It is just under
thirty years since Prince William’s parents, Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, were themselves married in St Paul’s Cathedral. Below are two Spectator articles relating to that wedding.
The first is the Spectator editorial from the time, the second an essay by Auberon Waugh on the lessons to be drawn from the occasion. Now that Kate Middleton has become Princess Catherine, you may
also want to click here for an article entitled “What Kate should know,” by
Diana’s former private secretary, Patrick Jephson, for The Spectator in 1996. Anyway, back to 1981…
The symbol of unity, The Spectator, 1 August 1981
The marriage of the heir to the British throne inevitably leads one to reflect on the on the monarchy and its function today. There are two broad categories of government in western democracies — those where the head of state is a ceremonial and symbolic figure with little or no “power”, and those where the head is a real ruler. The two obvious examples of the latter type are the USA and France. The former category is much more common, and it also has two divisions, elective presidencies and hereditary monarchies. On the whole the hereditary monarchies have been losing the struggle for survival. Before 1914 France, Portugal and Switzerland were the only European republics. The first world war produced a holocaust of dynasties, especially those of the “Great Powers”, with Britain alone remaining a kingdom. The Romanovs, Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs vanished. The new states — Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Finland — were republics. Monarchies survived in the Balkans, in Spain and Italy, in Belgium and the Netherlands, and in Scandanavia. The second world war saw the end of the Italian monarchy and all the Balkan kingdoms except Greece. That too has gone now, but Spain which became a republic in 1931 has had a king as head of state since Franco’s death six years ago.
Apart from that, the only monarchies which remain in continental Europe are in the Loew Countries and Scandinavia. Those who deduce from this that there is a trend which must go on under republicanism becomes universal are guilty of a well-known historical heresy. It could be described as that of “linear extrapolation”, the belief that every tendency goes on for ever. By such arguments it was proved conclusively in the mid-19th century that Britain must run out of coal by 1900. But there seems to be plenty still. Even if the argument has any validity for the other surviving monarchies (which is doubtful) it would not necessarily apply to Britain which has always differed from continental Europe — and still differs — in a multitude of ways. In fact the Crown has seldom looked more secure than it does today, which is not to suggest that this will always be true — otherwise one would be falling into the same error oafs the coal-predictors of 1850.
“The advantages of a hereditary monarchy are self-evident,” wrote Harold Nicolson in that model of all royal biographies, his life of George V. He notes among them “a prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession” and “the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments which congregate about an ancient and legitimate Royal Family”. The monarch does not have to justify his existence. He is there by natural right, and he is, as he must be today, political neutral.
“He is not impelled, as usurpers or dictators are impelled, either to mesmerise his people by a series of dramatic triumphs, or to secure their acquiescence by internal terrorism or the invention of external dangers.”
Political neutrality is not the only nor even the most important asset of monarchy, although failure to observe it is one of the quickest ways of bringing monarchy to an end; it was because they were on the losing side in either politics or its continuation, war, that most kings deposed in recent times lost their thrones. But the most important point about monarchy, anyway, in Britain, is that it appeals to the deep human need for mystery, colour and pageantry. Presidents, whether “real” or titular heads of state, fell obliged to show that they belong to “the people”. American Presidents, deplorable though it may seem, no longer even wear a top hat at their inauguration — and a top hat is not such a very grand form of headgear, worn as it is by about two-thirds of the 20,000 who attend garden parties at Buckingham Palace.
A former editor of the Spectator, Sir Ian Gilmour, wrote:
“The monarch is a person and a symbol. He makes power and the state both intelligible and mysterious. Presidents make them neither. Legitimacy, the acceptance by the governed of a political system, is far better aided by an ancient monarchy set above the political battle than by a transient president who has gained his position through that battle. Modern societies still need myth and ritual.
‘You have the Queen’, an American once said. ‘We have only the Flag’.”
The constitutional powers of the Crown which are slight, though potentially important in an emergency, could no doubt be exerted by a ceremonial president. Its influence, an intangible element and part of the monarch’s triple function as defined by Bagehot — “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn” —could not. No Prime Minister would pay attention to a president. As long as the Crown remains, as it is today, highly popular and symbolic of the unity of a nation which, despite inner-city riots, is not yet fundamentally divided, the monarchy will continue. If it ever becomes an object of political controversy it will not, but there is no reason at all to fear that this will happen in the foreseeable future.
Lessons of the Royal Wedding, Auberon Waugh, The Spectator, 15 August 1981
Languedoc, France
One would like to think that the French had derived some permanent benefit from the Royal Wedding. So far as one can tell, the entire French nation watched it. Every Frenchman and Frenchwoman I meet speaks of it as one of the most emotional occasions of modern history, and it almost seems as if nearly 200 years after their abominable revolution, the French are beginning to have second thoughts.
Yet this same nation has just elected a socialist President and a socialist Chamber of deputies for the first time in 25 years. It may seem incomprehensible to us that anyone of the slightest intelligence or benevolence towards the human race can still profess to believe in socialism, seeing the miserable havoc and poverty it creates whenever it is tried. But the inescapable fact remains, to be explained as best one can, that this supremely intelligent and, in my experience, entirely benign race has chosen to express its contempt for all men by governing by this means.
