‌Chapter 15

‌Vive la République

On an unusually warm Saturday in June, the heirs of Oliver Cromwell are sitting in a rented room in a building behind Euston station in London listening to speaker after speaker denounce the British monarchy. They have gathered here for the annual conference of Republic, an organization with the mission of “campaigning for a democratic alternative to the monarchy”. To call Republic a mass movement would be an exaggeration: although the organization claims 1,500 members, a mere hundred or so have turned up today. They are predominantly male, middle class and over fifty.

The discussions are calm and largely devoid of passion, although the atmosphere livens up when Geoffrey Robertson, one of Britain’s best-known human-rights lawyers, presents a glowing tribute to Cromwell and the men who tried and executed King Charles I in 1649. The French revolutionaries of 1789 also come in for praise. His audience are not about to man the barricades themselves, however. If this is all the support the republicans can muster, then the Queen – or Elizabeth Windsor as they prefer to call her – has little to fear.

The high point of the day’s debates is a discussion about the “meddling” of Prince Charles and the way he uses the influence that comes with his position to lobby for his pet causes. Charles is good news for republicans. While few can fault his mother’s behaviour as Queen, her son and his apparent disregard for the convention of royal neutrality can annoy people. One of the speakers, Peter Jenkins, an architect, says he has been drawn into republicanism by the Prince’s campaign against modern architecture. David Colquhoun, a professor of pharmacology at University College, London, is outraged by the way the heir to the throne lends respectability to some of the wackier forms of alternative medicine. “The influence he has exerted has been consistently malign,” he says.

Others present complain about the cost of the monarchy and oppose any proposals to increase the Queen’s Civil List at a time when other government spending is being cut back. There is talk too of the bad behaviour of some members of the royal family: it is only a few weeks since Sarah Ferguson has been trapped by the “Fake Sheik” from News of the World.

For Graham Smith, Republic’s full-time campaign manager, the issue is far more fundamental than that: the monarchy is a serious obstacle to the modernization of the British political system and to the abolition of such historical anomalies as an unelected House of Lords and the highly secretive Privy Council. “Some reformers dismiss monarchy as a decorative bauble,” says Smith. “But it’s the central pillar of our feudal constitution.”

The argument has acquired a particular resonance following the general election of May 2010, the first in more than thirty years not to give a single party a majority of seats in the House of Commons. The price that David Cameron, the Conservative leader, had to pay in order to become prime minister was to promise the Liberal Democrats, the country’s third party, a reform of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system. Although voters went on the following April to reject change in a referendum, constitutional reform was back on the agenda, and some hoped this could lead to discussion of the role of the monarchy. The uncertainty that followed the election has also focused attention on the powers of the Queen – or rather what was seen as her determination not to be involved in politics, leaving Britain alone among Europe’s democracies in not having a figure, whether a monarch or an elected president, steering the coalition-building process.

It is ironic that Britain, the country with the most deeply entrenched and best-known monarchy in Europe, and probably the world, should have been the first to try republicanism. Indeed, the eleven years between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of his brother Charles II in 1660 are not generally considered a good advertisement for republican rule. However admirable the motives of many who backed him, Cromwell did not prove himself a model democrat, dissolving parliament when it did not agree with him. By having himself appointed Lord Protector for life and naming his ineffectual son Richard to succeed him after his death, Cromwell became a king in all but name.

The Restoration appeared to close the door for good on republicanism: the men who brought Charles I to trial were themselves hanged, drawn and quartered after his brother climbed the throne; such was the desire for vengeance that Cromwell’s body was exhumed the following year on the anniversary of the King’s execution and his severed head displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall for the next twenty-four years.

Yet republicanism has lived on in Britain in the centuries since in radical circles, at times winning broader appeal – usually in response to bad behaviour on the part of monarchs. One such point was during the last years of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century, when George IV’s antics as Prince of Wales and Prince Regent added to the unpopularity of the Hanoverians. The arrival on the throne of his niece Victoria in 1837 gave the monarchy a boost that was to last for several decades – but this was to be undone following the premature death of her husband Albert in 1861. Consumed with grief, Victoria largely withdrew from public life, plunging the British monarchy into one of its most serious crises since the Civil War.

