the great debate ii: the royal family vs. republicans
“It’s quite delightfully homely, when you think of it: here you have this whole constitutional order, with all its laws and institutions, and at the very apex sits not a god or an ideology but … a family.”
— Andrew Coyne, 2011.
“But if the very idea of monarchy diminishes us, the living reality is even more humiliating. What are we doing paying homage to the unimpressive personages invested with this awe? They are the apogee of celebrity culture, because there is nothing there but empty celebrity.”
— Polly Toynbee, 2012.
It was one of those times when people remember where they were when they heard the news. The news was the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on August 31, 1997. On that fateful evening, Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. She was thirty-six years old. On the following day, Britons awoke to the report that Diana, the most photographed woman in the world, was dead. In speaking to a nation in mourning, British prime minister Tony Blair, holding back tears, said of Diana: “With just a look or a gesture that spoke so much more than words, she would reveal to all of us the depth of her compassion and her humanity.” The prime minister acknowledged Diana’s ability to connect with the people of the United Kingdom as well as with others worldwide through her charitable work. Of her character, he noted: “They liked her, they loved her, they regarded her as one of the people. She was the people’s princess. That’s how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and in our memories forever.”[1]
The week following her death was surreal, with Britain falling into a state of public grief unprecedented in its history. Hundreds of thousands of mourners were drawn to Kensington Palace, Diana’s home, where they left an estimated one million flower bouquets alongside the palace fence. Many mourners also came to feel animosity toward the royal family. Tens of thousands standing vigil outside Buckingham Palace became increasingly angry that no flag flew at half-mast in honour of the lost princess. The royal family provided an explanation: the Queen, Prince Philip, and the young princes William and Harry were at their Balmoral Estate in Scotland, and, according to royal tradition, the Queen’s Royal Standard only flies over Buckingham Palace when she is in residence. Furthermore, tradition also decrees that the Royal Standard never flies at half-mast, since the kingdom is never without a sovereign. Ignorant of and, once informed, angry about such royal protocol, the British public demanded that the Queen return to London and that she fly her flag at half-mast. “Where is our Queen? Where is her Flag?” wondered The Sun tabloid on a banner headline.
Diana’s funeral, held in Westminster Abbey on September 6, 1997, was a spectacle in the truest sense of the word. On that morning, the Royal Standard flew at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, a concession by the Queen, and, as the funeral procession approached the palace, the Queen, dressed in funereal black and standing at the palace gates, bowed her head as Diana’s casket passed by. An estimated three million mourners were in central London that day, with one million lining the procession route from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) estimated that 45 million Britons watched the funeral service on television, while a further 2.5 billion viewed it worldwide.
All of this public attention speaks to the power of the royal attraction. While some media watchers afterward argued that Britain had fallen into a form of weird hysteria following Diana’s death, the fact that the week played out as it did says something about human feelings toward royalty. The emotions at play were real, with so many people feeling overwhelming grief at Diana’s death. They behaved as if someone in their own family had died. Many people truly felt that they “knew” Diana, that their lives had been “touched” by her in one way or another, and that they would now be diminished by her absence. To many, Diana had become the “Queen of Hearts.”
In the end, emotion is the ultimate foundation for monarchist and republican opinions on the merits of the Crown. Personal passion exceeds all intellectual justifications for and against the preservation of the monarchy. “There comes a point in any consideration of monarchy,” writes Jeremy Paxman, “when rational thought is drowned out by sentimentality, religiosity, and what republicans would dismiss as mere drivel. Yet monarchs stand for something beyond themselves.”[2] No understanding of monarchist or republican thought can be complete without an appreciation of the purely emotive sensations that monarchy in general, and the British royals in particular, conjure in the hearts of those subject, however willingly or unwillingly, to their reign. At this level, the question becomes, how do the royals make you feel?
