream paper with Buckingham Palace at the top of the page, embossed in red, but with no address, informed me that they would not be able to help in any way. It was signed by Michael Shea, Press Secretary to HM The Queen – a very nice man, I subsequently discovered, an ex-diplomat, who is now an author himself, although not of royal books.
Four months later I wrote again and Michael Shea invited me in to see him. I will never forget the sensation of scrunching across the pink gravel at the front of Buckingham Palace, watched by dozens of Japanese tourists and busloads from Burnley, and stepping through the Privy Purse door at the extreme right of the building, into a world where time seemed to have stopped. Outside were guards standing stock-still in scarlet coats and black bearskins, with rifles beside their right ears, which immediately brought to mind A. A. Milne’s refrain about changing guard at Buckingham Palace. Inside were
footmen in red waistcoats and tails and I was invited to wait in a room beautifully furnished with antiques. A copy of
The Times
– I am tempted to say, crisply ironed, but that would be a lie – lay on a table.
Michael Shea appeared, friendly palm outstretched, and took me down wide red-carpeted corridors into his office, another room beautifully furnished with antiques; not as one might have expected the communications centre of the British monarchy to have looked in 1981. But then there was no great tradition of helping the media at the Palace. Up until just thirteen years before, the man in Shea’s shoes was known as ‘The Abominable No Man’. Commander Richard Colville hated the press and for the twenty years he held the job he made no secret of his contempt. Newspapers didn’t even bother ringing the Palace when a royal story cropped up because they knew there would be no comment. Every other organization I had dealt with took public relations seriously; press officers went out of their way to help journalists and writers get the material they needed, aware that a good relationship could be extremely useful all round. Michael Shea was charm itself, but I wasn’t convinced that the Palace had come far from the days when the colour and fabric of the Queen’s outfit was their stock in trade. And in the absence of reliable guidance, journalists were apt to make mistakes, and
in extremis
to make things up.
These days they are more inventive. On 20 November 2003 the Royal Family awoke to the news that for the last two months they had had an impostor in their midst. Ryan Parry, a
Daily Mirror
reporter, had applied for a job as a trainee footman at Buckingham Palace, and, despite giving dodgy references, had been given a job which brought him into direct contact with members of the Royal Family. He was given a security pass that allowed him access to all areas and within
days he had been shown the hiding place for skeleton keys to open every door in the Palace. He was still
in situ
when President Bush arrived on his state visit, amidst one of the tightest and most expensive security operations ever mounted in Britain. Not once was Parry questioned and not once were bags that he brought into the Palace checked. For two months he carried a camera in his pocket and the photographs he took of private areas, including bedrooms, were spread across the pages of the
Daily Mirror
for two days until the Palace sought an injunction to stop any more material being published.
It was a terrifying breach of security. Parry repeatedly pointed out that, had he been a terrorist, he could have killed the Queen or any member of the Royal Family. He could even have killed the President of the United States.
But as Edward Griffiths, the Deputy Master of the Household who employed the man, points out, he wasn’t. ‘He was neither a criminal nor had links with terrorists. In that sense he passed all the security checks.’ What the system doesn’t allow for is journalists posing as would-be terrorists.
Parry’s stunt was dressed up as a security alert. And, post 9/11, terrorism is a very real threat, although I’d have thought today’s suicide bombers are unlikely to go through the charade of applying for a post as an under-footman at Buckingham Palace. There must be quicker and more spectacular methods of blowing up the Queen or annihilating the British Royal Family. This was simply the most audacious assault yet on the Queen’s privacy and the privacy of other members of her family. And that was what had copies of the
Daily Mirror
flying off the shelves and newspapers and television channels all over the world reproducing the pictures. It was nothing more noble than the desire to see how the most famous family in Britain, notoriously secretive about its private life, actually lives. And the surprise was that the Queen, who lives in such
grand palaces and castles, wears priceless diamonds and jewels and is reputed to be one of the richest women in the world, keeps her breakfast cornflakes in plastic Tupperware boxes, and when she’s not hosting state banquets for 160 she has supper in front of the television watching serials and soaps.
