A Brief History of the House of Windsor (25 page)

In fact, it was precisely because of such pervasive gloom that the populace at large wanted a party. Britain was shown on television screens across the world as a country paralysed by strikes, financially unstable, choked with uncollected rubbish, and with its youth represented by snarling, foulmouthed punks. Knowing that no other nation could match them at staging a celebration, however, the British wanted to show the world – and themselves – that there were some things in which they still effortlessly dominated. The jubilee – with the service at St Paul’s in London, the series of tours that Her Majesty made of Britain and the Commonwealth, and the innumerable village fetes and ox-roasts and street parties – was a triumph. ‘An older Britain briefly re-awoke,’ as one commentator put it, though in truth that older Britain is always there, awaiting such opportunities. If the monarchy cannot cure the ills of society, it can at least provide colourful diversions and a sense of pride. So it proved in 1977.

This success was repeated, in even greater measure, four years later when Prince Charles was married in St Paul’s Cathedral. His continuing bachelorhood was causing concern to his parents, but like a previous Prince of Wales he seemed content to put off matrimony indefinitely. He was by
no means uninterested in women, and had had friendships with several who might have made suitable consorts. What the public did not know was that his affections were already committed to a woman, Camilla Shand, whom he had met when she was single but who was now married to an army officer. Charles needed, for dynastic reasons, to marry, but his wife must be suited to the role that she would expect to inherit. This meant in effect that she must not have ‘a past’, and must be sufficiently well drilled in duty and politeness to win the approval of the family’s older generation.

Lady Diana Spencer, the sister of one of Charles’s former girlfriends, seemed a perfect candidate: very young – at nineteen she was twelve years his junior – and from an aristocratic family. Her grandmother and his were friends. Lady Diana had lived on the Sandringham Estate, and appeared to take pleasure in the country pursuits that formed an essential part of the royal family’s lifestyle. She was not overly bright, but was obviously good with children (she was working at the time as a nursery assistant), and possessed qualities of kindness and modesty (she blushed easily) that won the affection of the public as soon as they began to see her in photographs.

She and Charles seemed very happy together. On the day of their wedding – 29 July 1981 – an estimated 600,000 people lined the streets to witness the event, and some 750 million watched on television. This time there had been no doubting the public enthusiasm beforehand. The populace had shown willing from the moment the engagement was announced. Television coverage was all-encompassing; souvenir manufacturers were in ecstasies. Once again, celebrations were mounted on village greens and at street parties throughout the country. As during the jubilee, Britons felt that the whole world was watching them with envy, and they enjoyed this further moment of national glory.

This new spirit of nationalism was unexpectedly put to the test the following year. The Falkland Islands, a British dependency off the coast of South America, was invaded without
warning by Argentinian forces. Argentina had always claimed the islands, which had been populated by British settlers since 1833. Since the Falklanders refused to consider abandoning their British identity, no government in London would even discuss the matter with Buenos Aires, let alone concede ownership. Sudden military occupation was the result. Could Britain, 8,000 miles to the north, do anything about this? Were there the resources – was there the will? The answer was yes. The indomitable British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, immediately ordered a taskforce to be assembled. The journey was too long to make by air, and the expedition had to sail to the Falklands, warships accompanied by commandeered merchant and passenger vessels filled with troops. The voyage lasted three weeks, the campaign almost three months. At a cost of 258 British fatalities Argentinian forces surrendered on 14 June 1982, and eventually the taskforce returned to Britain. Waiting for them in Portsmouth were the queen and Prince Philip, for one of their number was Prince Andrew, a naval helicopter pilot who had faced a degree of personal danger during the fighting. His craft had been used as a decoy for deadly Exocet missiles, and he had also flown anti-submarine patrols.