To devout monarchists, the answer to this question is simple yet profound. The royals, and especially Elizabeth II, elicit feelings of pride, awe, and love. As an object of devotion, Elizabeth II has become a towering figure of public significance. Many of us know the Queen’s story because her life has been lived in the glare of public attention, befitting someone who, from the age of ten, was destined to reign over an Empire fast becoming a Commonwealth. Monarchists sound recurring notes of personal affection when writing about the Queen. John Fraser’s ode to the monarchy, for example, is one of romance, of his love affair with royalty. Couching the Queen’s unfolding history in terms of endearment and respect, Fraser writes, “Darling baby, pretty and polite little girl, dutiful preteen, wartime teen and young woman, blushing but very serious bride, young wife, grieving daughter, youthful monarch, mother times four, grandmother and great-grandmother, maybe even Queen Mother before her days are done on earth.”[3] Monarchists revere the Queen’s storied life more for its tales of public duty and self-sacrifice than for its moments of glamour, ceremony, royal pomp, and palatial circumstance.
From the age of twenty-one, when as a princess she committed her life to public service, Elizabeth has exemplified the ideal royal: regal and dignified; reserved yet compassionate; studiously apolitical but definitely committed to the ideals of British, Canadian, and Commonwealth constitutionalism. As Queen, she has travelled more than any monarch in history, visiting every member state of the Commonwealth, including twenty-two royal tours to Canada. She has become the acknowledged expert on Commonwealth leadership as well as a keen observer of seven decades of international relations. As Queen, she has witnessed the transformation of the British Empire into a multicultural Commonwealth. She has beheld the growing secularization and democratization of society in Britain, Canada, and elsewhere. She has observed the development of a less deferential, more egalitarian, and critical public consciousness. She has affirmed the demand that monarchy must work in the interests of its subjects. As Queen, she has steered the monarchy through some exceptionally turbulent times, often related to the behaviour and misbehaviour of her own family members. In the turmoil, the Queen has always been the stabilizing force, injecting the monarchy and the “family firm” with often much-needed doses of honour and respect.
Despite her personal fortitude and integrity, Elizabeth II did not achieve her noble style entirely on her own. As a young woman, she was deeply influenced by two remarkable women: Queen Elizabeth, her mother, born in 1900, and Queen Mary, her grandmother and the widow of George V, born in 1867. Both of these women had set the stage for how the royal family was to be seen for the first half of the twentieth century, and the new Queen followed in their footsteps. Even so, she gradually did things a little differently. During her reign, Elizabeth II opened up Buckingham Palace and the royal family, both figuratively and literally, to greater public awareness and observation. Her own coronation of 1953 was televised. Prince Philip’s 1957 Commonwealth tour was the subject of a feature-length documentary. In 1969 Royal Family aired on television, an official film authorized by the Queen and Prince Philip showing the life of the royals behind closed doors. To most of the forty million British viewers and the four hundred million worldwide reported to have watched the film, this documentary marked the first time they had ever seen the interiors of the various royal palaces.[4] Other documentaries followed in subsequent decades, and by 1997 Buckingham Palace was online. The Queen inaugurated the first royal website, containing over 150 pages of information on the royal family and the monarchy. The monarchy Twitter account was launched in 2009, and in 2011 the Queen was on Facebook, quickly generating some 300,000 “likes.”[5]
The Queen’s motions toward transparency were met with mixed results. With greater public openness came greater public scrutiny and criticism of the lavish and detached lifestyle of these rich and famous persons. Questions increased in intensity as various members of the royal family, up to and including the Queen herself, came under attack for a variety of reasons related to their public and, increasingly, their private lives. The popularity of the royal family both in the United Kingdom and Canada reached its lowest ebb in the weeks and months immediately following the death of Princess Diana. Charles was largely detested as a failed husband to the saintly Diana, and the Queen was denounced for failing to show the proper degree of respect for her departed former daughter-in-law. Had there been referenda in both countries on the future of the monarchy at the time of Diana’s death, it is highly likely that the republican cause would have been triumphant.
But there were no referenda. And, over the next fifteen years, the royal family made a remarkable turnaround under the Queen’s leadership. Lurid tabloid scandals diminished. Charles was rehabilitated from an adulterer to a man of charity and environmentalism, and in 2005 he became husband to the love of his life, Camilla Parker Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall. The Queen celebrated highly successful and very popular Jubilee years: the Golden, recognizing fifty years on the throne in 2002, and the Diamond, celebrating a reign of sixty years in 2012. Other milestones provided fodder for a surge in popularity. The state funeral for the Queen Mother occurred in April 2002. Princes William and Harry came of age during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Perhaps most importantly for the monarchy’s public image, on April 29, 2011, Prince William married Catherine Middleton in Westminster Abbey, turning a fairy-tale romance (handsome prince falls in love with beautiful young commoner) into a fairy-tale marriage (handsome Prince William and beautiful Duchess of Cambridge live happily ever after). The couple’s royal home has been blessed with the birth of the next generation of royalty, George in 2013, Charlotte in 2015, and as of 2017, a third child anticipated in 2018. By 2015, the monarchy and the royal family was seemingly as popular as it had ever been in living memory, and the Queen — now a great-grandmother — was very much seen as the grandmother of all her people across the Commonwealth realms.