By the late 1860s ministers were beginning to express increasing concern about the invisibility of the Queen, who was spending most of her time at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight or at Balmoral in Scotland, and in February 1870 flatly refused a request to open parliament. Such reticence was perhaps understandable: when she had made a rare public appearance the previous year to open the new Blackfriars Bridge over the Thames, her carriage was booed as she drove down the Strand. Matters were not helped by the private life of her eldest son, the Prince of Wales, who was required to give evidence in an unsavoury divorce case in February 1870. The Times reflected broader exasperation with the Queen’s behaviour when it said the time had come for her to stop devoting her life to mourning her late consort and “think of her subjects’ claims and the duties of her high station, and not postpone them longer to an unavailing grief”.

After the overthrow of Napoleon III and the declaration of a French republic in September 1870, republican clubs sprung up across Britain. In a loudly cheered speech to the House of Commons that November, Sir Charles Dilke, a radical member of parliament, declared the cost of the royal family had jumped to a million pounds a year – ten times the income of the President of the United States, as another speaker put it – and this was “chiefly not waste but mischief”. “The republic must come, and at the rate at which we are moving, it will come in our generation,” Joseph Chamberlain, a future President of the Board of Trade, wrote to Dilke the following year.

Britain was not to become a republic, however, although the boost the monarchy received came from an unexpected quarter: on the day that the Times reported Dilke’s speech, the Prince of Wales fell ill with typhoid fever, the same disease that had killed his father. Dilke pressed on with his meetings, but with the heir to the throne’s life in danger the popular mood shifted radically. When he gave a speech at the Bolton Temperance Hall on 30th November 1871, royalists tried to storm the building and proceedings degenerated into a pitched battle between the two rival camps. It was a similar story a few days later in Derby. Then on 14th December, the tenth anniversary of Albert’s death, came the announcement that the Prince of Wales was recovering.

In public-relations terms, this was a golden opportunity for Victoria and the monarchy: heeding the advice of her hated prime minister, William Gladstone, the Queen agreed to a public thanksgiving service for her son’s recovery to be held on 27th February 1872 in St Paul’s Cathedral. And she insisted that “the show”, as she called it, should be done properly: dressed in black, but with a white feather in her bonnet, she travelled through London in an open landau drawn by six horses. The crowds went wild.

When Dilke’s motion came to a vote in a stormy House of Commons the following month, it was crushed by 276 votes to two. The result was greeted with cheers and laughter in the chamber. Dilke’s argument proved so convincing, mocked the Manchester Guardian, that “he carried with him into the lobby only just so many followers as he could have carried away with him inside a cab”. In retrospect, as Vernon Bogdanor, the British constitutional expert, has pointed out, the 1870s were to prove the high-water mark of republicanism.

An important factor in the monarchy’s continued survival in the decades since has been the attitude of the Labour Party, which began to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century and by the middle of the twentieth century had supplanted the Liberals as the main anti-Conservative party. When the Labour conference debated the monarchy in 1923, republicanism was defeated by 3,694,000 votes to 386,000. A republican motion in the House of Commons in December 1936 in the aftermath of the abdication of Edward VIII won only five votes.

Elsewhere in Europe, the end of the nineteenth century and the rise of organized labour and social democracy also led to a growth in republicanism that identified monarchy with the forces of reaction. In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party even made abolition of the monarchy part of its programme when it was founded in 1889 and has retained its commitment ever since. But although the party has been in power for much of the time since the 1930s, its leaders have always found something else more pressing to do – not least because of fear of upsetting their working-class supporters, who have always been rather fond of their kings. “Certainly I am a republican,” declared Tage Erlander, who was Social Democrat prime minister of Sweden from 1946 until 1969. “But that does not mean that I want a republic.”

The Swedish monarchy was certainly stripped of its political power in the 1970s, but at least it survived. As has been noted, it has tended to be military defeat and the disruption to society it caused rather than the success of republican parties at the ballot box that has done for monarchy in those European countries that have become republics during the last century.

Most of Europe’s monarchies – even Luxembourg’s – have at least one campaigning group which, like Britain’s Republic, is committed to getting rid of the king or queen. They have websites, hold meetings and congresses and publish newsletters and magazines setting out their cause. Sometimes they even get together – as happened during Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden’s wedding in June 2010, when the local republican association invited its counterparts from the six other main monarchies to meet in Stockholm to form an Alliance of European Republican Movements.

