Kings, Queens and Commoners

Becket parts company from Henry II and Louis VII, after a stormy meeting.
From The Becket Leaves

A hereditary monarch is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary doctor or mathematician.
Thomas Paine

… a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon, a mad fool with a frothy mouth … a lubberly ass … a frantic madman …
Martin Luther on Henry VIII

Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.
Edmund Burke

It is the folly of too many, to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
Jonathan Swift

One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper classes.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

The aristocratic disdain for work is the one legacy they’ve left that’s really worth something.
John Cooper Clarke

The king blew his nose twice, and wiped the royal perspiration repeatedly from a face which is probably the largest uncivilized spot in England.
Oliver Wendell Holmes on William IV

Good-morning, gentlemen both.
Elizabeth I, addressing a group of eighteen tailors

To promote a Woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion, or empire above any Realme, nation, or Citie, is repugnant to nature; contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance; and finallie, it is the subversion of good Order, of all equitie and justice … For who can denie but it is repugneth to nature, that the blind shall be appointed to leade and conduct such as do see? That the weake, the sicke, and impotent persons shall norishe and kepe the hole and the strong? And finallie, that the foolishe, madde, and phrenetike shall governe the discrete, and give counsel to such as be of sober mind? Of such be all women, compared unto man in bearing of authoritie. For their sight in civile regiment is but blindness; their strength, weakness; their counsel, foolishness; and judgement, phrensie, if it be rightlie considered …
John Knox, First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

The most notorious whore in all the world.
Peter Wentworth on Mary Queen of Scots

Most gracious Queen we thee implore
To Go Away and sin no more
But if that effort be too great
To go away, at any rate.
Anonymous epigram on Queen Caroline, wife of George IV

The bloom of her ugliness is going off.
Colonel Disbrowe on the ageing looks of Queen Charlotte

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugliness goes clean to the bone.
Dorothy Parker

Anne … when in good humour, was meekly stupid, and when in bad humour, was sulkily stupid.
Thomas Babington Macaulay on Queen Anne

One of the smallest people ever set in a great place.
Walter Bagehot on Queen Anne

The wisest fool in Christendom.
Henri IV of France on James I of England. Attrib.

One of the moral monsters of history.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Charles II

Henry VIII perhaps approached as nearly to the ideal standard of perfect wickedness as the infirmities of human nature will allow.
Sir James Mackintosh

A blot of blood and grease upon the History of England.
Charles Dickens on Henry VIII

Here lies our mutton-loving King
Whose word no man relies on
Who never said a foolish thing
And never did a wise one.
John Wilmot on Charles II

This is very true: for my words are my own, and my actions are my ministers.
Charles II

Throughout the greater part of his life, George III was a kind of consecrated obstruction.
Walter Bagehot

The Radical MP John Wilkes at a formal dinner in the presence of the Prince of Wales proposed a toast to the King’s health, a thing which no one had ever known him do before. The Prince asked Wilkes how long he had shown such concern for his father’s well-being. Wilkes replied: ‘Since I had the pleasure of your Royal Highness’s acquaintance.’
John Wilkes on the Prince of Wales, later on George IV

The two most powerful men in Russia are Tsar Nicholas II and the last person who spoke to him.
Anonymous

Never was a person less mourned by his fellow men than the late King … if ever George IV had a friend, a true friend, in any social class, so we may claim that his or her name never reached our ears.
The Times, commentary

Who’s your fat friend?
George ‘Beau’ Brummell to Beau Nash, who had introduced the Prince Regent

Queen Victoria was like a great paperweight that for half a century sat upon men’s minds, and when she was removed their ideas began to blow all over the place haphazardly.
H.G. Wells

Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king gear and there is left nothing but a poor forked radish with a head fantastically carved.
Thomas Carlyle on Louis XIV

Nowadays, a parlour maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne, would be classed as mentally defective.
George Bernard Shaw on Queen Victoria

Very sorry can’t come. Lie follows by post.
Telegram from Charles Beresford to the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, following a dinner invitation at short notice

No thank you; I only smoke on special occasions.
Anonymous commoner, confused and overawed, on being asked by George VI at a banquet whether he cared for a cigar