Upon the death of Elizabeth II, monarchists look forward to the reign of King Charles III. While the moment of Charles’s accession is not met with overwhelming joyful expectation among all his subjects, he is the heir to the sovereign, and the throne will be his in due course. But the king-to-be elicits more condemnation than approbation from his peoples. Many see him as an intellectual lightweight, a meddling prince who has used his position to advance his own idiosyncratic ideas about organic farming, saving the rainforests, the problems with modern British architecture, livable urban planning, and the disconnect between the modern technological world and human spiritualism. Assessing these perceived shortcomings, some commentators, such as historian David Starkey and biographers Jonathan Dimbleby and Catherine Mayer, argue that in fact Charles is misunderstood.[6] These authors see Charles as a sensitive soul and a man very much ahead of his time. As Mayer noted in 2015, Charles is a man of deep convictions arrived at through a combination of study, discussion, and intuition.[7]
In a book he co-authored with Ian Skelly and British environmentalist Tony Juniper entitled Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, Prince Charles contends that many of the problems currently ravaging the world — the fixation on the exploitation of the earth for short-term economic gain, environmental degradation, climate change, and social dislocation from the environment — are all rooted in humankind’s failure to live in harmony with nature, our fellow human beings, and the eternal principles of loving one another and natural creation found in all the world’s great religious teachings. Charles writes:
[T]here is much to be gained from the observance of the natural order and the rhythm in things, whether it be the lines and shapes of architecture or the processes involved in agriculture, and certainly in the natural world as a whole. Not just because of the aesthetic experience this may bring but also because it reveals how the same rhythms and patterns underlie all these things.[8]
Speaking of the future and how we need to prepare for it if we are to survive and prosper, Charles continues:
And this will mean somehow replacing our obsession with pursuing unlimited growth and competition with a quest for well-being and cooperation. It will mean shaping our culture so that its aims are rooted in relationship and focussed on fulfillment rather than on ever more consumption. If we can rebalance our perception and restore a sense of proportion to how we relate to the world — and on what basis we value the miracle of its marvels — it seems possible to me that we could create the conditions that ensure human societies thrive indefinitely.[9]
Prince Charles is very much a man of ideas and action extending well beyond environmentalism. Little known to most Canadians is Charles’s creation and promotion of the Prince’s Trust in the United Kingdom. This charitable foundation, established in 1976, is designed to provide financial and practical support to young people aged thirteen to thirty who are in danger of dropping out of school or are facing difficulties finding employment. The Trust offers mentoring support to youth — both individually and in groups — with respect to their education. It also provides funding for twelve-week development courses designed to give participants job skills and workplace training, experience in collaborative group work and team problem-solving, and enhanced personal motivation. With an annual budget of some £38 million as of 2010, the Trust has helped over 750,000 young people since its inception, with over 58,000 youth participating in its programming in 2014. Since 1976, it has provided seed money leading to the creation of over 80,000 businesses. The Prince’s Trust has become one of Charles’s signature charitable undertakings, linking the royal family to the needs of some of Britain’s most underprivileged people.[10] As David Starkey has argued, the demonstrated success rate of this Trust is striking, “and politicians — New Labour and Newer Tories alike — strive to learn from it and emulate it.” In assessing all of Charles’s public policy interests, Starkey suggests they form the intellectual basis of the reign yet to be: “Here then is a new kingdom of the mind, spirit, culture and values which is not unworthy of a thousand-year-old throne.”[11]
Many other royals are objects of monarchists’ admiration. Prince Philip has been respected as the Queen’s dutiful husband and erstwhile companion, supporting her arduous duties and being very much the head of family in contrast to her more expansive constitutional and ceremonial roles. Philip himself has always been a supporter of charitable causes, most significantly through the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, established in 1956 and designed to support young people throughout the Commonwealth in pursuing community service and leadership development through wilderness adventures.
