Family drama
The British royals may have weathered centuries of scandal, but their dynasty keeps on rolling along
The nuptials of the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles, after 35 years of innuendo, gossip, rumors, sniggering, and highly publicized heartache, while surely proof that love (or, at any rate, patience) conquers all, come, one supposes, as welcome news to many less illustrious lovers. The wedding has also set off the usual chorus of predictions that this inevitably means the end of the British royal family. The British public has been variously described as "furious" with Prince Charles because of the posthumous insult to the memory of Diana, the late Princess of Wales, or "enraged" with the queen, his mother, because she declined to attend the wedding (and announced her pleasure at the prince's second, and decidedly less glamorous, marriage in noticeably lukewarm tones). American tabloids suggested that Parker Bowles herself was in tears upon learning that she would merely be raised to the rank of Duchess of Cornwall and, in the event that the prince succeeds to the throne, would only be "queen consort," not queen.
For those of us who are British, and of a certain age, this dire prophecy seems unlikely to come true. On the contrary, the current climate seems almost like "Springtime for the Windsors" (to paraphrase Mel Brooks). Indeed, the two things that come to mind most quickly about the royal wedding are the old French saying "The more things change, the more they remain the same" and admiration, once again, for the royal family's remarkable ability over the centuries to adapt to unhappy or unwelcome news in the interests of staying in power.
If you are looking for stability, in other words, look no further than the royals. They have ruled England since the mists of time, for well over 1,000 years, despite civil wars, the occasional accession to the throne of knaves, adventurers, imbeciles, and murderers, and despite the tendency of the monarch's family, in every age, toward graceless behavior, greed, bad manners, arrogance, swinish self-indulgence, and lurid sexual misconduct.
The country that could cheer at the coronation of Richard III, who came to the throne having murdered the captive King Henry VI and his son the Prince of Wales, as well as Richard's own brother Clarence and his two nephews, or that could put up with the antics of the wastrel sons of George III (Queen Victoria's "wicked uncles") or the more recent bad behavior of the Prince of Wales (later to become, briefly, Edward VIII, then Duke of Windsor) and his brother the Duke of Kent, can certainly put up with the marriage of two rather more than middle-aged people after 35 years of playing hide-and-seek with the press and their spouses.
Frumpy. A country that could live with the persistent (though apparently incorrect) rumor that one of Queen Victoria's grandsons, the genial if slow-witted Prince Albert Victor (known in the family as "Eddy"), was in fact Jack the Ripper without the slightest diminution of its affection for the royal family can surely learn to live with an irritable, balding, blood-sports-loving Prince Charming and his frumpy, gray-haired consort.
To begin with, the tweedy style of the prince's new bride is a plus. Princess Diana, indeed, was a rare exception to the contented frumpiness of royalty. The women of the royal family have seldom been great beauties, nor were they expected to be--one need look only at their portraits over the centuries to realize that the throne is not a prize in a beauty contest. Diana's good looks, her flashing "bedroom eyes," and her lively, sophisticated interests allowed her to chart a successful course for herself to international celebrity and stardom (much to the all-too-evident displeasure of her husband) but did not in fact represent a viable long-term approach to the task of being "a royal." Momentarily dazzled by the Princess of Wales, the British public took her to its heart after her divorce, but one doubts that Diana would have remained popular over the long haul had she reached the throne--in much the same way that the breezy, cheerful vulgarity of Sarah, Duchess of York ("Fergie") would have palled eventually had she chosen to remain married to the duke.
Part of this lies in the difference between what foreigners expect of royalty and what the British themselves expect. Princess Diana was comfortable in the world outside the United Kingdom, particularly the haut monde. As a fashion icon, as a celebrity, as a person whose private life seemed to have been scripted by Joan Collins, she moved at ease in the world of the international rich, famous, and glamorous (as her sister-in-law Fergie, on a smaller scale, moves at ease as a spokesperson for Weight Watchers and author of children's books). This concept of royalty, last epitomized by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, seems appropriate to those who see Britain becoming an intrinsic part of the new Europe, with its political capital in Brussels and its institutions being gradually "modernized" to mesh with those of France, Germany, and, say, Finland, as well as those (a somewhat different group) for whom London to New York to Los Angeles and back is a seamless commute.
