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more relevant – a “people’s” Honours List, the opening of Buckingham Palace to the public and greater oversight of royal finances – seemingly served only to drain whatever substance re- mained from the beleaguered institution.

Yet, in spite of Charles’s messy divorce, the death of Diana and Prince Harry’s poor taste in fancy dress, the monarchy has survived. But the recovery of its fortunes does not indicate that Britain is a nation of ardent royalists, unques- tioning in their loyalty to the Windsor dynasty. Rather, the persistence of the monarchy in 21st- century Britain has been achieved only by the near-complete submission of the Crown to the popular will.

The mistake that commentators in the mid- 1990s made was to assume that the royal family’s then poor reputation reflected deeper changes in society. Conservative and republican writers alike believed that the Crown had been fundamen- tally undermined by a decade of Thatcherism,

both as a political institution and as a cultural ral- lying point. Respect for the monarchy, it was said, had rested on a class-riven society dominated by codes of deference, a society that Thatcher’s gov- ernment had torn asunder.

However, the problem is that throughout British history due public deference to the Crown has often seemed in short supply. From Wat Tyler swilling his beer in front of Richard II in June 1381 to the Kentish fishermen who accom- panied the captured James II to the privy in De- cember 1688, British subjects have often failed to observe the niceties of royal protocol. High-pro- file instances of this kind can be accompanied by the thousands of cases of seditious speech and writing found in British legal records, demon- strating a plebeian hostility to the monarchy.

Denunciations of individual monarchs, such as the one by William Pennington in 1690 (he was accused of calling King William a “Dutch dog” and Queen Mary a “Dutch bitch”), or by John

18 | NEW STATESMAN | 13 JULY 2009

From Wat Tyler swilling beer in front of Richard II to slogans of “God save the poor and down with George III”, the British have a long history of hostility

towards the Crown. Can it survive the coronation of King Charles III? By Ted Vallance

W IR

EI M

A G

E

Off with their heads

I n a recent poll conducted by Republic, the campaign for an elected head of state, 62 per cent of respondents wanted royal fi- nances to be open to full public scrutiny. At the very least, the renewed focus on

royal expenses, with its obvious parallels to the furore over MPs’ claims, could stymie requests for an increase to the civil list. At worst, the tim- ing of this debate, in the middle of a recession and in the wake of a serious crisis of confidence in our political institutions, threatens a repeat of the Queen’s “annus horribilis” of 1992.

The toe-curling (or rather toe-sucking) reve - lations of that year brought public respect for the monarchy to its lowest ebb for a century; the fire that engulfed Windsor Castle was an apt symbol for royal grandeur brought to ruin. In the aftermath of these disasters, commentators on both the left and the right rushed to pronounce the imminent death of the British monarchy. The post-1992 reforms to make the monarchy

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Harris in 171 4, who said “God damn the Queen [Anne], she can kiss my arse”, are commonplace. Many of these outbursts openly threatened vio- lence. In the revolutionary crisis of the 1790s, anonymous handbills were pasted up in Bath proclaiming “Peace and large bread or a king with no head”. Another from Wiltshire ended “God save the poor and down with George III”.

On the other hand, British history is filled with instances of monarchs who were lionised even by radical movements. The greatest exam- ple of this was Alfred the Great. The Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor painted an idyllic pic- ture of Saxon England under the rule of Alfred, when the working day was strictly limited to eight hours and “there was neither lock nor bolt on any man’s door because there was no thief ”. Many Chartists similarly believed, erroneously, that Queen Victoria was sympathetic to the cause of reform and had personally intervened to prevent the execution of John Frost, the leader of the Newport rising of 1839.

Yet the sheer level of hostility to some mon- archs alone demonstrates that the “enchanted glass” (to use the writer Tom Nairn’s phrase) of royalty rarely cast an effective spell over the public. Few British dynasties can have ex- pended more wealth and effort in maintaining the aura of regality than the Stuarts. The recent Tate Britain exhibition of Van Dyck’s work for the court offered a potent reminder of the en- ergy and expense devoted to extolling Charles I’s kingly authority. But the imagery, powerful as it was, was not strong enough to dissuade the king’s own subjects from putting him on trial and executing him.

Monarchy was restored in 1660 and Charles II was vigorous in emphasising once more the magic

of majesty, touching an estimated 100,000 of his subjects to cure them of “the King’s Evil” (scro- fula). But barely three years after Charles’s death, the mystical veneer of Stuart monarchy had al- ready worn thin, and James II was treated little better than a common criminal when captured on the run in December 1688.

