Nostalgia is an outstandingly bad political counsellor Anthony Howard 1960s
I once worked for a couple of delightful years in Mauritius, a former British colony wrested from the French, and thereafter obliged to offer allegiance to the British crown. This had been celebrated by the erection in the capital, Port Louis, of a statue of Queen Victoria, boldly announcing a dedication to OUR BELOVED AND MUCH REGRETTED QUEEN VICTORIA. I happily follow in these unintentionally ambiguous footsteps, as you see from my title.
I started to write this note some time ago, after enduring 48 hours of King Charles III’s Coronation, a process of being assaulted from all parts of the media by what I can only describe as the nostalgic delusions associated with Ruritania, and the more aged members of the Conservative Party. This classic display of false consciousness is writ large in the Coronation flummery (fancy dress, pompous rituals, all-but-stolen jewellery) derived in large part from Britain’s imperial past. The whole is ostentatiously underpinned, as are all our royal occasions, whether marriages, deaths, or coronations, by the militaristic appurtenances of a long lost era: gun carriages, regimental bands and insignia, senior members riding on fashionable but impractical horseback and wielding archaic swords, perhaps echoing more than we should like the significant decline in our status as a world power. Moreover, many of the rituals we now see on these occasions do not, as official accounts would have us believe, go back to time immemorial in the long history of British (or English) kingship, but are what the historian David Cannadine has labelled ‘invented traditions’. Much of our proudly embraced nostalgia goes back no further than Edward VII and George V, both of whom loved dressing up and wearing lots of ill-deserved medals.
Home truths about The Monarchy
It’s hard to know where to begin. A major myth is that royalty is simply an ordinary family, a model for the rest of us, and that this is a communal strength for the whole nation. But when we look, as we so often must, at the traditional wave-fest on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, what’s hard to avoid (again) is the militaristic get up of the men, most of them wearing highly coloured uniforms of uncertain rank but garnished with unfeasible numbers of decorations. Can they really have earned these ranks and these decorations? Well, we know that some of them saw active military service, let’s tip the hat to that, even if it largely helped Prince Andrew to construct an unconvincing refutation to critiques of his sexual campaigns. But is the male branch of the royal family dedicated only to armed service? Are there no other aspects of their royal service to the nation that could be highlighted? Just how much of their working lives do they spend in uniform? Why exactly does the royal family choose to adopt this as its primary visual message?
Even the female branch do not entirely avoid this connection. Queen Elizabeth would annually be seen on horseback, ‘trooping the colour’: and Princess Anne, a noted equestrian, contrived to leave Charles’ coronation on horseback. The former Queen grew up with horses, was mad about racehorses, and owned many, which could lead her into some dodgy relationships, e.g. with the Ruler of Dubai, reputedly the wealthiest man in the world, though by some distance not the nicest. The photo below shows them socialising at Ascot (note the presence of her favourite son Andrew). Some years later, she would be obliged to break ties with the Ruler of Dubai after a court ruling that he kidnapped and detained his two daughters. This is another trope that breaks the link with ‘ordinary’ families, for it is a reminder that royalty sits at the top of an aristocratic, landowning class whose long-standing sporting pursuits – hunting doomed foxes, shooting helpless birds, owning high class racehorses – separate them from most of the rest of us. I’ll come back to the ‘wealth and class’ issue in a second post.
British Monarchs: A Horrible History (They Come Over Here, Take Our Thrones…)
Many people seem to labour under the delusion that British kings and queens come from a long, unbroken line of descent which vaguely began with the Normans, morphed into the Tudors-and-Stuarts, and entrenched a glorious Elizabethan age that ran, via the ‘much regretted’ Queen Victoria, until the death of our late dear Queen Elizabeth II. Along the way, most maps of the world were suffused with the red of a British Empire on which the sun never set, while plucky little Britain not only won two world wars, but graciously transformed its empire into a series of newly independent nations with written constitutions that were close copies of the British constitution; clever, that, seeing that we have never had a written constitution.