His specialist skills had been required in the conflict, but because of his position there had naturally been reluctance to deploy him. It would have been understandable if he had been kept away from the ‘sharp end’. In fact, it was the queen herself who had insisted that he be sent. ‘No, he’s a serving officer,’ her chaplain later quoted her as saying, ‘he must take his turn with the rest.’ He is her favourite, and she would naturally have been deeply anxious about the outcome, but she wanted her son to take the same risks as his comrades. He was the first member of his family to serve in active combat since his father took part in the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1942. As in previous wars, equality of service – and perhaps sacrifice – strengthened the bond between monarchy and people.

Courage is always impressive, and this was shown by the
queen herself on two separate occasions. At Trooping the Colour in 1981 she was shot at – with blanks, as it transpired – while she rode along the Mall toward the parade. After calming her horse she coolly rode on, and the ceremony proceeded as usual. The next year she awoke one morning to find a stranger in her bedroom, and managed to keep him distracted until help arrived.

Apart from these events it was her children who claimed the lion’s share of the attention. Andrew was married, in the summer of 1986, to Sarah Ferguson. She was an exuberant, confident young woman whose boisterous sense of humour matched his own. As with Diana, who was a friend (and had brought her and Andrew together), Miss Ferguson seemed a highly promising addition to the family. The daughter of Prince Charles’s polo manager, she had known the family since childhood, and therefore understood the environment she was entering. Her sheer jolliness was seen as refreshing. The public expected to warm to her.

They didn’t. Remarkably quickly, she irritated them. She proved to be clumsy, boorish, undignified and selfish. She made too much noise, and she was a liability rather than an asset. She also proved to be greedy, and went on seemingly endless expensive holidays. ‘She was having too much fun,’ said one critic, adding that the public like the notion that, when royals are on holiday, they spend their time shivering at Balmoral rather than going somewhere nice. Sarah Ferguson took advantage of every privilege her position offered, and still wanted more. The nadir was perhaps reached when she produced a children’s book
– Budgie the Little Helicopter –
and pocketed the proceeds instead of making them over to charity.

Prince Edward, the only one of the siblings still unmarried, was also in trouble. He had made two decisions regarding his future. One was to attend Cambridge University, the other to join the Royal Marines. He was accepted by Jesus College, but it was obvious that he owed this to his position rather than any innate ability. There were protests, and a good deal
of public derision. He survived three years there, however, and received a degree. His fees had been paid by the Marines – the sponsoring of officer recruits is usual – and afterwards he had to start the notoriously tough training course. Though he was making good progress, the few weeks he spent with the Corps convinced him that his ambitions lay elsewhere. He pulled out of training, bringing further opprobrium on himself and his family.

He sought a career in the theatre, and was willing to start at the bottom as a general dogsbody in a production company, provoking yet more sneers. Having begun with this, he aspired to be a producer himself. Using his connections, he arranged a television spectacular that would raise money for charity while giving him national exposure.
It
’
s a Royal Knockout
, modelled on a much-loved television programme, used teams led by members of his family (Princess Anne, Sarah Ferguson) and filled with celebrities (Jackie Stewart, Cliff Richard, John Travolta) to compete in a series of comical races, while dressed in historical costume. It was not a success. In fact it was regarded as painful, and Edward’s sulking, when he discovered that the press had been unimpressed, compounded his misfortune. The queen disapproved, and those who wish the monarchy well have tried to forget it. Young people are allowed to make mistakes, it is how they learn, but in the case of royalty the media is always there to record and preserve such lapses.

The royal family was by now the subject of widespread ridicule, and it was not simply the mistakes of the younger generation that were the cause.

Throughout the earlier half of the twentieth century other countries had experienced a trend towards satirical humour: the cabarets of Paris or inter-war Berlin, for instance. From the 1950s, however, the United Kingdom saw a fashion for increasingly zany humour – often incomprehensible and bewildering to foreigners – that manifested no respect for
anything.
The Goon Show
, which appeared on radio throughout the fifties, was followed by
That Was The Week That Was
, a political lampoon.
Private Eye
, a magazine that poked disrespectful fun at the Establishment, began publication in 1961. Other programmes followed, most famously
Monty Python
’
s Flying Circus
. All of them had one thing in common – they were the work of young people. It was in the sixties that youth took over the media. Ludicrously inexperienced men and women still in their twenties – David Frost, Joan Bakewell, Simon Dee – were given access to their own television platform, and used it to lecture their elders. The chief targets of ridicule were the caste of patrician Tory politicians personified by Harold Macmillan, but the satirists also took a swipe at many other aspects of the Establishment.