All such groups are small, however; their leadership is often little more than a handful of enthusiasts, while membership is in the low thousands. And despite their dedication to the republican cause, they receive little attention from the media. Some, such as the Swedish Republican Association, include individual politicians among their ranks. The majority of the mainstream political parties, including those on the centre left, tend to support the status quo, however. Only small fringe parties, such as those on the far left or those devoted to “green” issues, tend to be committed to republicanism, and even for them, abolition of the monarchy is low in their list of priorities behind other more pressing social and economic concerns.

This is partly pragmatism; in most cases the constitutional procedures needed to transform a country from monarchy to republic are so complicated and require such large parliamentary majorities as to make them virtually impossible to implement in peacetime. Yet the continuation of monarchy is due to more than just inertia or to the much-voiced horror at the prospect of having a party politician – or even worse, a celebrity – elected to the newly created role of president. A modern-day constitutional monarch, by appearing to be impartial, above political party and not representative of any particular class or ethnic or linguistic group, is also perceived by many Europeans as a symbol of national unity. The Swedish example is instructive: the removal of the King from the formal political process during the 1970s did not turn out, as the republicans had hoped, to be the first step towards abolition of the monarchy. Instead it seemed actually to strengthen his position by removing a major source of criticism.

National unity is not seen everywhere as positive, however – certainly not by many in Belgium, where the monarchy remains one of the few common elements in a country divided between Dutch and French speakers. The extent of separatist feeling in Flanders, the northern part of the country, was shown by the results of the parliamentary elections of June 2010, in which the New Flemish Alliance, which advocates the dissolution of Belgium, emerged as the strongest party in parliament.

For Flemish separatists, the monarchy has become synonymous with the hated Belgian state, and they have waged a campaign to identify the royal family with the Francophone south. Their view was summed up by Mario Danneels, the young author who achieved notoriety after revealing the existence of King Albert’s love child in 1999. In a postscript to his polemical second book, Les Traumatisés du trône, published eight years later, he wrote: “Not only is the royal family French-speaking in origin, but also, over the past decade, it has given the impression of having chosen, almost openly, the French-speaking camp and of having been on its guard against the Flemish community. Under the circumstances, Flanders feels estranged from its royal family. It has turned its back on it because it intuitively perceives that is what some members of the royal family have done towards Flanders.”

The irony of such sentiments will not be lost on those who recall that during the 1950 plebiscite on the fate of Albert’s father Léopold III, it was the Flemings who voted overwhelmingly for his return, while a majority of French-speakers were against him. Yet care should be taken in analysing the results of that vote: if the Flemings voted for the King it was not because they perceived him as one of them. At the time, theirs was the poorer, more rural, more conservative and more Catholic part of the country – all of which translated into support for the monarchy. More heavily industrialized Wallonia, by contrast, was the power base of the left, which was traditionally more sceptical about monarchy. There was another more sensitive explanation, too: while the French-speakers had resisted the Nazis, some of the Flemish had a more equivocal relationship with the occupying forces, making them less quick to judge their King.

More than half a century later, the situation has changed, and not just because economic – and with it political – power has shifted from the south, mired in post-industrial decline, to the more economically vibrant Flanders which has found itself better placed to prosper in the global economy of the twenty-first century. In today’s Belgium almost everything is seen in terms of the language question. Danneels is not alone among the Flemings in viewing the royal family as representing the French-speaking community. No matter that the perceptions don’t quite match reality: as one commentator – Francophone, of course – pointed out, the royal family is more Flemish now than at any time before, with Dutch speakers forming a majority of the King’s advisors. In such matters, however, perception can be every bit as important as reality.

Any move towards the break up of Belgium would be watched closely elsewhere in Europe, especially in Spain, where there are also links between separatism and republicanism. Advocates of independence in the northern Catalan and Basque regions resent the royals as representatives of the centralizing Spanish state. Underlying this is the more fundamental question of how deeply rooted monarchy is in Spain, which has had two republics and four decades of right-wing dictatorship under General Francisco Franco during the last century and a half – a very different experience from the continuity enjoyed by Europe’s other surviving monarchies. Indeed, it was only after Juan Carlos’s successful facing-down of the attempted military coup of 1981 that the monarchy won wide acceptance – prompting the oft-repeated claim that Spaniards are not monarchists but rather Juancarlists. Just as many Britons wonder how Prince Charles will fare once he succeeds his mother, so many of Prince Felipe’s future subjects question the extent to which he will be up to the job.

The year 2007 proved an especially turbulent one for the Spanish monarchy: Catalan separatists burnt pictures of the King during his visit to the region, and a controversy erupted when two cartoonists were fined under a rarely used law against “damaging the prestige of the Crown” after they published a cartoon of Prince Felipe having sex on the cover of the satirical magazine El Jueves. There were questions too about the cost of the monarchy.