This version of our ‘island story’ soon falls apart when exposed to the historical record, and is rooted in deep levels of ignorance. This has its amusing side: once, when talking with a set of British politics students about the roots of the British constitution, I asked what they understood by the term ‘the Glorious Revolution’. ‘Why yes’, responded a young chap eagerly, ‘you mean Tony Blair in 1997’. Perhaps it’s not surprising then, that there are still so many misconceptions about the place and significance of the monarchy in our constitutional and political system.
Another form of ignorance embraces a wilful denial of the troubling and divisive consequences of Britain’s imperial past, summed up in the question asked of a well-known senior British charity leader: ‘where do you really come from?’. The question was asked at a Buckingham Palace reception, the charity leader was a British person of colour, and the questions came from a very senior member of the royal entourage, who subsequently had to resign in a baffled manner. One response to her question might well have been: but where does the British Monarchy really come from? If we leave aside the conquering Normans, Germany seems a reasonable answer, given that the House of Hanover reigned under four Hanoverian Georges in the crucial period from 1714 to 1830. They were neatly summed up by the noted historian J.H.Plumb : ‘It is almost impossible for a monarch to be dull, however stupid’, and he also suggests that ‘to men who had to watch their children starve, the antics of the royal buffoons made a mockery of life’. By the time of the death of the fourth George in 1830, Plumb writes, ‘thousands of men and women hated the monarchy, hated it as a symbol of wanton extravagance in the face of their poverty and degradation’.
The first George came to the throne as the Elector of Hanover, and a great grandchild of James I. Unable to speak English, he arrived without his wife (who he left incarcerated in Hanover) but brought with him not one but two mistresses upon whom he showered (English) honours. He was buried in his beloved Hanover. His best known successor was George III, famous for losing the American colonies, then going mad. His successor, first as Prince Regent, then as George 1V distinguished himself mainly in the bedroom, having many illegitimate children but no legal ones.
This would eventually lead to the succession of his niece Victoria in 1837, and the creation of another German-based dynasty through her husband Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Both Victoria and Albert had a strong sense of public duty. She herself was jealous of the ‘royal prerogative’ which led to several conflicts with her ministers; indeed the constitutional expert Walter Bagehot likened it to having ‘a family on the throne’. With Albert’s death she virtually withdrew from public life, though later renewed losing battles with her Prime Ministers. Her position as a constitutional monarch became considerably weakened as her reign progressed by the democratic expansion of the electoral system, and the strengthening of political parties. Her principal achievement was to reflect the flawed glories of Empire; by the late 1890s one person in four of the global population was the subject of Queen Victoria. One of the mourners at her funeral in 1901 was her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who declared war on Britain thirteen years later.
Let’s draw a veil over her appalling playboy of a successor, Edward VII and go straight to George V, who would be so seriously embarrassed by his German connections during the First World War that he changed the family dynastic name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. This did not, unhappily, remove the embarrassment, occasioned by the fact that the succession fell in 1936 to Edward Duke of Windsor. Edward VIII committed the then heinous crime, as head of the Church of England, of wishing to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorcee, and American to boot, and creating a political crisis that resulted in his abdication in favour of his brother George VI.
Much worse, he was a strong Nazi sympathiser just as Britain moved towards war with the Hitler regime. He met Hitler personally and was feted by senior military Nazi officers. A Channel 4 documentary (July 2023: Edward VIII: Britain’s Traitor King ) fronted by a reputable publisher and biographer, Andrew Lownie, shows on the basis of recently released Nazi records and BBC archival documents that just prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, Edward Duke of Windsor believed that Britain should make peace with Hitler. He was prepared to be installed again as monarch as part of a negotiated settlement. He is reported as saying that he didn’t have a drop of English blood in him, and was really German; and is described by a biographer, Anna Pasternak, as ‘needy and narcissistic’. Churchill was alert to all this and in effect banished him to be Governor of Bermuda, unable to play any active role or embarrass anyone. After the war he never again lived in Britain, cold-shouldered by the rest of the royal family.
Things looked up for a while for the Windsors, George VI seen as having ‘a good war’, then succeeded by his daughter Elizabeth II, who is now regarded as almost beyond reproach, largely for simply staying alive for even longer than Victoria. By this stage, the constitutional powers of the monarch were very strictly limited and confined, and almost never gave any cause for controversy. Indeed one of the anxieties about the new King Charles III is that he may be temperamentally inclined to interfere in unacceptable ways.