In view of this, the monarchy got off lightly for a very long time. Writing in 1977 the foreword to a book about cartoon images of the royal family – an historical survey that covered centuries – Prince Charles was to remark that, compared with their predecessors, his family had been treated kindly. This was true up to that point, but it was not to last. The satirical shows had introduced a climate of ridicule that made abuse a generally accepted part of entertainment. The increasing vulgarity of tabloid journalism was a further blow, and this would become worse when the anti-monarchist Australian Rupert Murdoch became proprietor of one of them.

It was in the eighties, with the advent of the ground-breaking television programme
Spitting Image
, that any deference to public figures was to vanish without trace. The programme used cruelly exaggerated, life-sized latex puppets to lampoon the world’s leaders: Mrs Thatcher, John Major, President Reagan, François Mitterrand. The creators, Peter Fluck and Roger Law, were both former newspaper cartoonists whose irreverence certainly did not spare the members of the Labour Party, but whose strongly-held left-wing convictions meant that anyone who represented the established order was unlikely to be treated gently. The queen, Prince Philip, the
Queen Mother, Charles and Diana, were all depicted with varying degrees of disrespect. Only when the series spawned a book did the Palace take exception. This depicted Prince Andrew in a nude centrefold, suggestively draped with a string of sausages. There was no outright objection from the royal family, but the Prince of Wales abruptly cancelled a contract with the book’s publisher, for whom he had been producing a volume of his own. When the Post Office produced, some time later, a series of stamps that celebrated British cartoonists, it included a design by Roger Law. All stamps must be approved by the queen, and it seems she simply refused to do so in this case. The story is probably true, though the Post Office Archives cannot confirm it. There are subtle but effective ways in which the monarch can express disapproval.

Satire comes in waves as styles go in and out of fashion, and
Spitting Image
, which ran on television for no less than twelve years, has not been followed by anything as pointedly cruel. Humour of a much gentler kind has been found in Sue Townsend’s novel
The Queen and I
, which was published in 1992 and subsequently made into a stage production. This is set during the general election of that year, and imagines the consequences of a victory by the People’s Republican Party.

The Windsors are stripped of their properties and titles, and sent to live on a council estate in Leicester (Miss Townsend’s home town), in order to experience ordinary life. The older generation are pensioners, the younger members have to find something to do. The humour comes from imagining how the various family members cope with their change of lifestyle. Prince Philip, despite a real-life reputation for no-nonsense pragmatism, cannot make the adjustment. He takes to bed and effectively goes on hunger-strike; Princess Margaret complains endlessly; the Queen Mother befriends an elderly West Indian widow and enjoys long afternoons reminiscing with her about their respective families (she later dies and is buried with her new neighbours in attendance). Charles becomes not
only an enthusiastic gardener but a political activist, jailed for a crime he did not commit – punching a policeman. He asks Diana to look after the plants in their modest garden, but she is more interested in forming a close friendship with a successful black accountant. William and Harry attend the local primary school and quickly slough off any signs of ‘poshness’, learning to talk in ungrammatical slang for protective colouring. Princess Anne, displaying the tough practicality for which she is known, drives her own removal van to the small cul-de-sac (Hell Close) in which the family have been settled. She immediately sets to work on repairing the plumbing with the aid of a household manual, and later takes up with a shy and unpersonable local handyman. Prince Andrew features only incidentally. He is at sea on a submarine. And neither does Prince Edward who, in his capacity as a production assistant in the theatre, is touring New Zealand with a musical called
Sheep!