Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (77 page)

Philip had completed his secondary education at Gordonstoun in Morayshire. Founded by Kurt Hahn, a refugee from Nazi Germany, the school was run on spartan principles and aimed to instil confidence and leadership through physical hardship and strenuous exercise. Philip, extrovert and naturally athletic, thrived, becoming captain of cricket and hockey and Head of School. But what suited Philip was a torment to his eldest son. Charles was shy, physically awkward and intense. His grandmother, the queen mother, fought hard for him to be sent to Eton, with its high culture, civilized tradition of individual rooms and reassuring proximity to Windsor. But Philip, humiliated over the issue of his children’s surname, was in no mood to give way. So to Gordonstoun Charles went, despite his misery and his tears. As he has admitted, it scarred him for life. It also reopened the traditional Hanoverian tension, in abeyance for three generations, between father and son.

II

Meanwhile, Elizabeth – in contrast to her husband with his restless, relentless, frenetic activity – sailed serenely on. Each year was much like the last, with a round of engagements as regular as clockwork. It was more of a liturgy than a diary. Like the Church’s liturgical year, which it so much resembled, the cycle of the royal year followed the changing seasons. Within it, each individual event was invested with a broader symbolic meaning; performed in a special, esoteric costume and choreographed to within an inch of its life. And it culminated in the annual secular sermon of the Christmas broadcast.

In 1996, the queen used her Christmas broadcast to list some of the highlights of the previous year and reflect on their deeper significance. In the spring, she had attended the Maundy Service at Norwich Cathedral. In the Middle Ages, the monarch, following Christ’s example, had washed the feet of as many poor people as they were years old; now they were merely given specially minted coins. But the message was the same: ‘The lovely service’, the queen said, ‘is always a reminder of Christ’s words to his disciples: ‘“Love one another; as I have loved you”. It sounds so simple yet it proves so hard to obey.’

‘In June’, she continued, ‘came the Trooping the Colour, a vivid reminder of this country’s proud military tradition, and of the discipline and dedication which our servicemen and women show in their taxing tasks of peacekeeping in many distant parts of the world.’

‘Then, in October,’ she concluded, ‘I opened Parliament. This is not just a state occasion, but also a symbol of the process of parliamentary democracy which we enjoy here in Britain, and in so many countries of the Commonwealth. It is a process which seeks to express the ideal of the equality of all citizens under the law.’

These ceremonies, as the queen again reminded us, ‘have their roots in history’. True. But, in their current form, and centring on the monarch’s personal participation, their roots are shallow indeed. The oldest, the Trooping the Colour and the state opening of Parliament, go back only to the reign of Edward VII, Elizabeth’s great-grandfather; the Maundy was revived only in 1932 by her grandfather, George V; while the June Official Birthday, when Trooping the Colour is celebrated, is an innovation of her father, George VI’s reign, which she retained out of both filial piety and convenience.

The Official Birthday is also one occasion for the publication of the twice-yearly Honours List, the other being New Year’s Day. In each, the queen is pleased, in the official phrase, to confer honours on about a thousand individuals. They range from the rich, the famous and the powerful, for whom their gongs are only another glittering prize to be added to their quiverful, to ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. And it is the latter whom the queen really cares about, taking immense pains to memorize their details for the investiture ceremonies in which she personally gives them their honours. These mass investitures, for which the vast ballroom of Buckingham Palace is scarcely large enough, are the most important and characteristic ceremonies of Elizabeth’s monarchy. And they are without any historical roots whatever further back than those of the Windsor monarchy.

III

On 29 July 1981 Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer were married at St Paul’s Cathedral, almost five hundred years since a prince of Wales had been married here. Both weddings were overhyped and overblown. And both led to disaster: the former to the Reformation; the latter to the Diana affair, which shook, or seemed to shake, the House of Windsor to its foundations.

It was, said the archbishop of Canterbury in his sermon, ‘a fairy-tale wedding’. Such indeed seems to have been Diana’s feeling as she looked forward with adolescent glee to becoming a real-life princess. Charles’s emotions were far more ambivalent and he had blown hot and cold on the engagement. Finally, Philip had put his foot down. Charles had gone too far and was honour bound to marry, he said. It was of a piece with Philip’s other interventions in his son’s life.

