TARNISHED CROWN

Christopher Hitchens

The Queen being upstaged by a dashing new prime minister, the auction of Princess Diana's frocks, and the publication of Kitty Kelley's scandal-packed book—all are signs that the sun may be setting on the British monarchy

About once a week, I find myself drawn into an argument about the British monarchy. I am an English republican, and my opponents, as often as not, are American royalists. But not even this piquancy makes the arguments any less predictable. Would you really rather have a boring old president? What about the magic and the fairy tale? Isn't the royal family good for tourism? Wouldn't Britain be a dull backwater without the Windsors? These and other routines have worn as smooth as an old 78-r.p.m. music disc, with about as many cracks and bumps and hisses. What people don't realize is that, without anyone's taking any particular notice of the fact, Britain has already become a republic. We live in the first, tentative days of post-monarchism.

Here are the three most recent proofs. On May 14, there was the traditional "pomp and circumstance" of the State Opening of Parliament. This is the wildly tradition-infested moment, beloved of American tourists and London-based hacks, in which the Queen reads a speech from the throne in order to give permission for her subjects to debate legislation. (She uses the charming phrase "My Government," just as the British employ the Royal Mail to send their letters, and are defended by the Royal Air Force from foreign foes, and get their money from the Royal Mint. But, as the great 19thcentury critic William Cobbett once mordantly observed, by some magic it's the Royal Mint and the National Debt.) Her Majesty arrived in a gilded coach drawn by horses. Meanwhile, the new prime minister, Tony Blair, and his barrister wife, Cherie, dismounted from their official car and walked the remaining distance to Parliament. The next day's press showed the adoring crowds and the Union Jacks being deployed for the new, "vibrant" presidential couple, while the Queen looked gray and wrinkled and bespectacled, and faintly absurd in a crown as she peered at the paper she had been given to read. This was a genuine upstaging, by democratic Britain, of traditional Britain. It simply would not have been tried by any previous prime minister, nor applauded by any previous mass audience. The intention of the new government is to give autonomy to Scotland and Wales and try for a final settlement in Northern Ireland, which makes the whole definition of Britain as a monarchy or "United Kingdom" rather iffy. Another mandate of the Labourites is to abolish the right of hereditary peers to vote in the House of Lords. If enacted, this would mean that the House of Windsor— of all dysfunctional families—was the only family in the "kingdom" to enjoy political privilege as a right of birth. It sharply raises the inescapable question: If heredity is an obviously absurd way to pick lawmakers, how can it be justified in the case of a single person as Head of State, Head of the Church, and Commander in Chief of the armed forces? (The Queen, if you like this sort of detail, is the only colonel of a British regiment to be married to another colonel.)

'At the Hong Kong handover Prince Charles looked like a monkey on a stick. ^

second republican moment occurred a few weeks later in New York, when Diana Spencer—the Artiste Formerly Known as H.R.H. Princess of Walesheld a sale of her frocks. This charitable triumph followed closely upon her astonishingly successful world tour urging the banning of land mines. You may take Diana or leave her. All I can tell you is that she laughed prettily on the one occasion we were properly introduced. For all I know, she may laugh prettily at everything that is said to her. But she actually laughed prettily when I said: "We republicans must stick together." She has done more, even if only by accident, to undermine the idea of "the succession" than I could ever have done by trying. Indeed, by her devotion to her children, she has put the whole idea of "the succession" into doubt. The Queen retaliated last November by issuing a royal warrant removing Diana's name from the prayers employed in the Sunday services of the Church of England. Where once the faithful were enjoined to pray for the heir apparent and his spouse, they now had to intone only the dismal words "For Charles, Prince of Wales." I daresay he can do with any solitary intercession. This is what you get, he may gloomily reflect, when you found a royal house, and a national church, on the divorcecentered family values of Henry VIII. But these are deep waters. For now, the point to keep your eye on is that the only "magical" and "charismatic" member of the supposedly magical and charismatic royal family is not, for real purposes, a member of that family anymore, or at all.