The King responded in August by appointing an auditor to scrutinize the spending of the royal family – which is kept hidden from the public by law. Juan Carlos also took the unprecedented step of attempting publicly to justify his role as head of state, claiming that he had contributed to the “longest period of stability and prosperity under democracy in Spain”.

The situation has calmed somewhat in the years since, but even minor incidents can be seen as disproportionately damaging. The divorce of the King’s eldest daughter Elena, announced in February 2010 – a first for the Spanish royal family – sparked fierce debate, as did the court appearance two years later of his younger daughter Cristina’s husband, Iñaki Urdangarin, in connection with a multi-million-euro corruption case. Then, that Easter, Elena’s thirteen-year-old son, Froilán, shot himself in the foot with a shotgun, even though by law in Spain you must be at least fourteen to handle a gun. The incident was reminiscent of the accidental killing of the King’s younger brother, Alfonso, in March 1956 by a stray revolver bullet.

Juan Carlos’s personal popularity has been dented by accusations of meddling – his public admission of concern at the slowness with which the country is recovering from recession and decision to hold talks with trade-union officials and bankers have held him open to accusations that he is venturing onto political territory. There was worse to come: the King’s claims he could not sleep because of the plight of Spain’s young unemployed began to sound hollow after it emerged in April 2012 that he had been on an expensive elephant-hunting trip in Botswana, allegedly financed by a wealthy Arab businessman. The trip, which came to light only after Juan Carlos broke his hip and had to be rushed home for emergency surgery, provoked widespread anger and prompted calls for him to resign from his honorary presidency of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund. The King was then forced to make a public statement to the television cameras as he left Madrid’s San José hospital. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “I made a mistake. It won’t happen again.”

Republicanism is not such a powerful force elsewhere in Europe, but there is a sense in which support for monarchy is not absolute but instead conditional on the behaviour of the royal families. While a relatively small number of out-and-out republicans object on principle to an unelected head of state, most people seem prepared to tolerate the continuation of monarchy under certain conditions: namely that members of the royal family behave themselves and are seen to provide taxpayers with good value for money.

The emphasis on personalities rather than the institution means popular support also follows a certain cycle. Generally, the longer a king or queen is on the throne the more his or her ratings will rise; familiarity seems to lead to contentment rather than contempt – unlike with politicians. The birth of an heir will provide a boost, as will the arrival on the scene of a glamorous boy- or girlfriend followed by a royal marriage – provided that he or she is deemed suitable, that is. That being said, young people seem in most cases less passionate about monarchy as an institution than their parents or grandparents.

The monarchy has experienced many such swings in its popularity in Scandinavia, a tendency documented by the many polls on the subject. In Norway, for example, the monarchy’s approval rating surged past ninety per cent in the late 1980s before dropping below sixty per cent (and to just forty-nine per cent in the capital) a decade later. The decline was due partly to revelations about the colourful past of Mette-Marit, the future Crown Princess. It was compounded by an outcry over the cost of a six-year renovation of the royal palace, which came in at 400 million kroner, against an original budget of just 150 million kroner. This prompted suggestions that the hitherto somewhat parsimonious royal family were, in the words of Carl-Erik Grimstad, a former deputy head of the household turned royal critic, “spending money like drunken sailors”.

The royal ratings had bounced back to sixty-seven per cent by April 2010, helped in part by Mette-Marit’s impressive performance as a crown princess, which bodes well for her future role as queen. The average Norwegian republican, says Grimstad, is “male, middle-income, university-educated and urban”. “Indifference is the greatest danger ‌to the monarchy,” he believes.1 The country’s Socialist Left Party has pledged itself to raise the question once every four years (every parliament) of whether the country should change to a republic. The motion is always defeated by a large majority, however – in the last vote, in 2010, by 125 to seventeen.

In Denmark, by contrast, polls suggested the popularity of the royal house grew through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s from between seventy and seventy-five per cent to between eight-five and ninety per cent – due, in part, to the arrival of an attractive young queen. The fading of class divisions and a decline in traditional antagonism on the part of the left-wing parties also helped the monarchist cause. A referendum in June 2009 on changing the rules of succession to give equal status to male and female heirs turned, to almost everyone’s surprise, into a broader debate about the monarchy. The controversy helped ensure that turnout easily passed the minimum forty per cent threshold – although some, especially in Copenhagen and other cities, heeded calls by republicans to stay away or hand in blank voting slips. The change itself was approved with an eight-five per cent majority. Polls suggest the effect of the vote was to reduce support for monarchy, although not substantially.