The result was that the fairy tale ended quickly and, before long, turned into a nightmare for both parties. There had been difficulties from the start, as Diana, young, highly strung and chaotically brought up, found it hard to fit into the rigid customs of the royal family. She had her suspicions, almost certainly unfounded at this stage, that Charles was continuing his affair with his old flame, Camilla Parker-Bowles. And her eating disorders became worse and their symptoms more extravagant and embarrassing. The result was rapid estrangement. There were hopes that the births of two boys, Princes William, born in 1982, and Harry, who appeared two years later, would bring the couple together. Instead, their dynastic duty done, their estrangement became complete and, from about 1987, they led separate lives. Charles returned to Camilla in good and earnest; while Diana began a serious of short, tempestuous affairs with all and sundry.

All this was common knowledge in select circles in London. But the press – still besotted, like much of the public, with the fairy tale of Cinderella who’d found her Prince and Lived Happily Ever After – showed no inclination to probe. Instead, it was the couple themselves who went public with their rival versions of the failure of the marriage. Diana struck first with Andrew Morton’s
Diana: Her True Story
, which she had effectively ghosted; Charles riposted with Jonathan Dimbleby’s authorized biography. The latter was accompanied by a television interview in which Charles memorably confessed to adultery. Diana then had her ‘revenge’ (in her own words) with her television interview with Martin Bashir, in which she too admitted to being unfaithful but in the much more artfully crafted language of romance.

Indeed, throughout the War of the Wales, as this game of tit-for-tat became known, Diana proved much the more adept media performer. She had the advantage of being a pretty woman and a fine ham actress; she also benefited from the fact that public opinion normally sides with the ‘wronged’ woman. As it did with her in spades. She was also imaginative, reckless of the consequences and developed posing for a photograph that would get the right headline in the
Sun
into a fine art.

Appalled at the damage the affair was doing, not only to the couple but to the monarchy itself, the queen, in one of her rare interventions in family affairs, effectively required them to divorce. But by then it was too late. Not only was the Waleses’ marriage dead, so too was the family monarchy.

The Diana story – which reached its climax, at once tragic and tawdry, with her death in a car crashed by a drunken driver in 1997 – is also a testament to the revolution in British values that had taken place during the Windsor years. In 1936, Edward VIII had been widely reviled, not least by Archbishop Lang, for putting personal happiness above royal duty. In the 1990s, however, Diana – who, like Edward, was photogenic, a celebrity, a clothes-horse and profoundly self-indulgent – was praised to the skies for doing just that. Duty was fuddy-duddy; happiness a right whatever the cost.

In the face of this tide of sentiment, Elizabeth, with her determination to stick to the monarchy of her father and grandfather, with its values of duty and service, looked more and more out of touch.

IV

The year 2002 was the turning point of Elizabeth’s reign. In February, her wayward but deeply loved sister, Margaret Rose, died, followed only six weeks later by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. The queen was now the undisputed matriarch of her clan. In the summer, she celebrated her seventy-sixth birthday and the fiftieth anniversary of her accession. But the Golden Jubilee also marked a turning away, towards the future and Prince Charles.

The first clear signal that something new was afoot came three years later, on 9 April 2005, with Charles’s marriage to his long-term mistress and the real love of his life, Camilla Parker-Bowles. The queen was detached, if not actually disapproving. For the marriage broke every rule in the Windsor book. In 1936, the taint of the divorces of his wife-to-be had forced the abdication of a king-emperor; in 2005, both parties were divorced and both had been openly adulterous. But they got away with it. Was it a betrayal of the fundamental principles of the family monarchy? Or a long-overdue recognition of changing times and values?

The ceremony, at Windsor rather than Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s, also marked a return to the semi-private nuptials of the pre-family monarchy and even perhaps to something of their typical chaos. For, again depending on your point of view, the arrangements were a shaming muddle or a splendid piece of improvised, make-do-and-mend ceremonial.