While we can commend Queen Elizabeth II’s strong sense of duty, she could not be said to have presided over a happy family, nor could it be easily regarded as a model for the rest of us. Let’s examine her record in this respect.
1 Princess Margaret In the early 1950s Queen Elizabeth refused to allow her sister Margaret to marry a divorced commoner (Group Captain Peter Townsend, a royal equerry), an example of what has been described as ‘the stuffy morality’ that characterised royal institutions at that time. It should be added that Margaret was noticeably unwilling to give up her rights to succession and the related financial privileges.
2 Princess Diana Queen Elizabeth was said to be cool but friendly towards her son Charles’ first wife Diana, but while knowing of Charles’ long-standing and ongoing relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles, would not intervene. After a messy process of separation in 1992, and divorce in 1996, Diana’s accidental death made a national icon of her for a time, much to the chagrin of senior Royals. Charles in due course married the woman with whom he had for a long period been unfaithful to his wife Diana, and who is now Queen Camilla, all with his mother’s evident approval.
3 Prince Andrew Queen Elizabeth’s son Andrew was said to be her favourite, and her support enabled him to survive the enormous scandal of his close friendship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein’s long-time associate Ghislaine Maxwell (also now convicted) which involved Andrew’s suspected illicit sexual involvement with an underage American woman, Virginia Giuffre. He vehemently denied even having met her, a story undermined by the photo below showing Ghislaine Maxwell in the background with Andrew apparently on friendly terms with the young woman. There have also been several press photos of him socialising with both Epstein and Maxwell even after Epstein’s conviction. Since Andrew has notoriously always been in financial difficulties, it appears certain that the royal family and very possibly his mother, must have provided him with the substantial financial sum needed for him to meet the costs of an out of court settlement estimated at between £10 and £12 m. His tarnished reputation was scarcely improved by a catastrophic televised personal interview in which he seemed quite unable to give straight answers to straight questions. While he was stripped of his royal titles and duties in January 2022, he still lives in the Royal Lodge in Windsor with his divorced ex-wife Sarah Ferguson. It has been reported that the files on Prince Andrew will remain secret until 2065: something to hide, then?
4. Prince Harry and Megan Then there’s the case of the hostile treatment by the royal family of Diana’s son Harry and his American wife Megan. Accusations and counter-accusations have flown in all directions, a rich and confusing broth of family misogyny happily stirred (and very possibly by illegal journalistic means) by the Daily Mail and other hyper-ventilating tabloids. Here is another family member of foreign blood, neither German nor blue, though ugly rumours about the possible colour of any royal offspring were added to the stew. It seems as though yet another American wife may in effect be persona non grata in Royal family circles, with a legal bloodletting instigated by an angry and vengeful Harry, who is now not invited to significant family events. This makes an interesting comparison with the treatment accorded to Prince Andrew by royal circles, an institution long labelled ‘the Firm’, always protective of royal rights, privileges, and reputations (something of a challenge this). Clearly the Firm’s view is that a reputation for being ‘disloyal’ (Harry and Megan) is significantly more heinous than a reputation for mixing with convicted paedophiles (Prince Andrew). There are clear indications that King Charles intends to admit Andrew back into the family fold, an olive branch unlikely to be extended to Harry and Megan.
The insistence on secrecy is a troubling aspect of royal affairs, not least because we taxpayers are expected to foot at least some of the royal bills. So here I follow the injunction of Paul Johnson, in a brilliant new book that advises that if we want to understand what really happens in public life and decision-making, we should ‘follow the money’. Let’s do that with the royal family and its finances. We instantly find that our public system, aided and abetted by ‘the Firm’ itself, does everything it can to obscure the path, and to keep out of the public domain any real awareness of the enormous wealth and privilege that underpins the British monarchy and its powerful social elitism. I will quickly turn to this in Part 2 The Royal Welfare Benefits System
Good reads :
J.H.Plumb: The First Four Georges ( Fontana edition 1966)
David Cannadine: The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Picador 1992)
Paul Johnson: Follow The Money: How Much Does Britain Cost? ( Abacus Books 2023
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