F rom the mid-18th to the late 19th century, the genetic lottery of hereditary succession threw up a series of deeply unpopular mon-

archs. “Prinny”, as the Prince Regent was known, became a target for fierce public anger. William Hone’s satire on British politics in the aftermath of Peterloo, The Political House that Jack Built (1819), portrayed the future George IV as the man “Who, to tricksters, and fools, leaves the State and its treasure/And, when Britain’s in tears, sails about at his pleasure”. When George IV finally died in 1830 (as a result of a diet that, according to the Duke of Wellington, included for breakfast a laudanum aperitif followed by a pigeon and steak pie and three-quarters of a bot- tle of Moselle), even the Times remarked that “never was an individual less regretted by his fel- low creatures than this deceased King”.

William IV and Victoria fared better, but in the late 19th century the behaviour of Victoria’s son Albert Edward, the future Edward VII, was seen to threaten the whole institution of monarchy. “Tum tum”, as some of his friends called him,

enjoyed good food and cigars, but it was mainly his sexual exploits that brought shame on the Saxe-Coburgs.

In 1861, shortly before he was due to be mar- ried, Albert Edward was caught sneaking the actress Nellie Clifden into his tent on an army camp on the Curragh, near Dublin. In 1870, the Prince of Wales was booed by the public when he was implicated in Sir Charles Mordaunt’s di- vorce case. Even in the 1890s, he was continuing to make headlines of the wrong kind with his in- fidelities and illegal gambling activities.

These public attacks constituted more than just the moral judgement of the crowd on royal gluttons and philanderers. Popular anger di- rected at particular monarchs was the legacy of a long-standing idea of “commonwealth” that placed service to the public good above loyalty to high-born individuals. This was the essence of Chartist praise for Alfred and Elizabeth I – these were supposedly monarchs whose first duty was always to the people and the well-being of the nation. This ideology was embedded in under- standings of both British history and the opera- tion of the British state. In popular histories of the nation, in contrast to elite “Whig” narratives that dwelt on the supposedly orderly progress achieved through events such as the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, pride of place was given to moments such as the Peasants’ Revolt, when the aristocracy was bypassed in favour of direct “negotiation” between the king and his subjects, or to the stirring legends of Robin Hood robbing the rich and giving to the poor.

The “commonwealth” ideal also incorporated a republican strain. Though out-and-out repub- licanism was only ever the political creed of a tiny minority, republican elements were long

s

Rather than being captivated, the Crown’s subjects have

seen their rulers as “but the people’s creatures”

Name and shame: identify everyone in this royal rogues’ gallery correctly, and a free NS subscription could be yours. Email: [email protected] with your entry by 20 July

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The revolution of 1688-89 left a profound po- litical legacy but not in the way usually under- stood. It did not create constitutional monarchy. All it really settled was that the royal succession was ultimately determined by parliament, not heredity. What it did not fix was the imbalances of power within the constitution. As the Lev- ellers had recognised back in the 1640s, royal tyranny could swiftly be replaced by arbitrary parliamentary rule. The British monarchy’s pow- ers, rather than being reduced, were simply ap- propriated by the Crown’s ministers. The royal prerogative over appointments, the gifting of ho- nours and the waging of war became the preserve of a new form of unelected absolute ruler, the prime minister. This is the problem posed by the monarchy’s survival – not the perpetuation of a supposedly backward, forelock-tugging national culture, but the potential for abuse of political power that the Crown facilitates.

However, as 1649 proved, cutting off the “head” of the body politic did not leave it a bleed- ing lifeless corpse. That revolutionary moment, more than any other, demonstrates that for much of Britain’s history, rather than being cap- tivated by the magnificence of monarchy, the Crown’s subjects have seen its rulers (to use the words of John Cook, prosecuting counsel at the trial of Charles I) as “but the people’s creatures”. There has been no better display of this popular assertiveness over the monarchy than in the most serious recent royal crisis, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997.

With the help of Helen Mirren and Stephen Frears, Diana’s death has since become a public relations coup for Elizabeth II. But at the time it was an unmitigated disaster for the Windsors, in which the royal family seemed deeply out of step with public opinion. The Crown’s response was telling. Bullied by a public wallowing in grief that

bordered on mass hysteria, the royal family was forced to override protocol and display the royal standard at half mast above the palace. The Queen was in effect made to return from Bal- moral to London in order to share the nation’s pain. Diana’s funeral itself was a triumph for popular vulgarity over court etiquette, with Westminster Abbey transformed for the day into a mourning-dress-clad version of Live Aid. The same jarring populism characterised the Queen’s golden jubilee in 2002, complete with the guitarist Brian May playing “God Save the Queen” on the roof of Buckingham Palace.