But whether royalty is, as John Osborne memorably put it, "the gold teeth in a mouthful of decay" or simply the icing on the British cake, the royal family's real skill since Queen Victoria came to the throne lies in its uncanny ability to connect with the aspirations and the self-image of the British middle class and to turn itself into one of the basic institutions--perhaps the basic institution--that define Great Britain and make it different from other countries. Royals, as a rule, do not fit comfortably into "cafe society," or cruise the Riviera on the yachts of Middle Eastern businessmen, or hobnob comfortably with movie stars. Parker Bowles, in her flowing tweeds, baggy sweaters, and sensible gumboots, apparently content to slog through mud and gorse to watch the Prince of Wales kill a few more pheasants, is in fact far more in the familiar tradition of royalty than was Princess Diana, and the bulk of the British public--that part of it that the royal family cares most about--is likely to develop a good deal of affection for her no-nonsense style and down-to-earth view of life quite quickly. It would have been better for poor Prince Charles, no doubt, if he could have married her in the first place. She would have been comfortable with his interest in organic gardening (including his somewhat eyebrow-raising plans to use human waste to fertilize the soil at Highgrove, his country house), his odd ideas about architecture, and his love of country sports and would have been unlikely to make a career of upstaging him before the world press. She and the prince are also said to share the same "bawdy" sense of humor--a terrifying thought for anybody who has ever attended an upper-class English school. (The royal family has a tradition of somewhat off-color humor, best exemplified by George V's comment in the mid-1930s to the prime minister, when the foreign secretary, Samuel Hoare, met in Paris with Pierre Laval and was obliged to resign his office after effectively approving Mussolini's conquest of Abyssinia. "No more coals to Newcastle, no more Hoares to Paris," said the king, with a loud guffaw--which is about as good as it gets for royal joke-making.)
The royal family's involvement with the British aristocracy has always been a little edgy--many of them were simply too stylish and fashionably chic for the taste of English monarchs from Victoria onward (exception made for Edward VII and his grandson Edward VIII), and not a few of them felt that the court was somewhat dull and dowdy, as indeed it often was and still is. As for the British lower classes, they could mostly be relied upon to admire royalty unquestioningly from afar--it was only necessary for members of the royal family to wave at the right moments, keep smiling, and stop every so often to admire the occasional baby thrust at them. The middle class, however, expected a royal family in its own image, only more so, dressed in sensible clothes, reading Country Life, surrounded by dogs, and seated comfortably in front of the fire or the television set for the evening. This is a world that has accepted some forms of modernity but that is as profoundly uneasy about becoming "European" as it is about being overwhelmed by the United States, and that remains desperately anxious to preserve what it can of British traditions, habits, and customs. It is a world that above all does not want to lose the things that make Britain different --whether that means driving on the opposite side of the road or retaining a firmly entrenched class system, or, perhaps most important of all, preserving the royal family and all the things that go with it, from the "Silver Stick in Waiting" and the "Trooping the Colour" to the obsession with horses and dogs, the tweedy clothes, and even the trademark silk scarf around the head of the queen herself. For the bulk of the British public, the idea of modernizing the royal family is not only unthinkable but a contradiction in terms. Parker Bowles is, in fact, ideal for this view of things. To paraphrase Voltaire's comment about God, "If she did not exist, we should have to invent her."
One can only admire the artistry and economy of the arrangements for accepting Parker Bowles into the royal family. Happily, given its long history, there is hardly any situation that hasn't occurred before in some form, and therefore a precedent can be found for almost anything. The queen seems to be particularly good at this. Her father, King George VI, moved quickly to turn his brother Edward VIII into "the Duke of Windsor" and at the same time to prevent the American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson from being addressed as "her royal highness" --a useful precedent of which the queen took full advantage when it came time to deal with her about-to-become ex-daughters-in-law the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York. Fortunately, no new title needed to be invented for Parker Bowles--the Prince of Wales is the Duke of Cornwall; it is merely one of his many "courtesy titles" --at most, it will involve re-engraving the crests on a certain amount of silverware. And the title of "consort" was of course first produced for the marriage of Prince Albert to Queen Victoria (Albert had hoped to be "king consort" rather than "prince consort," but much to his chagrin it was not to be).
Of course, a superficial observer of royalty might conclude that on the face of things, the royal family is in a bad way--that Camilla is a poor substitute for the glamorous Princess Di, that Prince Harry's appearance at a costume party in a brown shirt with a swastika armband was a gross example of bad taste or worse, that the Prince of Wales's high-minded but somewhat baffling speeches would put anybody but Parker Bowles to sleep, and that the queen's all too apparent displeasure with her own family and the Duke of Edinburgh's perpetual scowl would all seem to indicate that some image reconstruction is called for. But on the contrary, all this is par for the course for the royal family. After the death of her husband the prince consort, Queen Victoria spent the rest of her life in mourning (with a perpetual scowl on her face) and was much more beloved than she had been before. Her grandson King George V was notorious for his bad temper, his dissatisfaction with his own children, his fierce rages, and his widely feared popeyed glare of disapproval at even the smallest error or carelessness of dress, but he was nevertheless one of the most popular of British kings, his passing deeply and universally mourned. Those who love royalty love it "warts and all."
