A Brief History of the House of Windsor (2 page)

The British monarchy sets more store by ceremony than any other monarchy in the world. The United Kingdom is larger than any European country – other than Spain – that is ruled by a royal house. There is therefore an expectation that Prince William’s wedding will be bigger, better, more spectacular, than such an occasion would be elsewhere. There is also a feeling that – principally because the BBC has such experience and expertise in relaying state occasions – it guarantees to make good viewing. The British monarchy, like the Spanish, can stir a sense of affinity not only in their home country but wherever in the wider world their language is spoken or their culture has taken root. In the case of Britain
this is, of course, greatly helped by the existence of the Commonwealth. For viewers in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and a host of smaller countries, the wedding they are watching is a matter of immediate interest because the queen is their head of state and this couple are their future rulers. Even other lands – principally of course the United States, whose citizens have long since rejected monarchical rule – still enjoy certain aspects of royalty: the televised ceremonial, the sense of continuity, even the occasional juicy scandal.

Naturally there has been general fascination with a photogenic young couple whose relationship has been followed by the media almost since it began. Celebrity magazines have made William and Kate their own, despite the fact that royalty and celebrity should be two entirely different things. It matters, of course, that the two of them appear to be so similar to other young people of their age group. He has managed to seem, despite an upbringing in surroundings that few would find comfortable, a very ordinary young man. Today he is wearing, for the first time in public, the uniform of the Irish Guards (he has just been appointed Colonel), and this is perhaps the most formal he has ever looked. His grandmother’s subjects are accustomed to seeing him in more casual attire – the jeans and sweatshirts of his teenage years, the combats of a soldier during his military training, the green jumpsuit of a helicopter pilot while serving in the Royal Air Force. Because these images are familiar to people and represent the stages of life through which they have followed William’s progress, they feel they know him well. The bride, naturally the focus of attention today, is also well known. The details of her short life and her family background have already been extensively raked over by the media. Everyone with an interest in these matters knows that her mother was an air stewardess, that her parents run a company that supplies accessories for children’s parties, that she was bullied at one of her schools and was captain of the hockey team at another. Even Kate’s childhood piano teacher has been interviewed on television to say that,
though a pleasant little girl, she was not destined for greatness as a musician.

People of course enjoy the Cinderella aspect of the story – the notion that someone without social prominence or connections could win the heart of a prince on the basis of personal merit. If Kate could do such a thing, so could thousands, millions, of others. It is as if fate has reached into the crowd and plucked out one of them at random. She comes, of course, from a solidly upper-middle-class and public-school background, and has lived in a wealthy community in one of the most snobbish corners of England (‘the M4 Corridor’). There is no rags-to-riches element here, though the media has been able to score one or two points by tracing the differences in background between bride and groom. One newspaper published photographs of their respective great-great-grandfathers, taken during the First World War. Hers was a private in the Army, his was Commander-in-Chief. It has also been revealed that she has relations who run a chip shop in Sunderland, an emphatically working-class part of the north east of England, a world away from the green acres of Bucklebury in Wiltshire where she grew up. Though she has never met them, the mere fact that she is linked with Sunderland through her family will enable its inhabitants – and the owners of chip shops everywhere – to feel that they too have a stake in this event.

Her parents have been caught up in this to an extent that they must have been expecting ever since their daughter first brought William home. Their house has been shown on television, their wealth has been speculated about in the press (it is estimated to be costing her father over half a million pounds to finance his daughter’s big day), her mother has been criticized for an unfortunate habit of chewing gum during solemn occasions. Her sister will become a celebrity through the events of today, her figure much admired – especially from behind – in her tight bridesmaid’s dress. From now on she will appear regularly in gossip columns, though the bride’s brother James
will, by contrast, be largely ignored both during the service and afterward, despite the fact that he reads a lesson in front of what must be the world’s most intimidating audience with complete confidence and absolute perfection.

Once the ceremony is over and the principals have returned to the Palace, the crowd in the Mall is allowed to stream, slowly and under police control, toward the railings. This is the usual climax to any royal event that takes place in London. After an interval, while thousands wait patiently outside, the French windows on to the balcony will be opened by invisible hands and the family will appear, the signal for general uproar. Down on the street itself there is often pushing and jostling. Those who find themselves in the centre of the roadway can see nothing at all because their view is blocked by the great white bulk of the Victoria Memorial. Others are still struggling to get through one of the narrow gaps in the barriers between the pavement and the roadway, and to line up their cameras, when a sudden roar tells them they have already missed the great moment. Nevertheless they will stand there in the crush until the appearance is over and the family retreats inside.

The British monarchy, it is obvious, is popular. Its various celebrations – weddings and jubilees (of which there have been several in recent years) and coronations (the last was in 1953) – are regarded as national events. Though the queen and her husband are spoken of with respect, for the younger generations the public uses first names – Charles, Andrew, William, Harry, Kate – as if they were personal acquaintances. Only the minor members of the family, about whom much less is known, are referred to by their titles – the Duke of Kent, the Duchess of Gloucester, Princess Michael. The immediate family, with its divorces, its outspoken patriarch, its tearaway younger son, is public property. There is a feeling that people know them, and are privy to their secrets. They know about their clothes, their tastes, their sense of humour, their love lives.