The Queen Mother, moreover, was long adored by monarchy loyalists as the matriarch of the royal family, the devoted wife of George VI, and a symbolic yet real figure of British defiance and resilience during the Second World War. Many persons throughout the Commonwealth who lived through that war remember the story of the Queen being asked at the outset of the war whether the royal princesses Elizabeth and Margaret would be evacuated to safety in Canada. “The children won’t go without me,” the Queen reported to the press. “I won’t leave without the King. And the King will never leave.”[12] Throughout the war, the royal family remained in Britain, experiencing the Blitz and supporting the cause of Crown and country.
And there was Diana, the late Princess of Wales. To her many supporters both in Britain and abroad, Diana assumed an iconic position. She was the beautiful and sensitive newcomer to the royal family, a breath of fresh air blowing through the stale corridors of Buckingham Palace. To a family known for its staid traditions and aversion to public displays of emotion, Diana brought glamour and star power, a wealth of compassion for the less fortunate, and an easy-going rapport with the public. People wanted to meet her, speak with her, be with her, and be touched by her. As with all royals, she also adopted a number of charitable causes. Some were traditional, such as her patronage of the English National Ballet and the Royal Academy of Music, but others broke new ground for the monarchy. She became a fervent advocate for better care for serious illnesses and health matters that all too often bore the weight of stigma. She drew attention to the need for better understanding of drug and alcohol abuse, hospice care, homelessness, and services for mentally challenged children. She also promoted better awareness around the issues of AIDS and leprosy, calling for love and care to replace the fear and hate people often harboured for victims of these afflictions. In the final years of her life, she supported international efforts to ban landmines, those scourges of civilians living in places torn apart by war.[13] Unsurprisingly, by the end of her too-short life, Diana had come to be seen by a worldwide audience not only as a glamorous princess but, more importantly, as an angel of mercy.
Monarchists also extol the lives and work of Elizabeth II’s other children, Princess Anne and Princes Andrew and Edward. They likewise admire the newest generation of royalty, represented by the Queen’s grandson, William, and his wife Catherine. William and Catherine have become akin to royalty rock stars: young, handsome and beautiful, elite but with a common touch, a loving couple and devoted parents. To boot, they are socially conscious in their support of good causes.
When loyalists look back even further, they see the illustrious figures of British Crown history. They see two Georges (V and VI), each sovereign during one of the twentieth century’s world wars; and Lord Louis Mountbatten, cousin to Elizabeth II and arguably the most professionally accomplished member of the royal family. And they see the great women: Victoria, the first of the truly ceremonial heads of state; and Elizabeth I, “good Queen Bess,” who brought peace and order to mid–sixteenth-century England after decades of political and religious strife, gave a compassionate and moderate soul to Anglicanism, and inaugurated England’s rise as a major European and international power. To monarchists, history is most alive when personified, and this role is the perfect function for the sovereign: to be the living embodiment of the royal and constitutional heritage that we have been bequeathed by our ancestors.
Not all subjects of the Crown, however, are as enamoured with the lives and lifestyles of the rich and famous, and sometimes infamous, British royals. In answer to the question “how do the royals make you feel,” most republicans respond with equal measures of disdain, derision, and scornful laughter. Since republican thought begins with the premise that monarchy itself is archaic and ultimately illegitimate, republicans see no value in a hereditary monarch bearing the title of head of state. Nor do they see any merit in a royal family being held up as a role model of support for good deeds and charitable causes. When republicans look at the royal family, as people as well as symbols, they find much to criticize. Indeed, the tabloid press in Britain, most notably Rupert Murdoch’s distinctly republican-leaning paper, The Sun, became famous, or infamous, for its unrelenting desire to sniff out and report stories of “royals behaving badly.”
Without a doubt, the monarchist side is vulnerable to attack when they hold up the sovereign as the figurehead of the nation. Her family, as the “first family” of the nation, is likewise supposed to be exemplary, encouraging us all through their behaviour to be aware of our history and heritage, to be better persons, and to care for our communities, fellow citizens, and country. Monarchists themselves have set a high bar for judging the personal worth of the members of the royal family, and many republicans joyfully assert that most royals fall far short of monarchists’ expectations. Far from being paragons of public virtue, the royals are seen by many republicans as overly privileged aristocrats, the elite of the elite, persons far removed from mainstream life, whose private lives and behaviour, all subsidized by common taxpayers, are often an embarrassment to the people they are supposed to serve. Every member of the royal family in recent decades has been the subject of such criticism, with particular individuals facing withering republican attacks. Even the Queen has not been immune from censure.
