Still Hanging On

Angela Long:

  Britain and its Royals

On Royalty, by Jeremy Paxman, Viking, 384 pp, £20.00, ISBN: 978-0670916627

By now many newspaper readers in these islands will know that the Duke of York is allergic to cats. The news emerged during the visit of the duke, aka Prince Andrew, to Dublin in February. Andrew, his entourage and various pillars of Irish society had been invited to dine at the British ambassador's house. But when it emerged that, apart from the ambassador, other permanent residents of the establishment included one or more cats, panic ensued until a suitable feline-free alternative venue could be found.

The story is amusing perhaps for its very triviality, but when reported in the press it also performs the function of appearing to "humanise" one of them, the House of Windsor, members of the British royal family. Such a hold do these people have on the public imagination that apparent non-stories like this ("fluffy" is the term used in the trade) are seized upon with delight by editors across the world. Even in Ireland, with plenty of anti-monarchical sentiment handed down from the dead generations, or in Australia, where a noted republican campaigner recently begged Queen Elizabeth to intercede on behalf of Guantánamo Bay prisoner David Hicks, the old instinct to doff the cap and bend the knee is still not quite dead.

But really, what are they for? The prime minister (and to a decreasing degree, parliament) now run Britain. The countries of the Commonwealth defer to the monarch as titular head of state (hence the Hicks appeal), but the ageing queen is something of a tapestry antimacassar, dragged out to lend dignity and a bit of colour when governments feel some gravitas would come in handy.

No less a figure than Jeremy Paxman, himself arguably a leading scion of the new media aristocracy, addresses the issue in On Royalty, a successor to his book The English: a Portrait of a People (1999). Paxman, the great inquisitor of BBC television's Newsnight ("Mr Howard, I don't know how else to say this, but did you or did you not overrule Derek Lewis?"), turns his attention to a smaller and more manageable topic with the royals, a coconut shy for him this time as opposed to a clay pigeon shoot.

The first hundred pages or so has the flavour of a Google search for "royalty, Europe" and, although entertaining enough, tells the average reader little that he or she wouldn't have come across repeatedly elsewhere. There is, however, a fascinating section on the indignity of giving birth in royal circles. After relating the truly awful history of Mary of Modena, wife of James II (of ten pregnancies, five stillbirths and five who died in infancy), Paxman notes that when Prince James Edward, who was to survive to become the Old Pretender, was eventually born to Mary, there were 67 people, "including the Lord Chancellor", around the labouring queen's bed, while in 1779, "there had been so many people crammed around the bed of Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI of France, for the birth of her first child, including several men who had clambered on top of the furniture to get a better view, that she fainted from the heat". Were this barbarism to be permitted nowadays the spectators would no doubt all have contracts with international photo agencies.

The fascination with things royal has not always been shared by all subjects of the queen. By the late nineteenth century, independent MP Keir Hardie (later to be one of the founders of the Labour Party) was lacerating parliament for its excitement over the birth of a new English princeling, which had quite obliterated news of the deaths of nearly 290 people in a mining disaster in Cilfynnid, south Wales. Speaking of the child, Hardie said: "From this day forward this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation."

The Scottish firebrand predicted that Queen Victoria's newborn great-grandson would grow up to be "sent off on a tour around the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow, and at the end of it, the country will be called upon to pay the bill". Remarkably prescient, as the royal babe grew up to be Edward VIII, who never actually made it to his coronation and was forced to abdicate, ostensibly because of his attachment to American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

Hardie's diatribe, which incidentally cost him his parliamentary seat, sets Paxman off on one of the few analytical passages in the earlier part of the book, when he tackles the great problem with hereditary monarchy: the there'll-always-be-a-duffer principle. "We do not have hereditary brain surgeons, nor even hereditary road-sweepers," he writes - rather ignoring the fact that these are jobs, which people learn to do, whereas royalty only has to be.