The third republican moment lies in the immediate future. Kitty Kelley's book The Royals, which extracted many millions from Time Warner, is due out in late September. As Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip celebrate 50 years of matrimony, they will unwrap the Golden Wedding surprise of all time. We all feel ourselves jaded by scandal and disclosure about the Windsors. At least I think we do. What could possibly improve on the "Squidgy" tape or the "Tampax" files? But I have spent some quality time tracing Ms. Kelley's footsteps. I badgered some people in her lawyer's office in London (the only city in the world where there are no plans to publish the book). I have eyewitness testimony to her entering Kensington Palaceresidence of Princess Margaret—guards notwithstanding. Also to her embracing royal biographer Lady Longford in the National Gallery. I know that she was invited to the dinner of the republican "Common Sense" club, a regular conclave of Establishment anti-monarchists held in the rather fine L'Etoile restaurant, and I also know that she was the first person ever invited who was permitted to take notes.

How much should I mind if Ms. Kelley discloses that it took embarrassing sessions of artificial insemination to produce the present Queen and her sister, Margaret? (The then King, it was always whispered, was "not heir-conditioned.") Only a person who cared about bloodlines and heredity could care, surely, about that or about the allegation that the Queen Mother—our beloved Queen Mum—was born on the wrong side of the blanket, product of an illicit union between the Earl of Strathmore and a lowly housemaid. Is it possible that Ms. Kelley possesses evidence of this same Queen Mum's love letters to another chap? Can it really be the case that the Duchess of York—"Fergie" to you—was treated for addiction to a substance other than diet pills? Prince Philip's occasional wanderings from the matrimonial paddock are not denied even by his staunchest defenders, but what of his tear-stained farewell gifts to the woman he abandoned for the "dowdy" Princess Elizabeth and the chance of a royal match? How the hell—this was the talk of the Fleet Street bars—did Ms. Kelley get hold of memos from Nigel Dempster, courtier-journalist extraordinaire, telling his own publishers to deep-six the memos on virginity testing for the royal princesses? Was Prince Edward's backstage name truly "Dockyard Doris"? (I had always been told it was "Barbara.") Tales of Princess Margaret's offhand chauvinism are easy to come by, but signed and sealed depositions from the Princess of Wales, in the lawsuit she brought against the yellow press for printing pictures of her private moments in the exercise studio, are a much more rare commodity. I thought I was cynical enough, but a few miles spent walking behind Kitty Kelley's investigative shoes, and gleaning what I could of the harvest to come, left me feeling, my dear, positively drained.

'The maintenance of the monarchy has become a form of human sacrifice. ^

It used to be that the British people happily kept two sets of books, as it were. In one book—the book containing fragrant pressed flowers and national keepsakes—the Queen Mother was the radiant grandma and the woman who had braved Hitler's blitz by staying at the King's side in Buckingham Palace during the "dark days." In the other book, you could read if you chose about how she and the same King had welcomed Neville Chamberlain straight from the plane back from Munich, and invited him onto the balcony of that same Buckingham Palace in order to give a royal stamp of approval to appeasement before Chamberlain went to Parliament to face the condemnation of the Labour Party and Winston Churchill. I have pictures of this moment on my wall. It has been weakly described by Establishment historian John Grigg as "the most unconstitutional act by a British Sovereign in the present century."

Or again, you could know if you chose that Katherine and Nerissa BowesLyon, two cousins of the current Queen's and nieces of the Queen Mother's, had been secretly confined in a mental hospital three years after Munich. The exact nature of their mental incapacity is still a secret but was certainly not terminal. Nonetheless, false news of their deaths was announced in Burke's Peerage, almanac of British genealogy, in 1963. Yet they were not dead, and their covert incarceration lasted a quarter-century after they had been airbrushed from the family tree. I found, writing about this years ago, that many people would take the news placidly enough—as if it were true but as if it made no difference. It was a bit like talking to victims of the Kennedy "dynasty" cult in the United States, and telling them about the lobotomization of the missing sister by Joseph Kennedy Sr. They heard, but they didn't listen.

