“Are we right, or are we crazy?” This is how Alexander the Chancellor answered, in Telegraphabout the emotions of the British public at the 1986 engagement of the then Prince Andrew to Sarah Ferguson. The Chancellor was giving voice to the anxiety that intelligent Tories occasionally feel about their monarchism, but always shrug it off (“…rather crazy, but I don’t see any great harm in it,” the Chancellor continued). Is this great, moth-eaten anachronism really beautiful, dignified, magical (all those mysterious words)? Or is it bunkum, woo-woo, crazy?
Something similar is promoted by the BBC Queen Elizabeth II: Her Story, Our Centuryaired to mark what would have been her 100th birthday. It makes for a warm and strong watch, the Queen portrayed as our steadfast national pilot, facing the storms of modernity and change. There is a strong and official cast of commentators – Lady Glenconner, Helen Mirren, Tom Jones, Gyles Brandreth. And they remind you that, as with all matters of the heart, in royal matters the British should be allowed to behave strangely. But the programme’s claims to mark the passing century raise deeper questions – not so much about Elizabeth, but something we might vaguely call an “Elizabethan” era.
If the documentary has a major narrative theme, it is the Royal Family’s gradual but unstoppable concession to control of the media and public opinion—in effect, to democratization. This began with the telecast of the coronation and was accelerated by the behind-the-scenes documentary The Royal Family (1969), which saw royals butter sandwiches and buy ice cream. The Queen later banned the broadcast for whatever she had discovered. The process reached its climax in the 1990s, when the Queen declared it “a terrible year” (1992) – the daughter of the King-Emperor, pleading with her subjects for compassion for her children’s turmoil – and when, standing by the flowerbeds left for the dead Diana (1997), mourners began to use words like “disgraceful” and “disgusting” to describe the Queen’s pained response and her horror. palace”, recalls Kirsty Young. Forced by public demand to make a national broadcast, the Queen and her family became not a monarchy but something more like, in Matthew Parris’s phrase, a “hereditary presidency”. During the 2012 and 2022 Jubilee, we saw the Palace use images of James Bond and Paddington Maversty Bear for cinema audiences.
The calculation of the program for the last decades is very rosy. In this story, 2011 is not the year that saw Prince Andrew photo-linked to Virginia Giuffre in Mail on Sunday or the end of its “special” commercial role. No, 2011 is the year of the wedding of Prince William to Catherine Middleton, the peak of the British monarchy in its “modern” color, after the nineties. It’s also the year of the Queen’s state visit to Ireland, when, patronizingly implied, she wooed the Republic by mixing a few Irish words into a speech (ask any Irishman if that worked). Andrew’s “business”, as Palace officials no doubt describe it, is covered later, at two minutes and six seconds, with the Queen praised by Brandreth for realizing that “something had to be done” (realizing so firmly that she left the job of exorcising Andrew completely to her heir).
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Covid and Diamond Farewell Jubilee are used to bring back the feeling of upliftment. And as reruns of the Queen’s 2020 “we’ll meet again” air, it’s striking how much the Second World War feeds into her own personal myths – which are ultimately only a mirror for national myths. Here we are reminded, for as long as I can remember, that the Queen “did it a bit”, driving a Land Rover and handling the keys as Second Subaltern ATS. While she was not a century old, Elizabeth personified something of the “post-war.” Her passing, and hers, is having frightening, dissolving effects on the national mood and its assumptions. The Good War is just one of the national myths that began to rot as it did, tearing at the roots of post-imperial British nationalism. No one can honestly say that things have gone well since she died. And who can honestly say she didn’t matter, when her and her family’s actions can make us feel so crazy?
(Further reading: The crumbling crown)
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