Queen Margrethe II’s seventieth birthday in April 2010 brought another wave of polling. She herself had little to worry about: her personal approval rating was well above eighty per cent, with Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary a few points behind. Support for the Queen’s unpopular consort, Prince Henrik, slumped to just 24.8 per cent, however – down from 41.8 per cent in 2004. Danish voters also appeared to back constitutional changes that would reduce the Queen to a figurehead like her Swedish counterpart: a majority wanted the prime minister to be appointed by the speaker of parliament rather than the Queen, and more feel that the Queen should not have to continue to give her assent to legislation than those ‌who support the current system.2

Royalists appear to have more cause for concern in Sweden – or at least so it seemed in the months leading up to the wedding in June 2010 of Crown Princess Victoria and Daniel Westling. A poll on the King’s sixty-fourth birthday that April showed just fifty-eight per cent support for the monarchy, down from eighty-five per cent in 2000. Support for a republic, meanwhile, climbed to twenty-eight per cent, up from twelve per cent ten years earlier.

The decline was not an entirely steady one: the royal cause suffered as a result of some remarks made by the King during a visit to Brunei, generally regarded as a gaffe, but support picked up again as a result of his response to the 2004 Christmas tsunami, which claimed the lives of five hundred and fifty Swedish holidaymakers in Thailand. Perversely, though, it began to fall again as the royal wedding approached.

Dashing the hopes of republicans, the wedding itself, however, appears to have produced a boost for the monarchist cause. An opinion poll carried out immediately after the ceremony showed seventy-four per cent in favour of the monarchy; in another in November, they received a sixty-nine per cent positive rating.

Republican views are nevertheless held by a surprisingly large number of members of parliament – and are not confined to the Social Democrats, the Left party and the Greens. There are also some republicans among parliamentarians from the centre-right parties too. Yet the Social Democrats do not look any more likely to try to translate the commitment to republicanism in their party programme into action now than they did during the decades in which they dominated politics.

Indeed, the Social Democrats in particular appear to see republicanism as unpopular with their key supporters, and during occasional parliamentary votes on abolishing the monarchy they support the status quo. Hillevi Larsson, a Social Democrat member of parliament who used to be the head of the Republican movement, recalls one such vote. Told by her party whips to vote to keep the monarchy, she protested that this would sit awkwardly with her work for the republican movement. She was eventually allowed to vote according to her conscience, but only after appealing to a ‌higher body within her party.3

Support for the monarchy in post-war Britain has also had its ups and downs, but when there has been criticism it has generally been of individuals and of their behaviour rather than of the institution itself. The furore that surrounded Lord Altrincham’s remarks on Queen Elizabeth II’s style in 1957 was dwarfed by the controversy over the private lives of first the Queen’s younger sister Margaret, and then later by the collapse of the Queen’s children’s marriages. Criticism of the cost of monarchy – and the extent to which taxpayers are getting “value for money” – has also surfaced from time to time. All this came together in the Queen’s annus horribilis of 1992; in the years that followed, the battle between Prince Charles and Diana provided further fuel for republicans.

Or rather it would have done if there had been sufficient republican-minded people in political life to exploit it. One of the few exception was Willie Hamilton, who in the years after becoming a Labour member of parliament in 1950 branded the Queen “a clockwork doll”, labelled Princess Margaret “a floozie”, called Prince Charles “a twerp” and described Princess Anne as “plain”. It was no coincidence that Hamilton came from Scotland – which, much like Spain’s Basque or Catalan regions, has long been more republican than the rest of the country. Yet Hamilton remained something of a curiosity, and after his retirement from parliament in 1987 no one stepped forward to succeed him.

Tony Blair proved just as staunch a monarchist as his Conservative predecessors, skilfully saving the royal family from the public-relations disaster it brought on itself through its mishandling of the death of Princess Diana a few months after he came to power. Not so his wife Cherie, who reportedly refused to curtsy to the Queen when they met in private, although she did so reluctantly in public. Nor were all of his political allies as supportive as him of the monarchy. But when Mo Mowlam, the cabinet minister, caused an outcry in 2000 by suggesting the royals should move out of Buckingham Palace and calling for a nationwide debate on whether Britain should be a monarchy or a republic, Downing Street responded by declaring the prime minister was “one hundred per cent a supporter of the monarchy”.

