Whenever God of his infinite goodness shall call me out of this world, the tongue of malice may not paint my intentions in those colours she admires, nor the sycophant extoll me beyond what I deserve. I do not pretend to any superior abilities, but will give place to no one in meaning to preserve the freedom, happiness and glory of my dominions and all their inhabitants, and to fulfill the duty to my God and my neighbour in the extended sense.
King George III (r. 1760–1820) making a self-assessment.
The mystique of royalty, in the sense of its remoteness from the ordinary, has vanished in the twenty-first century. This is partly because of the burgeoning technological media available to pry into every corner of existence, as well as the lowering of deference and respect for the Royal Family. The trend of lowering deference is nothing new. Such publications as Tomahawk and Punch were sending up Queen Victoria and her family in the nineteenth century, following the spirit of Atlas which offered to the public royal epigrams of Queen Victoria’s ancestors by those such as Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) in 1855:
George the First was always reckoned
Vile, but viler George the Second;
And what mortal ever heard
Any good of George the Third?
When from the earth the Fourth descended
God be praised, the Georges ended!
In the twentieth century the Georges were back again. By and large George V and George VI received a better press. Although George V’s court was described by the novelist H.G. Wells as ‘alien and uninspiring’, George retorted that, ‘I may be uninspiring, but I’ll be damned if I’m an alien’. George VI was also described as ‘bumbling’.
Many an English and Scottish monarch have made blunders, played on by detractors. Edward II learned nothing from his affair with Piers Gaveston for instance; Elizabeth I made a terrible mistake in executing Mary, Queen of Scots, who in turn had brought death closer through her diplomatic blunders; James IV of Scotland took his army to destruction at the Battle of Flodden in 1513 by taking on his brother-in-law Henry VIII; by forcing the future Edward VII into a strict educational mould for which he was not suited, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert made their son a self-indulgent roué. The list is endless.
Even so monarchs have emerged from history as ‘heroes’. King Alfred, who unified the country, was the only English monarch with the suffix ‘Great’; Edward I also promoted the unity of Britain; in Scotland, Robert I, the Bruce, caused the nation to be accepted as an independent country; Edward III has been singled out as ‘the greatest warrior of his age’; while Henry VIII put an end to medieval England and set in motion a social, economic and religious reformation, on which his daughter Elizabeth I honed a new backbone for England internationally. All these monarchs and more, individually and directly, made the nation what it was to become.
But human nature delights in things that go wrong. One guest at Edward I’s coronation in 1272 was Alexander III of Scotland, who on hearing that there was an abundance of fine food, rode in with 100 Scottish knights. When the knights dismounted to pay honour to Edward I, people in the crowd stole their horses. Many royal weddings also had farcical aspects. When Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, was married in 1736, his father George II, who loathed him, decided to humiliate him and his new bride Augusta, daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg. While the rest of the family enjoyed the wedding dinner the couple were banished to the royal nursery.
All in all the story of the monarchs of Britain is the story of the nation itself. Their lives, fads, fallacies, victories, defeats, enemies, strengths and weaknesses are all threads from which British history is woven. This book sets out to give a taster of many of these aspects to underline how the public fascination with royalty never dims.
