Royal Mess
By Bill Kauffman

Americans instinctively disdain monarchy. "There is not a crowned head in Europe whose talents or merits would entitle him to be elected vestryman by the people in any parish in America," wrote Thomas Jefferson to George Washington. By blood and heritage, Americans are contemptuous of kings and queens and their footmen: the liveried drivers, scraping equerries, and sycophantic counselors. We call no man Lord except Jesus Christ, and we even prefer to call Him by His first name. 

Tom Paine, who believed an hereditary ruler to be "as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wiseman, and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet laureate," imagined the game to be almost up. In The Rights of Man (1792), he gave European monarchy seven years, tops. Surely, as the nineteenth century dawned the sun would set on the whole monarchical mess, which was just "a thing kept up to amuse the ignorant, and quiet them into paying taxes." 

Alas, Paine's prediction was in Jeane Dixon's league. God may not have saved the Queen, but something sure did. British royalty, if lacking in formal powers, has outlived Tom Paine. 

Our English cousins have endured a monarchic millennium interrupted only by those 11 years in the mid seventeenth century when Oliver Cromwell stole the scepter. Still, anti-monarchism has an ancient and honorable pedigree in England. As early as the twelfth century the cry went up that "Londoners shall have no king but their mayor!" There have always been Englishmen as spirited as the seventeenth-century Leveller Richard Rumbold, who proclaimed before his hanging, "I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another; for no man comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him." 

We are told that the monarchy embodies a "dignified" aspect of the state. It is said to provide a "focus for patriotism" and national identity--as though the England of Waterloo sunsets and Jamesian ghosts needs welfare mums in tiaras to protect it.

In The English Constitution (1867), which every fledgling prince reads as a child, Walter Bagehot explained, "The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other." Or so Kings like to think. 

With the British sovereign's role having been reduced to inutility, we are far from Alexander Pope's "The right divine of kings to govern wrong." Yet the prime minister still bows to the Queen and kisses her soft hands, uncalloused by even the drawing of her own drapes in the morning.

The sovereign also remains the titular head of the Church of England, which might have caused a national throat-clearing had Princess Diana married her lover Dodi Fayed. In that case the future King William, Defender of the Faith, would have had a Muslim stepfather. Then again, at least the Muslims in England believe. The empty Anglican churches have forced preservationist Englishmen to start answering Philip Larkin's question: "When churches fall completely out of use/What shall we turn them into?"

The current band of throne-sitters are no more English than was the late lamented Dodi. The winsome Windsors are of German stock, which proved embarrassing during the First World War, when King George V and cousin Kaiser Wilhelm found their nations at war, while another member of the royal cousinage, Tsar Nicholas II, was nearing the end of his run.

In 1917, as atrocity stories of Huns bayoneting Belgian babes cast Germans in a rather bad light, King George V thought it advisable to change the family surname from the wurst-reeking Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the impeccably English Windsor. The royals might still be an "imported dynasty," as H. G. Wells denounced them, but by golly that was one classy name.

The name change was carried off as deftly as Cordozer Broadus became Snoop Dogg or Chris Miller became Rat Scabies. Kaiser Wilhelm once joked that he was off to the theater to take in a production of The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Meanwhile, the current Queen's husband, Prince Philip, a product of separated parents who spent his boyhood bouncing among the wastrel rich, bears the family name Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, which he sensibly changed to Mountbatten.

The Windsors are a parody of a family, of alternately brutal and distant fathers and neglectful mothers. Avaricious and acquisitive, they purchase everything but the love of their children, who warp into titled adults. In the many accounts of the family, most if not all written by monarchists, one is hard-pressed to find evidence of the normal love between a husband and wife, or parent and child. The dominant note was struck by Edward VIII, who said upon the death of his mother, Queen Mary, in 1953, "I somehow feel that the fluids in her veins must always have been as icy-cold as they now are in death." Rest in peace, Freezer Queen.

Adultery is to this family as swingsets are to six-year-olds. The dissolute Edward abdicated in 1936 when his inamorata, the sluttish American divorcee Wallis Simpson, was deemed not of queenly material, but later royals have made Edward and Wallis look like a match made in Eden.

The infamous Diana Spencer had no more respect for the marriage vow than did Wallis Simpson, but, unlike Wallis, Diana was feminine and spoke with the upper-class English accent that reduces American newsmen to uncharted depths of obsequiousness. Diana was a suicidally depressed adulterous bulimic, which made her the "most celebrated woman of the century," in biographer Christopher Anderson's words. A day wasn't a day 'til she had vomited six times. While pregnant with William she cut herself in any number of ways, once throwing her body against a glass case. She was into astrology, not Anglicanism. She was also a votary of aroma therapy, t'ai chi, feng shui, acupuncture, colonic irrigation, and the healing power of crystals.