Americans particularly, who live in a merit-oriented society, often find this aspect of the royal family baffling. Shouldn't something be done about Prince Harry? Can't some image consultant teach the queen not to scowl? Or hide the Duke of Edinburgh behind a potted palm when there's a photographer in sight? But royalty does not, of course, need to be charming, or fashionable, or witty; it merely needs to be royal. In December 1940, the question arose as to whether the 10th Duke of Devonshire should be awarded the Garter, the highest and most restricted of all British honors. There was much telephoning back and forth between King George VI and Winston Churchill, then prime minister, on the subject, at this low point of British fortunes in World War II when one might have imagined, in any country but Britain, that there were more important things for them to be doing. But Churchill finally remarked to those who questioned the award that Devonshire was not bad as dukes go and that anyway the important thing about the Garter was "that there was no damned merit about it."
Churchill was absolutely right. The Garter is the most coveted and restricted of British honors precisely because it is not awarded for any kind of merit--the Duke of Devonshire was an affable, wealthy landowner but not otherwise deserving of his country's highest award--and in much the same spirit, "no damned merit" attaches itself to being royal or is required for royalty.
To put it simply, royalty is merely the extreme expression of hereditary succession. The British do not choose or elect the person best suited to be the monarch. Virtually alone among the citizens of major modern states, they are still ruled by the person who, by blood and by place of birth in the former Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family (their family name was changed to Windsor during World War I by George V to disguise the German connection) is next in line to inherit the throne.
Murder and mayhem. In the past, this system had the great merit of simplicity and helped to provide some kind of firm baseline, without which a country might be in a permanent state of civil war as powerful families or feudal leaders fought one another for control--hence the bloody histories of the Italian city-state republics. Even with a hereditary monarchy in place, English history, as everybody knows, is an endless tale of usurpations, assassinations, wicked uncles and helpless children, forced marriages, factional disputes, family feuds, beheadings, and bitter civil wars--it is the subject, after all, of many of Shakespeare's bloodiest and most popular plays and surely ranks among the cruelest histories ever recorded and still remembered, after that of the Old Testament and the Roman Empire. Still, when possible, the idea of hereditary succession provided at least some form of stability that far outweighed in importance the merits, or the lack thereof, of the individual monarch. Theoretically, a clever man might make a better king than an idiot, but the whole moral of Shakespeare's Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, is about the price to be paid by everybody, including the usurper himself, when a clever man usurps the throne--a moral repeated in Henry VI, parts 1 and 2, when a simple man who inherits the throne as an infant is undermined by his stronger, cleverer relatives, a process that eventually leads to the fratricidal War of the Roses and to the evil, murderous, hunchback Richard III's taking the throne.
Thus, no matter how much of a tactless buffoon Prince Harry may seem to be, it doesn't matter. His role in life is his place in succession, period. After all, George III went on as king for decades, despite losing the American Colonies, going mad, and finally going blind. His eldest son, the Prince of Wales (later the prince regent), made an inappropriate and (at that time) illegal secret marriage to a Roman Catholic, then married Princess Caroline of Brunswick as the condition for having his debts paid off, sued her for adultery in perhaps the most sensational and lurid trial in English history, and was mad enough to believe that he had led a cavalry charge at the Battle of Waterloo, but he nevertheless carried on as King George IV. He was succeeded by his brother the Duke of Clarence, who was crowned in Westminster Abbey as William IV, surrounded by his many illegitimate children. And why not? They descended from George I, who was brought over from Hanover to assume the throne, although he spoke little English and was widely (and correctly) believed to have locked his wife up for life in his schloss after having her lover murdered in front of her eyes and buried beneath the floorboards of her bedroom. George I spent his years as king of England in the company of his German mistresses, with his bags packed full of crown jewels and silverware, in case he had to make a run for home to escape from an angry mob, but in fact nothing of the sort happened, and he died peacefully.
In thinking about the royal family, therefore, we must always keep firmly in mind that it is perhaps the only remaining institution for which no special qualification is required. There is no reason to assume that Parker Bowles will be less good at her job than anyone else in the family, and indeed she could hardly be as graceless and grumpy about it as the Princess Royal.