Thank God for the Civil Service.
George VI on Labour’s 1945 election victory

Born into the ranks of the working class, the new King’s most likely fate would have been that of a street-corner loafer.
James Keir Hardie, Labour leader, on George V

For seventeen years he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.
Harold Nicolson, biographer of George V, on his subject

My father was frightened of his mother, I was frightened of my father, and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me.
King George V

He will go from resort to resort getting more tanned and more tired.
Westbrook Pegler on the abdication of Edward VIII, quoted by Alistair Cooke, Six Men

God grant him peace and happiness but never understanding of what he has lost.
Stanley Baldwin on the abdication of Edward VIII

[A] wife capable of behaving in this way: tantrums and suicide charades – anyone trying to do it with paracetamol isn’t trying – is a witless little girl unfit for marriage to anyone. And the wife capable of exploiting her position to get revenge through mass publicity is a destructive little chancer emotionally located in the foothills of adolescence. The footling story of Diana Spencer makes a bitter republican point, the liability of fairy tales to have been written by the Brothers Grimm! …

Charles has claims to be a victim of the Asiatic fixing of his family. No wife brought from Karachi to Southall by imperious parents-in-law could better respect an arranged marriage than the English rose heavily urged for the Crown Prince. She was English (after much public scorn of the former Teutonic norm), a virgin and thus free from all tattle, and she looked good. The facts: that she is virtuoso of on-camera tears, that her delight in life is the nightclub and that she seems to have no mind at all, were disregarded. An intelligent man has been fettered in ‘a suitable marriage’ to a frothball and has sought to live his life apart from her. What sharper intimation of the shabbiness of monarchy could there be?

There are many reasons for dispensing with monarchy, but two will suffice. The job could be done better; and monarchy, just by existing, induces pathetic impulses in other people. There has to be something wrong with an institution which assembles, in various degrees of competitive abjectness, Lord St John of Fawsley, in whom I have real difficulty believing, Sir Alastair Burnet and Lord Rees-Mogg.

These Firbankian grotesques, prime fruit of the trees of deference, can be relied upon to squelch noisily under royal foot. Happy calling someone twenty years younger ‘Sir’ or ‘Maa-am’ they proclaim a social pyramid in which their own status is secured by guileful proximity to the apex. They fawn and teach us to fawn. Unlike the late Richard Dimbleby, grand under-butler to the nation, they do not tell us that the Queen looks radiant, but they are lit by all the royal refection into which they can creep.

Such courtiers only echo the sick adoration of part of the nation. Royalty has done a roaring trade since the war in glossy iconic tosh, books about royal lives, houses, tours, weddings, ancestry and interior décor, books, God help us, about royal dogs. The appetite of silly people for living vicarious, reverential lives through this assembly of low-octane duds in jodhpurs is tragic.
Edward Pearce, the Guardian, ‘The Aspirin of the People’

Prince Charles is an insensitive, hypocritical oaf and Princess Diana is a selfish, empty-headed bimbo. They should never have got married in the first place. I blame the parents.
Richard Littlejohn, in the Sun

Harlot and trollop
Alleged remarks by Prince Philip in letter to Diana. Officially denied.

So thick and yet so thin.
Comedian Linda Smith on Princess Diana

A sort of social hand grenade, ready to explode, leaving unsuspecting playboys legless and broken.
Trevor Philips on the Princess of Wales, shortly before her death

Shea was a master of evasion, more slippery than a Jacuzzi full of KY jelly. You might say he was the first Sensitol-lubricated PR man – particularly appropriate when you consider where he has spent most of his life.
Richard Littlejohn on Michael Shea, the Queen’s former press secretary, in the Sun

I’m prepared to take advice on leisure from Prince Philip. He’s a world expert on leisure. He’s been practising for most of his adult life.
Neil Kinnock on Prince Philip, in the Western Mail

Why don’t you naff off!
Princess Anne to reporters, in the Daily Mirror

He is a man of many ideas, most of them bad.
Oliver Kamm on Prince Charles

It’s no wonder you’re deaf.
Prince Philip, to children from the British Deaf Association as they stood next to a Caribbean steel band

My, you must have fun chasing the soap around the bath.
Diana, Princess of Wales, shaking hands with a one-armed man in Australia, 1983