Disapproval of Elizabeth II as a person has been muted in comparison to some of her children and her husband. Nevertheless, critics have found areas they deem worthy of rebuke. A number of her biographers, such as Sally Bedell Smith and Sarah Bradford,[14] have commented on her “detached” attitude to child rearing, stating that her commitment to her public duties as sovereign “left her with too little time to fulfill her family care.”[15] In keeping with the tradition of the royal family, her four children — Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward — tended to be raised by royal nannies, with their parents often absent for long periods of time while on official duties and international trips.
Bedell Smith has noted that Prince Charles had a particularly miserable childhood, although much of its wretchedness was rooted in decisions made by his father. At the age of nine, he was “packed off” to Cheam, an elite yet austere boarding school that he came to dread. At the age of fifteen, he was sent to Prince Philip’s alma mater, Gordonstoun, an isolated school in northeastern Scotland remembered by Charles to this day as a place even grimmer than Cheam. Prince Charles still refers to his five years at Gordonstoun as his “prison sentence.”[16] As Bedell Smith remarks, it is harrowing to read the letters young Charles wrote to his parents, telling them of the relentless bullying he endured and pleading with them to allow him to return home. All to no avail. Prince Philip told him to “find strength in the adversity,”[17] and even his mother appears to have expected him to tough it out.
The Queen’s coldness demonstrated itself on other occasions too. In the days following the death of Diana, the entire world observed Elizabeth II’s rigidity. At a time when the British nation was in mourning over the tragic loss of their “Queen of Hearts,” their real Queen was noticeably quiet and seemingly aloof. In their grief, many Britons came to wonder why the Queen had not spoken to her people, why the church service she had attended on the morning after Diana’s death had not mentioned her passing, and why, as previously mentioned, the flag at Buckingham Palace was not being flown at half-mast. To many Britons, the Queen’s behaviour exhibited disrespect bordering on heartlessness. After days of growing public unrest, fuelled by such headlines in the tabloid press as “Show Us You Care” and “Your People Are Suffering; Speak To Us Ma’am,” Prime Minister Blair advised the Queen to return to London, fly the Royal Standard at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, meet mourners there, and speak to the British people on television.
While public support for the Queen in particular rebounded in the fifteen years following Diana’s death, the same cannot be said respecting public attitudes toward her eldest son. Prince Charles has been the subject of public condemnation and scorn for most of his adult life, precisely because of his beliefs and actions. As Prince of Wales, Charles has had the opportunity, for better or for worse, to garner instant media attention whenever he has voiced his concerns about certain causes he believed in — promoting traditional architecture, organic farming, communing with nature. To critics of these beliefs, Charles quickly became tagged as the “Looney Prince” and a man of “eccentric” and “unorthodox” ideas.[18]
Prince Charles has not been shy in advancing his causes, using public speeches, media interviews, private letters to cabinet ministers, and his own charitable work to encourage public awareness of, and debate about, concerns close to his heart, all the while challenging forces that he believes to be detrimental to humanity’s social and spiritual well-being. Since the 1970s, Charles has habitually expressed his viewpoints on matters of public policy to members of the British cabinet and their senior officials. This practice has garnered mixed responses. Jonathan Dimbleby, an early biographer, explained that Prince Charles “believed that as a Privy Councillor, a member of the House of Lords and, more especially, as heir to the throne, he had a right to warn, protest and advise.”[19] Such communications have always been controversial, with critics questioning the constitutional right of a Prince of Wales to have this type of privileged contact with senior government officials, giving him the opportunity to influence public policy. This issue became the basis of a decade-long legal dispute in the United Kingdom, beginning in 2005 when The Guardian submitted a freedom of information request for copies of twenty-seven letters — known as the “black spider memos” for their scratchy handwritten style — written by Charles to the heads of seven government departments between September 2004 and April 2005. In 2012, a freedom of information tribunal found these letters to be “particularly frank” examples of the Prince of Wales’s interventions on matters of public policy. The tribunal contended that the British public had the right to know how the prince endeavoured to alter government policy, and it ruled for their publication. The British government moved to overturn this judgment before the British Supreme Court on the grounds that these letters were privileged communications between the Prince of Wales and government ministers, thereby deserving privacy considerations. In March 2015, however, this court ruled in favour of the full public disclosure of these letters on account of their public interest value. Long viewed by his critics to be a “meddling prince,” these letters showed Charles seeking to alter British government policy on such matters as genetically modified crops (he was opposed), expanding the number and role of state grammar schools (he was opposed), and plans for the £1 billion renovation to the historic Chelsea Barracks in London (he was opposed on stylistic grounds).