The word dysfunctional has often been used to describe the House of Windsor and it’s hard to find a better word. It’s equally hard to know why they behave so strangely. It is not that there is a lack of affection. The Prince of Wales has a tricky relationship with his father but that aside, the family are all very fond of one another, and in private there are great displays of affection when they meet and a lot of jokes and laughter. But they don’t talk to one another in the way that most families who enjoy one another’s company do. They don’t pick up the phone when they have something to say, and would never dream of saying ‘What a brilliant speech you gave last Wednesday’ – praise for each other’s achievements is not something they go in for – or ‘I’ve got a free evening, what are you up to?’ They write memos to each other or liaise through private secretaries.
And yet it seems to be only contact within the family that they find so difficult. They all make phone calls perfectly happily to courtiers, friends, government ministers and the people running their charities. Indeed, the Prince of Wales is seldom off the phone, as his private secretaries, and more particularly their wives, know all too well. He often makes calls himself – although ever since he announced who was calling and the voice at the other end said, ‘Yes, and I’m the Queen of Sheba’, he has said it is his Private Secretary calling until he is certain he has the person he wants.
The inter-family formality is perhaps a result of there being no clear distinction between their business and personal lives. They are on duty so much of the time and live so much on top
of the job that they see more of their private secretaries than they do of their spouses or children. Yet although the relationship with their private secretaries is close, it is almost never a personal one. While the private secretaries are in post they are indispensable, not just in running their principals’ lives but also as sounding boards and occasionally confidants. They know everything that goes on, everything that passes through their bosses’ heads. But they are never friends, and as soon as they have gone, and someone else is in post, with very few exceptions they are lucky if they get a Christmas card.
The time of my first meeting with Michael Shea in 1981 were heady days for the House of Windsor. The wedding had been a triumph – ‘the stuff of which fairy tales are made’ as the Archbishop of Canterbury had said in his address. Diana, who was tall, leggy and gloriously photogenic, was on her way to becoming a superstar, and after months of recession, depression and inner-city riots, extravagant though it was, a full-blown state wedding with grand coaches and all the paraphernalia was just what the country needed. For most people it was a welcome distraction, a wonderful opportunity to celebrate; it was a boost to the nation’s morale, to tourism and to the security and popularity of the monarchy.
Diana had very exceptional qualities. I remember watching her during her first visit to Wales with the Prince, immediately after the honeymoon. As she climbed out of the car at their first stop, she looked briefly to her husband for reassurance and then set off into the crowds with a big smile on her face and arms outstretched to shake as many hands as she could reach. She was a natural; there wasn’t an elderly person in a wheelchair or a babe in arms that she didn’t notice and single out for attention. A thirty-second conversation is going to be banal at the best of times, but she seemed to find just the right words. ‘What nice shiny medals,’ she said to one hunchbacked
old soldier, and then to his beaming wife, ‘Did you polish them for him?’ And when a seven-year-old boy called out from a couple of rows back, ‘My dad says give us a kiss’, she smiled and responded, ‘Well then, you’d better have one’, and leaning right forward gave the boy a kiss on the cheek.
The crowds were contained behind barriers on either side of the street, as with all such visits, leaving the middle clear for the royal party. Diana and Charles took one side each and there were audible groans of disappointment when people realized that they would get Charles rather than Diana. It was no secret that the enthusiasm and the flowers were all for Diana. ‘Do you want me to give those to her?’ Charles said time and time again as people held posies aloft and looked longingly in her direction. ‘I seem to do nothing but collect flowers these days. I know my role.’ He was laughing, and I have no doubt at all that at that time he was terribly proud of his wife and pleased that people liked her, but as time went by and the pattern repeated itself endlessly, his laughter began to ring hollow.
