Battle Royal Read online

  Monarchists, of course, are not swayed by this republican appeal to history. When confronted with the long litany of abuses and misdeeds perpetrated by the British Empire acting under the name of the Crown, most monarchists simply admit the truth of these allegations. They will accept that the Empire and its many servants committed great crimes, motivated by such very human failings as greed, pride, racism, nationalism, militarism, jingoism, condescension, arrogance, and ignorance. Most monarchists today concede that the British Empire of the past was responsible for many wrongs. That Empire, however, is gone. It no longer exists. It has been overtaken by global forces witnessing the decline of Britain as a world superpower, the ending of once traditional European imperialism, the demand from the peoples of former colonies to govern themselves, and the worldwide growth of the ideals of democracy, equality, and national autonomy.

  To monarchists, what is remarkable in this history of decolonization in the quarter century following the end of the Second World War is that the former British Empire was able to transform itself, peacefully and relatively amicably, into the modern Commonwealth. This new organization, moreover, is dedicated to principles wholly opposite to those that motivated earlier British imperialists. The modern Commonwealth is committed to the promotion of democracy, social and economic development, justice and equality, public education, women’s rights and the interests of youth, and multiculturalism, racial tolerance, and collective self-interest. And standing at the heart of the organization, the symbol of its unity and history, is Elizabeth II, the titular head of the Commonwealth. While we should never ignore the history of greed, racism, domination, and inhumanity at the core of British imperialism, we should always remember that the British Empire has evolved into a free-standing, multi­national, and multicultural association of states spanning the globe and united in furthering some of the highest ideals of humanity. Rather than viewing the monarchy as a symbol of an awful and abusive past, monarchists see the monarchy as a living testament to how human beings can learn from the past, how they can better themselves, and how they can strive to make the future brighter than yesterday.

  How we appreciate our constitution and understand the historic legacies of our past affiliation with the British Crown are matters that fundamentally divide monarchists from republicans. Both sides in this “Battle Royal” appeal to history, because history is important. Its grand narratives tell us who we are, where we came from, and what ideas and values from the past inform our present and future. But history never speaks with only one voice. To republicans, the history of the Crown is largely lamentable, something we need to transcend if we are to evolve toward a more democratic and egalitarian future. To monarchists, a very different reading of the past connects us to an important heritage speaking volumes about our democratic constitutional development under the Crown, and the respect and promotion of multiculturalism found within the Commonwealth.

  The divergent opinions respecting the constitutional role of the Crown and the history of the monarchy in this country, Britain, and the Commonwealth appeal to the mind. But these divisions pale in comparison to the animosities engendered when republicans and monarchists argue over how we should view the people at the centre of these debates — the royals themselves. Here the debate becomes exceptionally personal and emotional, very much appealing to the heart. We now turn to this exquisitely human side of the “great debate.”

  Chapter 8

  the great debate ii: the royal family vs. republicans

  “It’s quite delightfully homely, when you think of it: here you have this whole constitutional order, with all its laws and institutions, and at the very apex sits not a god or an ideology but … a family.”

  — Andrew Coyne, 2011.

  “But if the very idea of monarchy diminishes us, the living reality is even more humiliating. What are we doing paying homage to the unimpressive personages invested with this awe? They are the apogee of celebrity culture, because there is nothing there but empty celebrity.”

  — Polly Toynbee, 2012.

  It was one of those times when people remember where they were when they heard the news. The news was the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on August 31, 1997. On that fateful evening, Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. She was thirty-six years old. On the following day, Britons awoke to the report that Diana, the most photographed woman in the world, was dead. In speaking to a nation in mourning, British prime minister Tony Blair, holding back tears, said of Diana: “With just a look or a gesture that spoke so much more than words, she would reveal to all of us the depth of her compassion and her humanity.” The prime minister acknowledged Diana’s ability to connect with the people of the United Kingdom as well as with others worldwide through her charitable work. Of her character, he noted: “They liked her, they loved her, they regarded her as one of the people. She was the people’s princess. That’s how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and in our memories forever.”[1]

  The week following her death was surreal, with Britain falling into a state of public grief unprecedented in its history. Hundreds of thousands of mourners were drawn to Kensington Palace, Diana’s home, where they left an estimated one million flower bouquets alongside the palace fence. Many mourners also came to feel animosity toward the royal family. Tens of thousands standing vigil outside Buckingham Palace became increasingly angry that no flag flew at half-mast in honour of the lost princess. The royal family provided an explanation: the Queen, Prince Philip, and the young princes William and Harry were at their Balmoral Estate in Scotland, and, according to royal tradition, the Queen’s Royal Standard only flies over Buckingham Palace when she is in residence. Furthermore, tradition also decrees that the Royal Standard never flies at half-mast, since the kingdom is never without a sovereign. Ignorant of and, once informed, angry about such royal protocol, the British public demanded that the Queen return to London and that she fly her flag at half-mast. “Where is our Queen? Where is her Flag?” wondered The Sun tabloid on a banner headline.