Only with respect to the barracks issue was Prince Charles ultimately able to exert influence, but that influence did not come through any of the black spider memos. Rather, it arrived through his intervention with Qatari investors involved in the project.[20] As Graham Smith, chief executive officer of Republic (the lead organization in the United Kingdom pushing for Britain to become a constitutional republic), pointed out in relation to the Supreme Court’s ruling against the prince, it is “completely unacceptable in a democratic society” for members of the royal family to try to influence government policy, and the royals “should stay out of politics completely.”[21] In acknowledging their own legal victory, The Guardian argued on their editorial page that if it is both desirable and accepted that the future head of state is “going to have opinions” and perhaps “give them an airing,” then there is a logical next step: “Not any longer to allow the job to be filled by accident of birth, but instead to select for the post by democratic means.”[22]
For all the debate over past decades about Prince Charles’s ideas, the manner in which he has expressed them, and whether they suggest he would or would not make a good king, none of these matters have ever come close to rivalling the intensity of passion running against him on account of his marriage to and divorce from Diana, Princess of Wales. If many people in Canada and other Commonwealth realms are leery about the idea of Charles reigning over them as king with Camilla at his side, it may be in large part due to Camilla’s place in a three-sided marriage and the scandalous nature of Charles and Diana’s marital collapse. Seemingly happily married in July 1981 after a fairy-tale romance, the Prince and Princess of Wales became one of the world’s most famous couples and poster stars for the next generation of the monarchy. With the birth of two sons, William in 1982 and Harry in 1984, the public love affair with the future king and queen seemed secure. But all was not as it appeared.
In a BBC interview in November 1995, Diana was asked whether Camilla Parker Bowles had been the cause of her marriage’s failure. “Well,” she famously replied, “there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”[23]
Charles first met Camilla Shand, the daughter of an upper-middle-class wine merchant, in 1972 and quickly fell in love with her. They shared interests in nature, horses, and polo, and were both quirky, with self-deprecating senses of humour. With the hindsight of history, they should have wed one another sometime in the mid-1970s. Their lives, however, took different paths. The young prince was busy pursuing his career in the Royal Navy, and Camilla, perhaps sensing the challenges and difficulties of becoming closely interwoven into the royal family, accepted the marriage proposal of a former suitor, Andrew Parker Bowles, in 1973. Throughout the 1970s, Charles and Camilla remained close friends, even after Charles had met nineteen-year-old Diana, daughter of the eighth Earl of Spencer, in 1977. By 1980, Charles was thirty-one years old and facing enormous family pressure to marry a woman of aristocratic lineage and produce an heir. Against his better judgment, as he has since admitted, Charles proposed to Diana in February 1981. As the wedding day drew closer, Diana aired concerns about her fiancé’s relationship with Camilla. “I asked Charles if he was still in love with Camilla Parker Bowles,” she confided to some girlfriends, “and he didn’t give me a clear answer. What am I to do?”[24]
Cracks in their relationship began to appear soon after their wedding. They shared few interests, and while he came to resent her star power and easy grace with the media, she became increasingly worried about his continuing friendship with Camilla. Within a year and a half, they were fighting openly in front of his family. As these arguments increased in intensity, friends and supporters of the princess would characterize Charles as an unfaithful, unloving husband and a cold and distant father. Defenders of the prince, though, would paint Diana as a troubled young woman prone to depression, volatile mood swings, and self-destructive behaviour. According to Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton, the princess always knew that her husband loved another woman, and she feared that from the very beginning of their marriage Charles was cheating on her.[25] According to Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, however, the prince stressed that for the first five years of their marriage he was loyal to Diana and faithful to his marriage vows, only reaching out to Camilla for companionship in the fall of 1986 once his marriage had “irretrievably broken down.”[26] Diana was also turning her romantic attention to other men. The first affair, which she herself admitted in 1995, was with Barry Mannakee, one of her bodyguards, in 1985. Here begin the infidelities and adultery on both sides of the marriage equation that were to be unveiled to the public in 1992, ultimately leading to the agreement by Charles and Diana that they should separate in December 1992 and divorce in August 1997.