The problem was that, if the monarchy – or at least the prince – had changed its spots on the remarriage of divorcées, the Church of England hadn’t. This meant that the wedding had to be a civil ceremony before a registrar. Whether the legislation setting up such ceremonies was properly available to members of the royal family is a not-entirely-answered question. Moreover, it had been overlooked that the venue for civil ceremonies had to be licensed. And if it is licensed for one couple it is licensed for all. The thought of turning the state apartments of Windsor Castle into a public wedding parlour led to a hasty relocation of the ceremony to Windsor Guildhall – the humblest location for a royal wedding since the clandestine marriage of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville in 1464, which led to the fall of the House of York.

Ducks-and-drakes was also played with tradition in the matter of Camilla’s titles. In an obvious attempt to appease Diana’s diehard supporters, it was announced that she would be known, not as princess of Wales, but as HRH The Duchess of Cornwall. Nor, official spokesmen claimed (with an eye on the same constituency), would she be styled queen when Charles became king; instead she would be known as HRH The Princess Consort.

All this is legal and historical nonsense. If the wife of a king does not automatically, both by law and immemorial custom, become queen, then why did George IV have to try to divorce Caroline to deprive her of her title of queen? Or why did Edward VIII have to abdicate to marry Mrs Simpson? But, nonsense though it might be, this bold, unilateral innovation is characteristic of a royal house that had thrown over its name, its nationality and its closest relations in 1917 – all in the name of survival.

Prince Charles has given clear indications that his coronation will be very different too. He wishes, he says, to be known, not as Defender of the Faith, as every monarch has been since 1521, but as Defender of Faith. This is to challenge, head-on, the unique and exclusive alliance between the sovereign and the Church of England which has existed since the Reformation and has been a key to the survival of both. Is James I’s famous dictum, ‘No bishop, no king’, really played out? And can Church and crown successfully go their separate ways?

The prince, I suppose, would point out that the Church’s hostility to his remarriage had already broken their side of the bargain. It is not even clear, in view of his marital status, whether a future archbishop of Canterbury would be prepared to crown and consecrate him, much less Camilla. More positively, the prince’s position also represents his well-known engagement with other faiths, in particular with Islam. As it happens, the first proposal for a multi-faith coronation came from that other would-be princely innovator, Edward VIII, who had his own quarrel with the Church of England. But Edward also pointed out, quite reasonably, that as emperor of India he was sovereign of subjects of a multitude of faiths, among whom Anglicans were a small minority. In 1953, there was even a small nod in the direction of Christian ecumenism when the moderator of the Church of Scotland was given the task of presenting the Bible to the queen. But a genuinely multi-faith service would involve a much more radical rewriting and rethinking of the ancient ritual.

And what of the peers? In 1953, as at every coronation since the High Middle Ages, the peers in their crimson robes and the peeresses in their white provided both chorus and backdrop to the ceremony. But in 1999 all but a rump of the hereditary peers were removed from the House of Lords, and the remainder are certain to go soon. This is the logical outcome of the progressive curtailment of the Lords’ powers over a century or more, from the Reform Act of 1832 to the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949. But if the peers no longer sit in the Lords, why should they dominate the coronation? And who will replace them?

Indeed, with Church and peerage both in eclipse, will it be possible for Charles to have a coronation at all? Is it even desirable? Might it not be better instead to have a civil inauguration? Westminster Hall, the Coronation Chair and the regalia of crown, orb and sceptre could be used to provide historical continuity. But a new cast of characters and a different form of words would take account of the tumultuous social, political and religious changes of the several decades that will have elapsed since the last coronation.

And there is a precedent, too, with the inauguration in Westminster Hall of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector in 1657. That was the homage of the Republic to the monarchy it had abolished but could not replace. Charles’s civil inauguration, on the other hand, would be a recognition that the United Kingdom has become – as it has indeed – the Royal Republic of Britain. The ceremony would thus represent a new and welcome accommodation between the two great strands in British political life: the royal and the republican. It could also redefine the royal role itself.