The moral hazards of extreme privilege are obvious. When you are told you have no equals, how do you develop any sense of social obligation? If you stand at the top of the mountain, without having made the slightest effort to climb, what can prevent vainglory and self-indulgence? No parental threat that, if you don't work hard or have some consideration for others, nothing will become of you, can have any force, because it doesn't matter whether you are industrious or indolent, thoughtful or boorish, considerate or selfish, the job is yours for life.

There is a fair bit of this kind of thing, going over familiar observations and gripes about monarchy and the royals. Paxman begins to hit his intellectual stride only when he addresses the execution of Charles I. His exploration of the romantic and religious commemoration of this act is interesting and lays something of a foundation for the sentiment of loyalty to the crown still retained by many English people. Comparing the situation in France, where the execution of the king marked a permanent and fundamental change, he writes that the dispatching of Charles Stuart was at the time not much more than one of many public entertainments to take place in the Whitehall Banqueting House, the site of the execution. Within eleven years, however, the attempt to establish some sort of a civil state minus monarch had foundered (and the nickname of Richard Cromwell, Oliver's ineffectual son, was "Queen Dick").

"In England they seemed to look at the alternatives to rule by a king, and to take fright," Paxman writes. He suggests that this is a form of innate conservatism, with a metaphysical element, "a belief that the [royal] institution is part of 'deep' England".

Part of it perhaps stems from that preference for the practical over the theoretical that so many foreign visitors have commented upon, part of it from the inherent suspicion of ideologies, part from sentimentality, part from lack of imagination, part from sheer laziness.

And he makes a telling point - after such a clear and drastic demonstration of the limits of royal power, a person in that position need never be feared again.

There is a strain in English culture that seems never to have quite got over the shock of hosting a regicide in the green and pleasant land. In fact Paxman himself gets very close to maudlin over the fate of Charles Stuart: even if he tries to be sniffy about portrayals of the doomed king saying farewell to his children in his cell he only succeeds in sounding as if he is furtively wiping away a tear himself.

After the regicide has been chewed over, there is a bit more meat to this book, which the reader feels might well have been engendered by some reader of his stimulating earlier volume, The English, complaining: "But you didn't talk about the royals." In the previous book one senses that Paxman is genuinely engaged, really wanting to get at the nub of what makes Englishness, as distinct from Britishness. In On Royalty, by contrast, you get a sense of the rolling eyes and set jaw familiar from many a television appearance.

That is not to say he has no sympathy with the wider topic, and he does get more involved when discussing the history of British republicanism. This has never been a very successful movement. The first great stirrer for the cause, in the nineteenth century, was Charles Wentworth Dilke, who, partly offended by Queen Victoria's long absence from public duties after the death of her husband, Albert, launched a campaign against the parasitism of the British royals. "I am of the opinion that a Constitutional Monarchy is a good government for children, and that a Republic is a good government for grown men," he declared. But a series of meetings and talks Dilke arranged to debate the issue aroused little enthusiasm and a parliamentary vote on his proposals failed dismally. As the Manchester Guardian reported, "he carried with him into the lobby only just so many followers as he could have carried away with him inside a cab".

The failure of the republican movement to raise a significant following in England - or indeed Britain - is touched on, but not really tackled. Referring to the frequently violent demises of royal houses in Russia, Germany, China, Portugal and elsewhere, the author muses that "the intriguing question is why the British monarchy did not suffer a similar fate".

He faintly suggests that a starstruck hero worship, running through the lower classes, undermined a natural constituency for seeking abolition of the monarchy. The Labour Party, he reminds us, has tended to be a staunch defender of the institution: in 1923, a vote at party conference on a resolution stating that "the royal family was no longer a necessary part of the British constitution" gained 400,000 proxy votes of support, but nearly ten times as many against (no reference is made to the marvellous insubstantiality of the unwritten British constitution). An analysis of the vote showed that trade unionists were less likely to vote for abolition than party intellectuals. Paxman refers to the fascination of Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald with matters royal, in contrast to the abhorrence of intellectuals such as Beatrice Webb - herself "gently-born".