The period of double bookkeeping is effectively over (as it is, I hope and suspect, for the Kennedys too). An accumulation of shabby stories, about everything from family nightmares to tax evasion, has descended upon "the royals" just at the moment when their hereditary "line" has run out of genes and just at the time when social and institutional changes make them more of a grit than a lubricant in the machinery of politics. What is the unspoken obstacle that prevents reform of the Lords, inhibits British integration into Europe (with its Convention on Human Rights), and blocks the demand for self-government for Scotland, Wales, and Ireland? The obstacle is the principle and practice of the Royal Prerogative, whereby British people are subjects, not citizens, and whereby they have no written rights or formal constitution, and whereby their country itself is named after a dynasty. The supreme political body in the realm, made up of specially sworn members of both houses, is an unelected group quaintly titled the Queen's Privy Council. (It might not sound so quaint if it were called by its proper English name, which would be the Secret Council.) A republic could not possibly make a greater hash of matters than this.

ou can have scandals, enjoyable or sordid. You can have a constitutional impasse. And you can have a crisis in the succession, whereby nobody believes that the actual "next in line" is up to the "job." But you cannot have any two of these at once, let alone all three. No longer is the onus on the republicans to prove their case. It's the monarchists who have to answer the question: What happens when the Queen drops off the twig? Prince Charles, who has gone stale well before his time (he looked, at the Hong Kong handover, like a monkey on a stick), would be King of about 10 percent of the population and of nobody who was his own age. He would also awaken his own church's archaic neurosis concerning royal divorce, and awaken it twice if he married Camilla Parker Bowles, faithless ex-wife of Silver Stick in Waiting. His sons are too young and have not been raised for the "job," and must have heard their father say, which he did on prime-time television, that he never loved their mother. (I always thought "fairy tale" was exactly the right term for that marriage.)

The glory has departed. As Thomas Paine, the great English republican and moral author of the Declaration of Independence, phrased it, the monarchy has become "something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to open, and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter." Or, one might add, into tears. Prince Philip's threatened lawsuit against Kitty Kelley will not prevent her book from being circulated widely among the disloyal subjects. The prevention of publication is a proof of weakness, not Strength. The saloon-bar standby "Whaddaya want? President Thatcher?" has worn desperately thin. Never mind that President Mary Robinson and President Richard von Weizsacker and President Vaclav Havel and President Nelson Mandela have recently set a standard that few presidents and no monarchs could rival. Presidency can give you George Washington (who refused a crown) or Richard Nixon (who was caught trying one on). But monarchy, by its reliance on heredity, guarantees absurdity and recurrent succession crises. In Britain, it has reached a pass where it simply has to be replaced in one way or another.

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' What could possibly improve on the "Squidgy tape or the ""Tampax" files? ^

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Look at young Prince William. He seems like a nice boy. Who, knowing what they now know, would want to see him sequestered in the gloomy, loveless world of the Hanoverian court, compelled to exhaust his youth in the task of waiting for somebody to die? The maintenance of the monarchy has become a form of human sacrifice. But, just as peers, who are now barred by law from running for office, will be free to do so when their privileges are removed, so the Windsors will be emancipated when their subjects outgrow them. Indeed, one of them might make a very good president. . .

I hate the tourist trade, which has turned large tracts of beautiful England into a mediocre royalist theme park, so I don't give a damn if it suffers. But I resent the insulting suggestion that the British have nothing else to offer foreign visitors, and nothing else in which to take pride. Here is my proposal: In Westminster Abbey there are two shrines. One is the burial place of a long line of monarchs, many of them in their lifetimes either deplorably spattered with blood or regrettably flecked with drool. The other is Poets' Corner, with its plaques and busts and window dedicated to imperishable writers. English and Anglo-Irish literature has a splendor and continuity that make the royals look shabby. (And many of its greatest lights— Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Burns, Shelley, Wilde, Joyce, Hazlitt, Orwell—were republicans. So are most of the contemporary British writers worthy of the name.) Merely shift the Abbey's center of gravity. Make the national letters the object of pride and reverence, and of course debate and disputation. Take the visitors there, and the schoolchildren too. Tell them the story. By that time, with any luck, the bishops will no longer be sitting in the House of Lords or enjoying state patronage, so there will be more room in the Abbey for the essentials.

The British have a great republican tradition. They lead, for all practical purposes, republican lives. Their society is increasingly multicultural within and increasingly European without. They feel less and less need for what Thomas Jefferson called "the false glare which surrounds kingly government." Some years ago, there was a hugely successful book called Dreams About H.M. the Queen. In its pages, ordinary subjects confirmed that they often had vivid dreams about a sudden encounter with royalty. It was all very touching, and confirmed the role of monarchy in the national fantasy life. But the book contained a warning. The dream, it cautioned, is not about the Queen. It is about you. In recent years, so my friends tell me, royal dreams have been tapering off and becoming less intense. And people are waking in surprise, to find that the ghosts have fled and that their dreams have turned democratic.