Familiarity does not exactly breed contempt, though there is far less respect for them than there was when the present monarch came to the throne. The public likes, and expects, its royal family to be accessible, informal and not aloof, even while demanding that they be dignified. Insofar as this is possible, the family perform the trick of facing both ways at once, of personifying the nation’s history and representing it abroad, upholding its ceremonial traditions, while at the same time belonging to the present – wearing the clothes, liking the music, befriending the celebrities, of their generation. Some royals are naturally more serious, some more fun-loving, but because there are now so many of them and they cover such an age span – and because they have between them such a wide variety of interests – they can relate to more or less any sector of society.

A hundred years ago, their predecessors were very different. Then the monarchy was hedged around by rigid protocol, and members of the royal family were not seen in public anything like as much as they are now. Royal weddings were private events held behind the doors of Windsor Castle or the Chapel Royal, though they spawned general enthusiasm and were publicly celebrated. Family members were not seen by the public while informally dressed, though they might be photographed indulging in the leisure pursuits of the comfortably off – golf, shooting, hunting – in the appropriate costume, and a tweed suit would have been the equivalent of being ‘dressed down’ today. They did not take part in charity events – other than by acting as patrons – and certainly did not help to raise funds. They did not mingle with crowds by undertaking the ‘walkabouts’ that are now standard practice, and the most that many of their subjects would have seen of them was a distant splash of white dress or scarlet tunic.

They made formal speeches without a trace of levity (King George V warned his sons never to inject humour into their official utterances), and indeed never smiled or laughed in
public – a rule to which Queen Victoria had strictly adhered, and which her successors adopted in their turn. They did not tell jokes, and it would have been unthinkable for any of them to give an interview, so that their views on any subject were a matter purely for speculation. Both press and public treated them with what seems today to be exaggerated deference, their male subjects immediately doffing their hats at the appearance of any royal carriage. Their friends were drawn entirely from the aristocracy and the wealthy plutocracy, and no one pretended that they had any understanding of the lives of their more ordinary subjects. They did not go to school, and naturally did not work in any profession. They were deliberately kept apart from everyday life because it was considered important to preserve their mystique. In an age of more rigid class structure it was in any case unheard of for people in their position to court public favour. Members of the aristocracy after all would not have stopped to chat with coal miners or market women, and what was the monarchy if not the apex of the aristocracy? Members of the royal family were, and were expected to be, the remote tip of the social pyramid.

Their business was not to be liked by the rank and file of their subjects – though it was gratifying when this happened, as it did sometimes. Rather it was to enhance the prestige of the nation through their splendour and dignity, to further the country’s interests through their relations with their fellow monarchs, to preside over Society (a hugely important function, since they thus set the tone of national life) and to provide a reference point, a nominal leadership, for politics, the Civil Service and the armed forces. Nowhere in their ‘job description’ were they required to befriend or even to notice the great majority of their people, other than with a distant wave.

In fairness, their isolation was not so complete as might be imagined. They held the patronage of charitable organizations, just as they do today, and made visits to hospitals
and orphanages, where they might have brief conversations with inmates who had probably been chosen and groomed in advance (such staged encounters were, and are, standard practice for politicians too). More importantly, the male members of the family served in the forces. The boys were put into the Royal Navy where they might live and work on close terms with men from the lower deck. Nevertheless it was taken for granted that members of the family existed on a different plane and had very little in common with their subjects.

It was apparent, by the beginning of the twentieth century, that a more democratic age was coming. Monarchy had already been cast aside by France not once but twice, and the emerging giant among nations – the United States – was emphatically a republic. The future seemed to lie with big, energetic nations: America, Canada, Australia, South Africa. These were accumulating unheard-of wealth and their frontier nature made them egalitarian to an extent that Europe could never be. If these emerging powers were to dominate the world, monarchies would quickly seem outmoded. The subjects of kings would look enviously at the social freedom enjoyed by the citizens of these new countries, and would become increasingly impatient with their own situation.

At this time there were also a number of murder attempts – many of them successful – against monarchs all over Europe, perpetrated largely by individual fanatics whose only motivation was to kill heads of state. Never before or since have royal families endured such persecution from the bombs and bullets of assassins as they did in the years between 1900 and 1914. The Age of Kings could be coming to an end, and Britain’s monarchy might well go down with all the others. That was why Edward VII – who presided over an era of radical upheaval – once introduced a visitor to the Prince of Wales, later George V, with the words: ‘This is my son, the last king of England.’

Queen Victoria had identified the family with the morality of the middle class, though in everything else they belonged to the super-nobility. Edward VII, with his extravagance and
extensive womanizing, had been a throwback to the more riotous Hanoverians, the sons of George III, and had lived with all the vulgarity of a
nouveau riche
millionaire. His own son was to prove quietly dutiful in a manner that would realign the institution of the monarchy with safely conservative bourgeois values. Once again its outlook would reflect that of the highly influential and politically important middle class.

Whatever their affiliations with a particular class, one thing the royal family clearly did not have in common with their subjects was much of a sense of ‘Britishness’. Their names, their accents, their family customs, were alien, and did not always sit well with British attitudes or expectations. Like most monarchies they were, by force of circumstance, a very cosmopolitan lot. By and large, royals could only marry people from their own social stratum, and suitable candidates could of course only be found in other countries – in courts and palaces equivalent to their own. The result was that although ‘imported’ members might live most of their lives in England, they remained – subconsciously or deliberately – wedded to other cultures, languages and practices. One example of this was the Duchess of Edinburgh (1853–1920) who was born Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia and married Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred. She never ceased to regard her adopted country with disdain, and continued to order her clothes, her shoes and even her biscuits from St Petersburg. Monarchs spoke German or French to each other – Victoria and Albert had used German as their language while at home – and British royals often spent their summers on the Continent, at health spas or visiting their seemingly endless relations.