Another partial rationale offered for the persistence of deference to royalty is the city/country divide, with the landed aristocracy being supporters of the status quo, and hence of the monarchy. Paxman points out that the great crisis for royalty, the civil war and execution of the king, came before the industrial revolution: "socialism, like republicanism, was bred among the smokestacks". But not bred enough obviously, and he proposes no real answer to that "intriguing question".

If the analytical side is undernourished, we do get interesting titbits. There is the tale of John Camden Neild, an apparently impoverished subject of Queen Victoria, who wore tattered clothes, walked wherever he conceivably could and refused to even buy a bed for his house in (now ultra-fashionable) Cheyne Walk. But when Neild, neatly described by Paxman as a "miser of prodigious commitment", passed away, he left his sovereign the queen around £500,000 - that's £35 million in today's money, or around ?50 million.

One learns that the Prince of Wales has seven boiled eggs prepared for him to consume at the end of one of his sessions of polo. This, according to Paxman, is to make sure that at least one of them is cooked to the princely taste. Tap-tap, and if the first candidate is too runny or too hard . discard it and on with the next. Off with its head! Similarly, but horrifyingly, the queen's glad-handing visits to hospitals, schools, etc, are all scripted, according to On Royalty. Those whom HRH will address in person are warned in advance, and told the question they will be required to answer. "How long have you been a tulip?"

Paxman admits that he's never actually met the queen - although he did once have lunch with Princess Diana. Speaking of Diana, one can almost feel the author's reluctance to go there, but how can he help it? He expressed his revulsion at the mass hysteria her sudden death caused in The English - the only discussion of royalty in that book - and here he finds himself dragged down by the Diana cult at several points. The princess brought about the most dramatic changes in the monarchy and its relationship with the country, largely by her death. And the key to both the success and failure of her life in this respect is that she wasn't ecktewelly royal - being royal having become such an outdated and specialist life, like that of a contemplative monk. Diana might have been a posh gel with an ancestry, as her brother loved to remind everyone, far more ancient than that of the former Saxe-Coburg-Gothas. But she wasn't of the line.

This is a journalistic book. "What else should one expect from a journalist?" as a royal person might ask, were they in any way bookish. And there is nothing wrong with the journalistic, especially when it is skillfully wrought and well footnoted, as this is. But as a fresh contribution to the subject of an enduring, expensive and yet apparently symbolically vital institution, it would have been better as a shorter book.

Alternatively, Paxman could have covered wider and more forward-looking territory, such as the monarch's ongoing relationship with the countries of the Commonwealth, particularly Canada and Australia. Although there is mention of the enchantment with the young Elizabeth II displayed by many mid-century elder statesmen, he does not find space for the almighty national embarrassment that was Australian prime minister Robert Menzies's abject adoration. Menzies, a portly figure with an impressive white mane and eyebrows from a relatively early age, quite lost the run of himself when welcoming the young queen to his country in 1963. Speaking of the joy, the lifelong exalted memories, which the sight of the sovereign would instil in all Australians who beheld her, Menzies quoted a seventeenth century poet, Barnabe Googe: "I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die." Television footage of the occasion reveals one of those vary rare occasions when the queen has registered any emotion other than the totally predictable in public as she gives an embarrassed little moue.

The trouble with royalty, especially, in the narrow definition of most of this book, the British variety, is that it is very much like the weather. It is always there and not a great deal you can do about it. Or like an unattractive shrub in the back garden that grows too freely. You can prune it, but digging out its iron roots would be too much trouble. You can live with it.

A rather more mundane problem perhaps than what to do about a privileged, wealthy, distant bunch of under-achievers who stand out like a sore thumb in a meritocratic society. Paxman settles for the argument that they aren't actually doing any harm - politically they are irrelevant - and there is a certain feelgood factor, despite the faux pas of some of the more robust members of the family (as when Prince Philip, in defence of firearms, declared after the Dunblane massacre of 1996 that if the killer, Thomas Hamilton, hadn't shot the children he might well have clubbed them to death with a cricket bat). "We could easily pack them all off," says Jeremy in his rather uninspiring conclusion. "But why bother?"