So far, the only result has been to devalue the franc against the pound. With every day that passes, an extra frog’s leg or snail lands on my plate without the slightest effort on my own part. The general conclusion must be that French socialists are not nearly so depraved as our own. Mitterrand, as a person, seems less objectionable than Giscard. I wonder if that half of what we laughingly call our Shadow Cabinet which boycotted the Wedding drew any conclusions from the fact that Mitterrand, who had actually won an election, attended. The week of the Royal Wedding cannot have been a happy time for socialist politicians waiting in the wings. No doubt, in time, national disgust at the Conservatives — at Mr Heseltine, for his horrible postures in Liverpool, at Mr Walker, for the spectacle of his naked ambition, or at Mrs Thatcher, for her mean and obstinate attitude towards My Worsthorne — will reassure them that the country is indeed ready for the exciting experience of civil war which they promise us. But it must have been a depressing thing to see all those happy, half-witted, cheering faces in the crowd.
Even in America, which has just elected the man who, I am convinced, will prove the greatest and the best President of my own lifetime, and where our Wedding was also followed with rapt attention, the message does not seem to have got through. I cannot have been alone is noticing how Mrs Reagan, on being presented to the Queen at a polo match just before the Wedding, pointedly refused to curtest. She is, of course, a woman of humble origins and may not have known any better. Or she might have been hinting that she was a Daughter of the American Revolution (which as a jumped-up chorus girl she most certainly isn’t). Or perhaps, like so many wives of even the greatest men, she is simply quite mad. But I prefer to think she was suffering from the same residual loyalty to her own country’s revolution as the French evince when, on public occasions, they still pretend to believe that liberty and equality are reconcilable aspirations, or that either necessarily makes for happiness.
Something of this ancient, irrational urge may be understood by Englishmen when we analyse the extreme irritation we felt on learning — with this new concentration on the affairs of the Royal Family — that the children of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent have somehow been allowed to assume the style of younger son and daughter of a duke (or marquess). I do not know what pipsqueak in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office or the College of Arms assured them that they had this right, but they don’t. Mr and Miss are the proper styles, although after that they can call themselves anything they like. A special Royal ordinance authorising the practice would have been dubious enough, but for a junior member of the Royal Family to assume the style of a nobleman’s younger son in this way is to spit in the face of the Magna Carta. Possibly neither Prince Michael nor his bride has ever heard of Magna Carta, but if I were a baron, let alone a duke or a marquess, I should certainly take this usurping couple to Runnymede and dunk them both in the river which runs around the historic meadow.
Which may explain why intelligent and respectable Frenchmen still stand to attention for La Marseillaise, why Nancy Reagan refused to curtsey to the Queen. But the most sombre lesson of the Royal Wedding concerns the future, not the past. Ever since becoming a father, more than 19 years ago, I have tried to convince my children that if they neglect their studies they will end up as road-sweepers or lavatory attendants. If, on the other hands, they apply themselves diligently enough to all the absurd and humiliating subjects in the modern child’s syllabus, achieving satisfactory ‘A’ levels in biology, physics, ‘modern’ mathematics, ‘Nuffield’ latin, the theory and practice of positive anti-racialism, the political, philosophical and economic framework to a non-smoking policy, creative modelling in plasticine etc — then, if they are boys, they will become rich and famous like their father and grandfather before them; if they are girls, they will marry if not the Prince of Wales, at any rate a marquess, a duke or one of the better class of earls.
Even if I could think of a single unkind thing to say about out new Princess of Wales I would refuse to say it in deference to her beauty, birth and obvious amiability of temperament, but the fact remains that she now got a single pass at ‘O’ level GCE and on that rock the whole ship of state looks like sinking. The Prince of Wales, in choosing such a mate, makes a statement of greater importance than if he had chosen to marry a girl of average educational abilities who was either black or working-class. What he is saying, in effect — and instructing all his dukes and marquesses down to the meanest citizen in the land — is that education is no longer of the slightest use or interest to the modern Briton.
In a sense, of course, he is right. In a society were the long-distance lorry driver earns more than the university professor, the ancillary technician in hospital more than the consultant surgeon, who need education? A chimpanzee can be trained to perform most of the functions of the “worker” in a modern factory, and would probably perform them with better grace.
The erode in this is to suppose that education prepares people for employment rather than unemployment. Present figures for unemployment are not the product of a temporary recession, still less of the Government’s non-existent ‘monetarist’ policies. They are the inescapable and permanent result of technological progress. The greatest challenge facing our civilisation — as opposed to the dragooned and regulated societies of the East — is the challenge of leisure. Even the lower classes grow intolerably bored with television after a time. Music is already surging ahead and literature, I feel sure, will revive once it has been taken away from the Arts Council and learned to address itself once again to its readers. Education is the key to everything. If the Prince is too busy himself he should appoint a tutor to instruct his young bride in music, dancing, poetry and all the gentler arts. If Lord Goodman’s health is not up to the job, I will volunteer for it myself.
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