  Diana’s funeral, held in Westminster Abbey on September 6, 1997, was a spectacle in the truest sense of the word. On that morning, the Royal Standard flew at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, a concession by the Queen, and, as the funeral procession approached the palace, the Queen, dressed in funereal black and standing at the palace gates, bowed her head as Diana’s casket passed by. An estimated three million mourners were in central London that day, with one million lining the procession route from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) estimated that 45 million Britons watched the funeral service on television, while a further 2.5 billion viewed it worldwide.

  All of this public attention speaks to the power of the royal attraction. While some media watchers afterward argued that Britain had fallen into a form of weird hysteria following Diana’s death, the fact that the week played out as it did says something about human feelings toward royalty. The emotions at play were real, with so many people feeling overwhelming grief at Diana’s death. They behaved as if someone in their own family had died. Many people truly felt that they “knew” Diana, that their lives had been “touched” by her in one way or another, and that they would now be diminished by her absence. To many, Diana had become the “Queen of Hearts.”

  The Power of Personality

  In the end, emotion is the ultimate foundation for monarchist and republican opinions on the merits of the Crown. Personal passion exceeds all intellectual justifications for and against the preservation of the monarchy. “There comes a point in any consideration of monarchy,” writes Jeremy Paxman, “when rational thought is drowned out by sentimentality, religiosity, and what republicans would dismiss as mere drivel. Yet monarchs stand for something beyond themselves.”[2] No understanding of monarchist or republican thought can be complete without an appreciation of the purely emotive sensations that monarchy in general, and the British royals in particular, c
onjure in the hearts of those subject, however willingly or unwillingly, to their reign. At this level, the question becomes, how do the royals make you feel?

  To devout monarchists, the answer to this question is simple yet profound. The royals, and especially Elizabeth II, elicit feelings of pride, awe, and love. As an object of devotion, Elizabeth II has become a towering figure of public significance. Many of us know the Queen’s story because her life has been lived in the glare of public attention, befitting someone who, from the age of ten, was destined to reign over an Empire fast becoming a Commonwealth. Monarchists sound recurring notes of personal affection when writing about the Queen. John Fraser’s ode to the monarchy, for example, is one of romance, of his love affair with royalty. Couching the Queen’s unfolding history in terms of endearment and respect, Fraser writes, “Darling baby, pretty and polite little girl, dutiful preteen, wartime teen and young woman, blushing but very serious bride, young wife, grieving daughter, youthful monarch, mother times four, grandmother and great-grandmother, maybe even Queen Mother before her days are done on earth.”[3] Monarchists revere the Queen’s storied life more for its tales of public duty and self-sacrifice than for its moments of glamour, ceremony, royal pomp, and palatial circumstance.

  From the age of twenty-one, when as a princess she committed her life to public service, Elizabeth has exemplified the ideal royal: regal and dignified; reserved yet compassionate; studiously apolitical but definitely committed to the ideals of British, Canadian, and Commonwealth constitutionalism. As Queen, she has travelled more than any monarch in history, visiting every member state of the Commonwealth, including twenty-two royal tours to Canada. She has become the acknowledged expert on Commonwealth leadership as well as a keen observer of seven decades of international relations. As Queen, she has witnessed the transformation of the British Empire into a multicultural Commonwealth. She has beheld the growing secularization and democratization of society in Britain, Canada, and elsewhere. She has observed the development of a less deferential, more egalitarian, and critical public consciousness. She has affirmed the demand that monarchy must work in the interests of its subjects. As Queen, she has steered the monarchy through some exceptionally turbulent times, often related to the behaviour and misbehaviour of her own family members. In the turmoil, the Queen has always been the stabilizing force, injecting the monarchy and the “family firm” with often much-needed doses of honour and respect.

  Despite her personal fortitude and integrity, Elizabeth II did not achieve her noble style entirely on her own. As a young woman, she was deeply influenced by two remarkable women: Queen Elizabeth, her mother, born in 1900, and Queen Mary, her grandmother and the widow of George V, born in 1867. Both of these women had set the stage for how the royal family was to be seen for the first half of the twentieth century, and the new Queen followed in their footsteps. Even so, she gradually did things a little differently. During her reign, Elizabeth II opened up Buckingham Palace and the royal family, both figuratively and literally, to greater public awareness and observation. Her own coronation of 1953 was televised. Prince Philip’s 1957 Commonwealth tour was the subject of a feature-length documentary. In 1969 Royal Family aired on television, an official film authorized by the Queen and Prince Philip showing the life of the royals behind closed doors. To most of the forty million British viewers and the four hundred million worldwide reported to have watched the film, this documentary marked the first time they had ever seen the interiors of the various royal palaces.[4] Other documen­taries followed in subsequent decades, and by 1997 Buckingham Palace was online. The Queen inaugurated the first royal website, containing over 150 pages of information on the royal family and the monarchy. The monarchy Twitter account was launched in 2009, and in 2011 the Queen was on Facebook, quickly generating some 300,000 “likes.”[5]

  The Queen’s motions toward transparency were met with mixed results. With greater public openness came greater public scrutiny and criticism of the lavish and detached lifestyle of these rich and famous persons. Questions increased in intensity as various members of the royal family, up to and including the Queen herself, came under attack for a variety of reasons related to their public and, increasingly, their private lives. The popularity of the royal family both in the United Kingdom and Canada reached its lowest ebb in the weeks and months immediately following the death of Princess Diana. Charles was largely detested as a failed husband to the saintly Diana, and the Queen was denounced for failing to show the proper degree of respect for her departed former daughter-in-law. Had there been referenda in both countries on the future of the monarchy at the time of Diana’s death, it is highly likely that the republican cause would have been triumphant.