He was not used to sharing the limelight. He had been the centre of attention wherever he went for thirty-two years – and he was being eclipsed by his wife. His work, his speeches, his visits, everything was being overshadowed by Diana; and through no fault of her own. Later it became a deliberate ploy but at that time she was as surprised as anyone by the mania which gripped the nation. Every day some trivial story provided an excuse to have her on the front page of the newspapers. Charles began to lose heart – and who can blame him? There were so many serious and important issues that needed airing but no one seemed to be listening. All they seemed to care about was Diana’s wardrobe. Diana wore pearl chokers that had scarcely been seen since the nineteenth century and suddenly the shops were full of them. She wore culottes on
honeymoon and culottes returned to fashion; high necks and they too flooded the market; and her hairstyle was copied in every high-street salon.
Diana’s popularity was phenomenal but it was not the first time that the nation, or indeed the world, had fallen in love with a beautiful royal princess. The Queen is good-looking now in her seventies – as the young Princess Elizabeth she was breathtakingly pretty. She was not tall and rangy like Diana, and her style was quite different, but she had flawless skin, a good figure and the most radiant smile that won hearts as surely as Diana’s did thirty years later. When the mania over Diana was at its height, one of the Queen’s courtiers said, ‘Ma’am, you will never have seen anything like the publicity Charles and Diana are having.’ ‘You were not around,’ she said witheringly, ‘when Margaret and I were having our future husbands talent-spotted for us. In comparison with the width and breadth and depth of the media in those days, it was just as great if not greater. Daily we were being lined up with some new suitor.’ ‘I couldn’t argue,’ he says. People turned out in their thousands not just in Britain but in the countries she visited all over the world to see Princess Elizabeth and cheer her. Monarchy at that time was revered in a way that the youth of today would find incomprehensible.
Her marriage in November 1947 to the Greek Prince Philip, a tall, blond, handsome naval officer, riveted a nation still in the grip of post-war austerity. It was broadcast on the radio in forty-two countries, millions of people sat glued to their sets, thousands lined the route to Westminster Abbey, dozens camped out in the Mall overnight to be sure of their place, and all over the country there were parties, fireworks and celebrations.
At her coronation six years later the traffic jams in London, into which people had begun flooding ten days before the
ceremony, were so bad that the police had to ban all but priority and public service vehicles from entering an area within a two-mile radius of Westminster. ‘Never has there been such excitement,’ wrote Jock Colville, her Private Secretary, ‘never has a monarch received such adulation.’ Sir Charles Petrie, the monarchist historian, concurred. ‘For the first few years of her reign,’ he wrote in 1961, ‘she was the subject of adulation unparalleled since the days of Louis XIV.’
The excitement of the coronation went on for weeks, and the adulation for perhaps the first ten years of her reign, but as the Queen’s biographer Ben Pimlott observed, ‘Popularity is not normally seen as a reason for self-appraisal – it is more likely to encourage a belief that the existing formula is a successful one … Hence in the mid-1950s, on the back of the fragile post-war recovery, and cosseted by governments that were happy to bask in the reflected glory, the monarchy wasted its most bountiful years – taking what it was given in mindless admiration as its due.’
Elizabeth II was never going to be a radical monarch in any event. Her personality didn’t allow it. She was too shy and introverted, too conservative, too responsible to risk rocking the boat. She stepped into King George VI’s shoes when she was just twenty-five, a young mother with two small children and a passive acceptance of her destiny but no burning ambition to change either the world or the monarchy. She hero-worshipped her father and he was her role model; he was not the most charismatic of men, he was shy and had struggled with a stammer all his life, but he cared about people, about the less privileged, and with Queen Elizabeth beside him he had been an exemplary monarch, and perfect for restoring confidence in the monarchy after the trauma of his brother’s abdication. He was also perfect for the period when Britons pulled together against a common enemy; and in identifying
himself so completely with their difficulties helped to stimulate a spirit of social solidarity which his daughter inherited. In the immediate aftermath of her coronation, there was no obvious need for change; and so along with his quiet, dutiful manner, she also inherited his courtiers, his palace and his way of working.