The monarchy still appears to be a British political institution with a great deal of popular support: more than two million people watched the “highlights” of Trooping the Colour on 13 June. But the House of Windsor now survives only at the sufferance of a general public that has little interest in history, tradition or protocol.

The negative arguments used by monarchists for retaining the institution highlight the present precarious fate of the royal family. The connection of royal spending with the expenses furore points up the pitfalls of a familiar monar- chist refrain – that we are better with a heredi- tary head of state than the likely elected alterna- tives. Many will certainly have thought twice about deselecting their chiselling, venal repre- sentatives when it appeared that the alternative was Michael Winner or Esther Rantzen MP. The same line of argument operates reasonably well when the head of state is a nice old lady who has wisely learned to say little more than “What do you do?” and “Did you come far?”

But the thought of President Branson might be less appalling when the alternative is King Charles III. Just as they have done in the past, the British public may then decide that a republic, not a monarchy, is “what works” best. l Ted Vallance’s “A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries, the Men and Women Who Fought for Our Freedoms” is newly published by Little, Brown (£25) To read Ted Vallance’s essay “Burning down the House” from our issue of 8 June, go to: www.newstatesman.com

20 | NEW STATESMAN | 13 JULY 2009

MONARCHY SPECIAL

T he 17th-century archbishop of Canterbury William Sancroft privately wrote of his desire to disentangle the church from the aggrandising government of the James II. Three centuries later,

his successor Rowan Williams may have inadvertently staked out the middle ground in modern struggles over constitutional reform. In his recent lecture “Faith in the Public Square”, Williams proposed that England was “a society haunted by religion and not at all clear what to do about it”. Far from exorcising the ghost of religion, however, his ambition – as in his notion of English sharia courts – was to sketch out an affirmative role for religion in public life.

The key to Williams’s system is “interactive plurality”, an equitable consensus of believers and non-believers gently facilitated by the state. Such pluralism scarcely requires an established church, and even he has acknowledged that disestablishment has some functional appeal.

The separation of church from state, inevitable with the end of monarchy, need not be understood as the crushing triumph of secularism over faith and religious privilege, if it is accompanied by an endorsement of the idea of an English “civil religion”. In America, civil religion is a non-sectarian pattern of beliefs, rituals, customs and symbols – a shared public language for the expression of collective religiosity. Thus the pledge of allegiance includes the phrase “one Nation under God”, not “one Nation under Jesus”.

An English civil religion would allow the state to recognise formally the historical and moral contributions of religions both past and present while maintaining a transparent, secular and singly comprehensive rule of law. l Elliott Visconsi is the author of “Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England” (Cornell University Press)

God help the Queen!

Diana’s funeral was a triumph for popular vulgarity over

court etiquette, a mourning- dress-clad version of Live Aid

identified within the British constitution. This “monarchical republicanism”, to use the term coined by the great historian of Elizabethan England Patrick Collinson, was a “what works” doctrine of proto-New Labour political pragma- tism. It posited that though monarchy was in- deed the normal and traditional form of govern- ment in England, it could be replaced with republican forms when circumstances required (for example, the sudden death of a childless monarch such as Elizabeth I, who refused to name a successor).

At a local level, government was essentially free of monarchical interference, consisting of thousands of autonomous mini-republics, the parishes, often run by democratically elected, low-born office-holders. In Scotland, the posi- tion of the monarch was even more clearly that of a public trustee as a consequence of its more radical, Calvinist reformation. As Andrew Mel - ville, the 16th-century theologian, remarked to James VI (later James I of England), the king was but “God’s silly vassal”, an instrument to serve the godly nation and nothing more.

M onarchical republicanism was integral to the two greatest crises of the British monarchy: the Civil War and the Glo-

rious Revolution. It was during these two revo- lutions that the schemes for temporary English republics first discussed by Lord Burghley, Eliza- beth I’s minister, were put into effect. In 1649 parliament was much more interested in getting Charles I to abdicate so that he could be replaced by a Commons-vetted puppet king (probably his youngest son, Henry) than it was in permanently replacing the monarchy with a republic. It was Charles’s intransigence rather than revolutionary zeal that brought him to the scaffold. The parlia- mentarians’ intended solution in 1649 finally came to fruition in 1688-89. James II’s flight from the kingdom was followed by the rapid cre- ation of a republican council constituting the in- terim government of the nation. The Convention Parliament summoned very shortly afterwards then offered the Crown to a Protestant candidate, William of Orange and his English wife, Mary.

s

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