Epilogue

‘I will be as good unto you, as ever queen was to her people’

Elizabeth I

‘I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service’

Elizabeth II

 

MONARCHY IS A contract between sovereign and people, but neither Elizabeth would have been able to carry the burden of queenship – symbolized by the sheer weight of the crown – without a profound belief that she was chosen by God and accountable to Him.

‘My lords, the burden that is fallen upon me maketh me amazed,’ the first Elizabeth told the lords on her accession, ‘and yet, considering I am God’s creature, ordained to obey His appointment, I will thereto yield, desiring from the bottom of my heart that I may have assistance of His grace to be the minister of His heavenly will in this office now committed to me.’

She appeals to the lords, her natural advisers, to assist her, ‘that I with my ruling and you with your service may make a good account to almighty God and leave some comfort to our posterity in earth.’

Four hundred years later, the young Elizabeth II, making her first Christmas broadcast, echoed the words of the dedication she had made on her twenty-first birthday. Then, she had pledged her whole life to the service of her people: ‘I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in with me, as I now invite you to do. I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God help me to make good my vow.’ Now, she declared: ‘At my Coronation next June, I shall dedicate myself anew to your service.’ She asked her listeners to pray that she might faithfully serve God ‘and you all the days of my life’.

‘Sirs, I present unto you Queen Elizabeth, your undoubted Queen.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury’s opening words at the coronation in 1953 echoed those of 1559. The sacred ceremony of the coronation emphasizes the sovereign’s other-worldly status by bringing her ‘into the presence of the living God’. She is recognized by the people, makes a special, sacrificial pact with God, and takes an oath to govern according to the laws and customs of the land. It is the bond uniting all sovereigns, going back to the beginnings of England’s monarchy in the tenth century, while at the same time it is a reminder to the people of their historic past, of the evolution of the Anglo-Saxon political tradition into the modern state.

In 1953 it was apt that the most solemn part of the ceremony, the anointing with holy oil, took place out of view of the television cameras. Like her predecessors, Elizabeth II divested herself of her robes and donned a simple, white garment, before taking her place on the coronation chair, concealed under a canopy held by Knights of the Garter. Dipping his fingers in the holy oil, the archbishop made the sign of the cross on her hands, chest and head, intoning the words of the ancient text: ‘Be thy Head anointed with holy Oil: as kings, priests, and prophets were anointed. And as Solomon was anointed King by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, so be thou anointed, blessed and consecrated Queen over the Peoples, whom the Lord thy God hath given thee to rule and govern…’

The sacred ritual – elevating her into the realm of mystical sovereignty – is said to have profoundly affected her.

With the demise of the Church in the sixteenth century, there was an increase in secular ceremony focusing on the monarch, who had aggregated the powers of the former Church to himself. As a woman, Elizabeth I deferred to male sensitivity, calling herself Supreme Governor rather than Supreme Head of the Church, but it amounted to the same thing. All subsequent queens have taken seriously their responsibility towards the Church of England, including Elizabeth II, who is Queen of a multi-faith society.

At the Reformation, the images of the saints were deliberately devalued, to be replaced by the symbols of monarchy. But the sovereign had always been considered holy, being possessed of an aura or ‘mana’, creating an awe or dread of their person and authority in the minds of their subjects. There is a sense in which this feeling survives today. When people meet the Queen, they either freeze or begin a stream of mindless chatter. She understands. She smiles graciously, nods, and moves on.

In the past, the symbolism of the office was centred on the human body of the monarch. Those who touched the King drew off some of his aura or holiness to themselves. It was no accident that his closest body servants were often those sent on the most delicate diplomatic missions to fellow sovereigns; they understood that someone in such close attendance, so close they actually touched their sovereign, could be trusted with confidential information. Significantly, the body servant accorded the most public power and influence was the Groom of the Stool, who fulfilled the most intimate role of all – wiping the royal bottom. Queens seem to have dispensed with this service; certainly Kat Ashley, who held the office of Groom of the Stool to Elizabeth I and was keeper of the royal close-stools, had no political power. It was merely a ceremonial duty. Now, the monarch’s relieving herself is ‘such an awesomely private affair’ that one of the usual preparations for a royal visit is the construction of a special WC, dedicated to the Queen’s sole use.

As a Catholic monarch who saw the Reformation as a tragic aberration, Mary I continued to use her God-given power to carry out the sovereign’s traditional role in imitation of Christ. On Maundy Thursday she would kneel down and wash the feet of the poor; then she would give the most deserving of the women – usually the oldest – the gown she was wearing. Similarly, she would touch for the Evil – scrofula or bovine tuberculosis – rubbing the swellings of the afflicted, just as she would touch ‘cramp rings’, as a healing weapon. On Good Friday she underwent the creeping to the cross ceremony, going on her knees through the various stages of Christ’s journey with the cross. Elizabeth, in turn, asserted her quasi-divine status by appropriating those pre-Reformation ceremonies – the Maundy ceremony, for instance – that would make the most dramatic impact.

Mary II fulfilled none of these functions, since her husband pooh-poohed them as popish superstition, but Anne revived them. ‘I desire you would order 200 pieces more of Healing Gold,’ she wrote to her Mistress of the Robes, the Duchess of Marlborough, for her forthcoming healing ceremony in the Banqueting House. Elizabeth II continues to hold the Maundy ceremony, but she does not wash the feet of the poor; she hands out the specially minted money with gloved hands. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson and other sufferers of the King’s Evil treasured their ‘healing gold’ – the medals they received from the monarch. Today, Maundy money is on sale on eBay the next day.