  But there were no referenda. And, over the next fifteen years, the royal family made a remarkable turnaround under the Queen’s leadership. Lurid tabloid scandals diminished. Charles was rehabilitated from an adulterer to a man of charity and environmentalism, and in 2005 he became husband to the love of his life, Camilla Parker Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall. The Queen celebrated highly successful and very popular Jubilee years: the Golden, recognizing fifty years on the throne in 2002, and the Diamond, celebrating a reign of sixty years in 2012. Other milestones provided fodder for a surge in popularity. The state funeral for the Queen Mother occurred in April 2002. Princes William and Harry came of age during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Perhaps most importantly for the monarchy’s public image, on April 29, 2011, Prince William married Catherine Middleton in Westminster Abbey, turning a fairy-tale romance (handsome prince falls in love with beautiful young commoner) into a fairy-tale marriage (handsome Prince William and beautiful Duchess of Cambridge live happily ever after). The couple’s royal home has been blessed with the birth of the next generation of royalty, George in 2013, Charlotte in 2015, and as of 2017, a third child anticipated in 2018. By 2015, the monarchy and the royal family was seemingly as popular as it had ever been in living memory, and the Queen — now a great-grandmother — was very much seen as the grandmother of all her people across the Commonwealth realms.

  Upon the death of Elizabeth II, monarchists look forward to the reign of King Charles III. While the moment of Charles’s accession is not met with overwhelming joyful expectation among all his subjects, he is the heir to the sovereign, and the throne will be his in due course. But the king-to-be elicits more condemnation than approbation from his peoples. Many see him as an intellectual lightweight, a meddling prince who has used his position to advance his own idiosyncratic ideas about organic farming, saving the rainforests, the problems with modern British architecture, livable urban planning, and the disconnect between the modern technological world and human spiritualism. Assessing these perceived shortcomings, some commentators, such as historian David Starkey and biographers Jonathan Dimbleby and Catherine Mayer, argue that in fact Charles is misunderstood.[6] These authors see Charles as a sensitive soul and a man very much ahead of his time. As Mayer noted in 2015, Charles is a man of deep convictions arrived at through a combination of study, discussion, and intuition.[7]

  In a book he co-authored with Ian Skelly and British environmentalist Tony Juniper entitled Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, Prince Charles contends that many of the problems currently ravaging the world — the fixation on the exploitation of the earth for short-term economic gain, environmental degradation, climate change, and social dislocation from the environment — are all rooted in humankind’s failure to live in harmony with nature, our fellow human beings, and the eternal principles of loving one another and natural creation found in all the world’s great religious teachings. Charles writes:

  [T]here is much to be gained from the observance of the natural order and the rhythm in things, whether it be the lines and shapes of architecture or the processes involved in agriculture, and certainly in the natural world as a whole. Not just because of the aesthetic experience this may bring but also because it reveals how
the same rhythms and patterns underlie all these things.[8]

  Speaking of the future and how we need to prepare for it if we are to survive and prosper, Charles continues:

  And this will mean somehow replacing our obsession with pursuing unlimited growth and competition with a quest for well-being and cooperation. It will mean shaping our culture so that its aims are rooted in relationship and focussed on fulfillment rather than on ever more consumption. If we can rebalance our perception and restore a sense of proportion to how we relate to the world — and on what basis we value the miracle of its marvels — it seems possible to me that we could create the conditions that ensure human societies thrive indefinitely.[9]

  Prince Charles is very much a man of ideas and action extending well beyond environmentalism. Little known to most Canadians is Charles’s creation and promotion of the Prince’s Trust in the United Kingdom. This charitable foundation, established in 1976, is designed to provide financial and practical support to young people aged thirteen to thirty who are in danger of dropping out of school or are facing difficulties finding employment. The Trust offers mentoring support to youth — both individually and in groups — with respect to their education. It also provides funding for twelve-week development courses designed to give participants job skills and workplace training, experience in collaborative group work and team problem-solving, and enhanced personal motivation. With an annual budget of some £38 million as of 2010, the Trust has helped over 750,000 young people since its inception, with over 58,000 youth participating in its programming in 2014. Since 1976, it has provided seed money leading to the creation of over 80,000 businesses. The Prince’s Trust has become one of Charles’s signature charitable undertakings, linking the royal family to the needs of some of Britain’s most underprivileged people.[10] As David Starkey has argued, the demonstrated success rate of this Trust is striking, “and politicians — New Labour and Newer Tories alike — strive to learn from it and emulate it.” In assessing all of Charles’s public policy interests, Starkey suggests they form the intellectual basis of the reign yet to be: “Here then is a new kingdom of the mind, spirit, culture and values which is not unworthy of a thousand-year-old throne.”[11]