Diana could barely be bothered with her sons, kenneling them at early ages in the bleak boarding schools which produce the British upper class. When she died in a car crash with a spoiled rich kid, she hadn't seen her precious boys in five weeks. The lads "were never far from her thoughts," her hagiographer assures us, though they seldom seem to have been in her presence.

Then again, Diana was bred not to give a damn about her children. Her mother had walked out on the family when Diana was six, leaving her to the not so tender mercies of abusive nannies and a wicked stepmother she nicknamed "Acid Raine." Diana was shipped off to a boarding school and then a Swiss finishing academy, where she learned that a family is what you call the alcoholic strangers with whom you spend Christmas. This is hardly unique to the Spencer-Windsor match; Electress Sophia, mother of the Hanoverian line, wrote of her own dear mother: "Her Majesty had her whole family brought up apart from herself, preferring the sight of her monkeys and dogs to that of her children." (The current queen has her beloved corgis.) Even the earliest British sovereigns were "brought up in fosterage," writes an historian of the monarchy, which "removed them from the infection of royal intrigue and rivalries"--not to mention parental affection.

G. K. Chesterton bemoaned the indifference of well-to-do English parents toward their offspring, as they "exiled all their children to boarding school, and thought any boy a milksop who admitted any affection for his mother." Nannies and boarding schools misshaped the English upper class. They fed a coldness, a lack of sympathy for others, an inability to form lasting bonds. 

Diana's adulterous husband was also raised in an emotional fridge. As a boy, Charles received affection from nannies, not mummy: Even after extended absences, the Queen greeted him with only a handshake. His father, Prince Philip, was away for six of the boy's first eight birthdays.

Charles may have been a distant husband to the Princess of Wails, but how many hysterical suicide-threatening scenes can a man take? Besides, his mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles ("The Rottweiler" to Diana) had the right lineage. Parker-Bowles's ancestor Alice Keppel was Edward VII's mistress. When Camilla met Charles in 1972, she is said to have gamely suggested, "My great-grandmother and your great-great-grandfather were lovers. So how about it?"

As Queen Elizabeth's reign shows no sign of letting up, Charles must be in a state rather like that of Edward, Queen Victoria's son who muttered in 1897, "I don't mind praying to an Eternal Father, but I must be the only man in the country afflicted with an eternal mother." And so a nation turns its eyes to William, whose character was molded at boarding school, fantasizing about Ginger Spice and Cindy Crawford and hearing rumors of a celebrity called Mother who danced away her nights with coke fiends.

Grandpa will be of little help to William. Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, is best known for making boorish remarks about aborigines, Chinese, and other exotic breeds during his taxpayer-funded trips 'round the world. Ah, that royal charm.

The Queen's accumulated wealth, which is pegged at anywhere from 275 million pounds to over 1 billion pounds, is exempt from the inheritance tax. The royal subsidy runs to about 35 million pounds annually, by the reckoning of the Queen's accountants: Mere chicken scratch, say her defenders. 

If it's not all that expensive, and if the queen's governing powers are slight, why bother abolishing the monarchy? Certainly it is no American's business if Englishmen wish to bow before even the most abject nitwits of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line. As Jefferson wrote in 1798, "I do not indeed wish to see any nation have a form of government forced on them." But, he continued, should England be "republicanized, I know not on what principle a true republican of our country could lament it."

Columnist Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, a leading republican, argues that "the crown symbolises the very essence of our political culture--declaring loud and clear that power in Britain flows from the top down, with the throne at the summit of the pyramid. So long as the head of state belongs, automatically and irreversibly, to a single pampered family, we can but be subjects of their kingdom, not citizens of our own land."

British republicans tend to prefer an elected president and a constitution patterned after that of the United States. Alas, any new constitution would likely be written by a pasty technocrat of Cool Brittania rather than by James Madison. As one British conservative scornful of the royal family says resignedly, "I'd rather have the Queen than President Blair."

While the Windsors continue to go their not-so-merry way, prospects for republicans are growing brighter. In 1936, in the wake of Edward's abdication, Member of Parliament James Maxton offered a motion to abolish the monarchy in favor of a republic. He lost by the Sovietish margin of 403-5. Today, opinion polls find that about one quarter of Englishmen support an elected president rather than a monarch. 

Maybe it doesn't much matter what the umbrella-poppers do with their buckteethed royals. Whether or not England survives has nothing to do with the thousand banalities yet to be spoken by the future King William, and everything to do with the concerns of Oliver Goldsmith:

Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroy'd, can never be supplied.

If the English measure in meters, watch Friends, take orders from Brussels, and ban hunting, then what, really, does it matter if a King or Queen smiles benignantly over the lowing herd? If the London sky loses its hue, who cares who bows to whom?

Still, the Woman of the Century must be heeded. Diana is said to have remarked shortly before her death: "William is waiting patiently for the monarchy to be abolished. It will make it so much easier for him!"

In memory of the Princess of Whales, Free Willy!

—TAE associate editor Bill Kauffman's Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette will be published this winter.