The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor. Penny Junor

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