Only the first two of the six queens regnant ruled as well as reigned. While recognizing that Parliament had its uses, Elizabeth I intended to rule as absolutely as her father had done. It helped that the Tudor queens, unlike their female successors, were superbly educated, but then the role of an absolute monarch is so much more challenging than the role of a constitutional one. Mary I might not have been a success as a monarch, but the speech she gave at the Guildhall during Wyatt’s rebellion – composed by herself and delivered with rousing aplomb – was every bit as good as her sister’s brilliant oratory over a forty-five-year reign. In a fiercely media-driven age, Elizabeth II is not a natural communicator and she cannot ad lib. Unlike the first Elizabeth, she relies on others to write her speeches. Even the short speech she read out from the television autocue after the Princess of Wales’s death was the work of her advisers in liaison with Downing Street and it was the Prime Minister’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, who thought to include the crucial, affecting phrase ‘as a grandmother’.

The evolution from absolute to constitutional monarchy over four centuries has diminished the sovereign’s political power to the point where it is exerted so subtly it might as well not exist. The growth of government business and the ever expanding state meant that as early as the eighteenth century Anne could not hope to see every document and know every facet of policy as Elizabeth I had done. Although an assiduous desk worker, Victoria was unable to cover the workload that Albert had mastered, while coincidentally, in the course of Victoria’s reign, the drive towards universal suffrage – albeit male – meant that politicians increasingly drew their authority from the people, not the sovereign. Once the electorate had spoken in 1880, for example, the Queen could no more keep Disraeli in than Gladstone out. In the same way, in 1940 George VI would have liked Halifax for Prime Minister rather than Churchill, but he was powerless to achieve it. His daughter, Elizabeth II, would in effect surrender the sovereign’s last remaining prerogative to choose a successor to a Prime Minister leaving office while a government was still in power. The process of royal political disempowerment was complete.

A monarch who no longer ruled had to do something. Elizabeth I had found power in an itinerant court and ongoing dialogue with her subjects; Victoria and Albert would take this to new heights. They embarked on an unprecedented number of regional tours, reciprocal royal visits, military reviews and civic engagements. Hospital openings, prison visits, inspections of working-class housing and factories became the norm, setting a standard for future sovereigns and their families to emulate. All this was made possible by the revolution in transport and bolstered by the revolution in the newspaper industry, with the mechanization of production and the invention of photography and the telegraph ensuring them maximum, almost instant, coverage.

Reading about the Queen in the newspaper and looking at her picture became an everyday practice of collective identification with the sovereign a national figurehead and her family everyone’s family. Visibility, the expectation that the sovereign must be visibly active, and public demand for value for money, equated with royal services rendered, all reached their apogee in the age of television, which itself received a boost with Elizabeth II’s coronation.

‘The more democratic we get the more we shall get to like state and show, what have ever pleased the vulgar,’ Walter Bagehot predicted in the 1860s. Victoria’s successor, Edward VII, was impatient with the drudgery of paperwork; his forte was royal ceremonial. An impotent but venerated monarch was a unifying symbol of permanence in an age of rapid industrial change and when Britain’s position as an imperial power was already under threat. Under Edward’s aegis, central London was transformed, with the widening of the Mall, the building of Admiralty Arch, the re-fronting of Buckingham Palace, and the construction of the Victoria Memorial, to accommodate a triumphant ceremonial way.

In the wake of the First World War, the British monarchy was one of the few to survive. Now it could be presented as something unique, which the British people could consider peculiarly theirs, their proud heritage.

The coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 fulfilled several functions. It has been described as ‘the last great ceremony successfully conflating monarchy and empire’; indeed, it was the last great imperial occasion. The ancient, Christian ceremony emphasized Britain’s long, continuing tradition and political stability, in contrast to the new god of Communism and the Cold War which threatened the world. In postwar Britain, the emphasis on royal ceremonial was also a ‘comfortable palliative’ to a nation coming to terms with the loss of its world-power status.

Victoria’s coronation had been a ramshackle affair. Significantly, at the time of her accession she held more political power than at her demise. As the power of the monarchy waned and its prestige grew, so too did the emphasis on royal ceremonial. No one did it better than the British, everyone agreed at subsequent coronations, royal weddings and funerals. The anachronistic grandeur of royal ceremonial, such as the coronation or the State Opening of Parliament, was emphasized in the age of the motor car by the use of horses, carriages, swords and plumed hats, not to mention the crown and regalia. So vital were these props to the whole mystique of monarchy that at the coronation in 1953 seven extra carriages had to be borrowed from a film company.

All monarchs are dependent on popular approval – no more so than in the present age of media exposure. Victoria, whose popularity dipped and rose in the course of her reign, feared she would be the last sovereign. ‘How long will it last, we wonder?’ asked the Pall Mall Gazette in the week of her 1887 Jubilee. ‘As long as the Queen lasts, yes, but after the Queen, who knows.’ Victoria would have been surprised and pleased to know that her great-great-granddaughter had taken the thousand-year monarchy into the twenty-first century. Will she be Elizabeth the Last, as one newspaper speculated on her eightieth birthday? Who knows.