However embarrassing the headlines for individual members of the royal family in the 1990s, it would be difficult to argue that the monarchy as an institution was ever seriously at risk, even during the week immediately after Diana’s death, when hysteria appeared to seize hold of the country and a poll commissioned by the American TV network ABC, which featured extensively in the film The Queen, showed nearly one in four in Britain thought the country would be better off without the monarchy. Within a few weeks, however, it had recovered again quickly – just as was the case, albeit to a lesser extent, after events such as “Sophiegate” or during the run-up to Prince Charles’s marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles. In the same way, the boost provided by Prince William’s marriage in April 2011 looks likely to have been only a temporary one. Indeed, polls by Ipsos MORI showed support for the monarchy running at a remarkably constant sixty-nine to seventy-two per cent between 1993 and 2006 (dipping only briefly to sixty-five per cent in April 2005), while backing for a republic varied between ‌fifteen and twenty-two per cent.4

This is despite what sometimes seems almost like disdain for the monarchy among Britain’s largely London-based liberal intelligentsia, who see it as old-fashioned and in need of modernization, and who feel affronted – and even embarrassed – by the continued popular support that the royal family enjoys in the country as a whole. A case in point was the Golden Jubilee of 2002, which many on the left were keen to write off in advance as a likely non-event – but which turned out to be a mass outpouring of enthusiasm. “We need to face up to the facts,” admitted a leader in the Guardian. “The Queen’s Jubilee celebrations of 2002 have been in every respect more successful than either the organizers had feared or the critics had hoped.” That being said, the newspaper still insisted that the enthusiasm witnessed on the streets had been for a “good person” and ‌not for “a lousy system”.5

Equally telling had been the furore that ensued three months earlier when the BBC newscaster Peter Sissons wore a burgundy rather than black tie as he reported the death of the Queen Mother at the age of 101 – apparently after being told by his editor “not to go overboard. She’s a very old woman ‌who had to go sometime”.6 The scale of the turnout for her funeral was another surprise for those same members of the metropolitan intelligentsia.

The Dutch monarchy has also experienced similar swings in its popularity – though again within a fairly narrow range: the reign of Queen Beatrix’s mother Juliana was marked by the crisis of 1956 brought about by her relationship with the pacifist faith healer Greet Hofmans and, two decades later, by the accusations that her husband, Prince Bernhard, had taken a $1 million bribe from the Lockheed aircraft corporation. And then, as has been seen, there were the unfortunate marriages: of Juliana’s daughters in the 1960s and, more recently, of her grandsons Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and Prince Friso.

While monarchists elsewhere in Europe are a largely unorganized force, the Dutch monarchy enjoys the support of a network of grass-roots organizations known as Oranjeverenigingen (Orange Unions). Some four hundred of them are brought together under the group known as De Bond van Oranjeverenigingen (Association of Orange Unions). Yet these are no mere royal lackeys. The federation’s chairman, Michiel Zonnevylle, a former civil servant and now mayor of the town of Leiderdorp in the west of the Netherlands, speaks out when he feels members of the royal family are not behaving according to the high standards expected of them – as he did in October 2009 when there was an outcry over Crown Prince Willem-Alexander’s decision to buy a villa in Mozambique.

The property had been promoted as a development project that would benefit the local community, but rumours of corruption persisted. Such a purchase also seemed inappropriate at a time when the economic crisis meant many ordinary Dutch were having to tighten their belts. In an interview with de Volkskrant, one of the country’s leading newspapers, Zonnevylle weighed into the row. “It is very unfortunate to choose such a poor country as Mozambique, particularly if you do it out of considerations of privacy,” he said. “I think prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende and Queen Beatrix should talk about this. And I would really ‌value the project being abandoned.”7

A parliamentary debate on royal finances a few days later in October 2009 provided fuel for the royal-bashers. Mozambique, inevitably, was on the agenda. But so too were the allowances. The discussion even widened to take in calls for the Dutch monarchy to have its role reduced to a purely ceremonial one, as in Sweden. Jan Peter Balkenende, the prime minister, rejected this proposal outright, however, saying “it would be detrimental to the monarchy”. He did, however, agree to calls by the Labour and Socialist parties to curb expenses for private flights by the royal family, which in 2008 had reached €600,000. In future, it was announced, only the Queen, her successor and his wife would be allowed to make claim. That was as far as he would go. In any case, Willem-Alexander had got the message: shortly afterwards he announced he was pulling out of the Mozambique project. In January 2012 the government announced that the Prince had finally sold the villa for a symbolic sum, after failing to find a private buyer.