Those who hold the view that the royal family is an unnecessary--and often ludicrous--extravagance can take comfort from the fact that this was being said at least as far back as the 17th century. Calls for the abolition of the monarchy have been common enough since then, but there are many reasons it is unlikely to take place--chief of which is that Britain would have to invent a whole new form of government and institutions to replace it. This is not a simple matter. First of all, because of the bicameral parliamentary system of government, the prime minister is not, and cannot be, the head of state--he or she is simply the party leader who can put together a majority in the House of Commons. As in Germany and France, Britain would need to elect a president of the republic to serve as head of state as well. In France, the president de la republique plays approximately the same role as a king: He lives in the Elysee Palace; he names, after a convoluted political process that can only be understood, if at all, by the French, a prime minister ( president du conseil ), who can command a majority in the Assemble Nationale; he serves as the de facto commander in chief of the armed forces and greets other heads of state when they arrive in France. With all due respect to President Jacques Chirac, nobody can plausibly argue that he plays this role as well as the queen does in England. As for Germany, its past political history is such that nobody would look to it as an example to be followed.
Might we then look to the United States as an example and elect a president of the United Kingdom to serve for four years who would be both head of state and head of the government? But would this mean imposing some equivalent of the Electoral College on Britain, or turning our counties into states, or making Britain truly a federal state (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, plus the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man)? Would we need to turn the House of Lords into the Senate? Would we need a Supreme Court? These are weighty problems, but no sensible person would want to throw overboard a system of government that has worked for many centuries for one that is fairly recent and has problems of its own.
Then, too, let it be said that a major attraction of royalty lies in the simple fact that the sovereign is not a politician. The sovereign is not scheming to get re-elected while serving simultaneously as head of a political party and as head of state--he or she is merely the citizenry writ large, an observer of the political process, not a participant. He or she stands in for the people of the United Kingdom in the sense that it is the sovereign's job to listen, advise, and warn, as well as to play the all-important role of emphasizing the decent, common-sense, long-term view of things, as opposed to what politicians may be attempting to impose or conceal to further their own agendas or their careers. Nobody who has listened to President Bush ranting about cutting Social Security benefits or lowering taxes for the rich can doubt that it would do him no harm if he had to listen at regular intervals over a cup of tea to a gentle, firm, sensible lecture about social responsibility from somebody like the queen, who, for all her faults, is very conscious that the poor and the humble are as much her subjects as is the Duke of Devonshire. Prime ministers as powerful as Gladstone, Disraeli, and the Marquess of Salisbury complained that their palms grew sweaty and their knees trembled before their regular "chats" with Queen Victoria, whose stern common sense and careful moral judgment made her a formidable interlocutor. Those who know Queen Elizabeth II say that she is every bit as sharp and formidable as her great-great-grandmother. Indeed, recent photographs of the queen not only show a certain resemblance to Victoria--the frown, the turned-down corners of the mouth, the beady eyes, the expression of barely concealed impatience ("We are not amused")--but make it clear how unnerving it would be to explain to her a policy with which she disagreed.
There seems no reason to assume that Prince Charles would not play this role at least as well as his mother. His concern for the environment, his preoccupation with "fairness" --surely the most important element of the British character--his feeling that Britain's traditional buildings ought not be torn down for the benefit of property speculators, and his affection for all sorts of odd British customs go well with the basic role of the monarch, which is to provide a steadying, slightly conservative, and cautious view of events and above all a sense of the long continuity of British institutions, perhaps never more valuable than now, as Britain is drawn deeper and deeper into the European Union, whose members may have more to learn from the United Kingdom in terms of democracy, free speech, and the rule of law than vice versa. If anybody is likely to recognize the importance of not giving up the essential values and identity of Great Britain in order to "join" Europe, it is likely to be the Prince of Wales, who would be recognizable as English anywhere in the world, as would the Duchess of Cornwall.
Like tea, shepherd's pie, English country life, and much else in Great Britain, the royal family is not supposed to be glamorous, exciting, or chic. It is, above all, supposed to be English--or, rather more ambitiously, British. Given this, Prince Charles could hardly have made a better choice than Camilla Parker Bowles. It has taken them a long time to get together as a couple, and there is something rather touching and charming about love shining in the eyes of two people who are, to put it mildly, no longer in the flush of youth and no strangers to wrinkles and gray hair. In the meantime, the British monarchy has done it again and ensured its survival for another few generations.
This story appears in the April 18, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.