Despite such occasional hiccups, the Dutch monarchy remains extremely popular: a poll conducted for a live television debate in October 2011 found seventy-five per cent of the people still support the monarchy, with more than fifty per cent of them satisfied with the institution in its current form. A substantial minority – twenty-six per cent – however, wanted the House of Orange reduced to a purely ceremonial institution. This followed criticism not just from the left and the centre, but also from Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV), which has been especially critical of the considerable influence given to the Dutch monarch by the country’s constitution in choosing a prime minister.

Barring war or revolution – neither of which look likely in today’s Europe – it is difficult to conceive of circumstances that would lead to the removal of any of the continent’s monarchies any time soon – with one proviso: the British monarch’s continued position as head of state of fifteen Commonwealth countries outside the United Kingdom including Australia, New Zealand and Canada looks less secure. For Britons, the monarchy is a symbol of national unity – for many in these countries, known as the Commonwealth Realms, the Queen is a vestige of historic subordination to the “mother country”, which no longer seems appropriate in the twenty-first century.

In 1993 Australia’s Labour premier, Paul Keating, who had shocked the British tabloid press the previous year by daring to put his arm around the Queen, committed his party to a referendum on the monarchy by the end of the century. In November 1999 the vote finally took place: voters were asked whether they wanted to replace the Queen as head of state with a president.

Opinion polls in the years before the vote had suggested a majority in favour of a republic. Yet when it came to the referendum, only 45.13 per cent voted “yes”, compared with 54.87 who wanted to leave things unchanged. So what changed?

A crucial role was undoubtedly played by the proposed method for selecting the new president. Rather than have a directly elected head of state as in, say, France, which inevitably would have led to a fundamental change in the functioning of the country’s Westminster-style political system, it was proposed that the new president be appointed by parliament – leaving the “yes” camp open to accusations that the change was undemocratic and would turn Australia into a “politicians’ republic”. For this reason, even some of the more radical republicans voted “no” – better stick to the status quo with the chance of another vote further down the line than move to a flawed model, they argued. Moderate republicans were outraged.

A decade later, Australians are still waiting for another vote. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it would have been far fairer to have asked voters simply if they were in favour of a republic, and only if they had voted yes then decide, perhaps through another referendum, on how to elect the president.

In New Zealand, by contrast, there is little agitation for ending the role of the monarchy, although even here support is far from overwhelming: John Key, leader of the centre-right National Party, who became prime minister in November 2008, has said he is not convinced a republic will be a big issue in the short term – although he does believe it is “inevitable” in the end. Politicians were given a chance to have their say on the issue in April 2010 after a private member’s bill proposed by Keith Locke, a member of the Green party and an ardent republican, was put to the vote. It was defeated at its first reading by sixty-eight votes to fifty-three. The monarchist cause appeared to have been given a boost by a visit to New Zealand that January by Prince William, who, delivering his first major speech, officially opened the country’s Supreme Court building dressed in a traditional Maori cloak.

At the time of writing, there is no sign of a rerun of the Australian vote or of referendums in any of the other countries where the Queen still reigns. That may change when she dies. There seems little doubt that support for the institution of monarchy in these countries has been bolstered considerably by support for the Queen herself, and the dedication she has shown to her job for almost six decades. Charles will not automatically enjoy such popularity, at least initially, providing Australian republicans and those elsewhere with a golden opportunity to push for change. Quite how they – or those in the other Commonwealth Realms – would succeed in jumping over all the constitutional hurdles that would stand in the way of turning their country into a republic remains to be seen.

In Canada, meanwhile, monarchists and republicans have been locked in debate over the institution of monarchy since before the country’s confederation in 1867. Opinion polls have showed support for the monarchy has varied over the years, although – not surprisingly – republican feeling is stronger in French-speaking Quebec than it is in the English-speaking provinces. As in Australia and New Zealand, however, Prince Charles appears to enjoy considerably less support than his mother, suggesting his succession may provide opponents of monarchy with the opportunity for which they have long been waiting. Here, too, a visit by Prince William in July 2011 – this time accompanied by his new wife – was of great help to the monarchist cause.