In the aftermath of this very public collapse of Charles’s marriage, critics within Britain asked serious questions about his fitness to ever be king. On December 7, 1993, BBC Radio 4 interviewed the archdeacon of York, the venerable George Austin, with respect to Prince Charles’s moral claim to the throne. “Charles made solemn vows before God about his marriage,” noted the second most senior Anglican cleric in Britain, “and it seems — if the rumours are true about Camilla — that he began to break them almost immediately. He has broken the trust of one thing and broken vows to God of one thing. How can he then go into Westminster Abbey and take the Coronation vows?”[27]
The problem for faithful Anglicans is that not only will Charles become king when he succeeds his mother, but he will also become the supreme governor of the Church of England. Should a man who has lied about adulterous acts be permitted to rise to such an august theocratic position? But the troubles do not only worry the religious. Republicans in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth gleefully recounted the trials and tribulations of Charles and Diana and Camilla. To them, this scandal exposed the hypocrisy of the royal family — a family that is supposed to be a manifestation of regal elegance, an archetype of honour and duty that promotes respect for public morality and service to others. Instead, they were presenting themselves as profoundly dysfunctional, wallowing in scandal and deceit, lies and immorality. Rather than filling the public with a sense of awe and majesty, republicans argued that the royal family was a joke, the subject of sordid tabloid exposés, and worst of all, an international embarrassment that deserved to be put out of its misery.
Republican criticism of the royal family does not end with what they perceive to be the disgraceful and dishonourable status of the Prince of Wales. Far from it. Many other royals have provided ample ammunition for republicans to call into question the continued existence of the monarchy. If the royal family is supposed to be a model of exemplary family values, then the marital problems of Charles and Diana were just the first cracks in this edifice. Prince Andrew had gained the nickname “Randy Andy” in the British tabloids by 1985 for his reputation as a ladies’ man, and his wedding on July 23, 1986, to Sarah Ferguson, now Duchess of York, served only to increase media interest in their flamboyant lifestyle. News of lavish spending, boozy parties, nightclub hopping, and expensive vacations, all underwritten by the British taxpayer, filled the British tabloids in the late 1980s. By the early 1990s, there were also reports of marital infidelities, with the Duchess of York having a string of affairs. The couple separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996.[28] The collapse of this marriage, as well as that of Charles and Diana, however, was preceded by the divorce of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips in 1992. By the mid-1990s, the first marriages of three of the Queen’s four children had ended in divorce. Anne quickly remarried in 1992 to Timothy Laurence, and Prince Edward, the Queen’s youngest son, married Sophie Rhys-Jones, now Countess of Wessex, in 1999. Prince Charles finally married Camilla Parker Bowles, now Duchess of Cornwall, in a civil ceremony in the Windsor Guildhall on April 9, 2005. Many republicans, however, noted a delicious irony. Not so long ago, the royal family had been so opposed to the very idea of divorce that monarchs such as Victoria, Edward VII, and George V refused even to meet with divorced individuals. Edward VIII, in 1936, was compelled to abdicate the throne on account of his desire to marry the twice-divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson. And now, by the mid-1990s, this same family had become famous for its troubled marriages and divorces. While the royal family had simply come to experience the modern reality of family breakdowns, as various monarchist supporters argued, republican critics nonetheless piled on their criticism, proclaiming that the royal family had lost any claim to be seen as an example of good family values.
The challenge to behave well has presented the royal family with no end of grief for at least the past half century. In popular mystique dating back to the reign of Victoria, the royals have been held up as paragons of proper manners and etiquette, good taste and sophisticated elegance. With so much expected of them, no wonder the media, the general public, and republicans in particular, are captivated by news of royals failing to live up to these high standards. Beyond prurient interest in the failed marriages of Charles and Diana, and Andrew and Sarah, the tabloid press in Britain has revelled in past decades in exposing examples of royal misbehaviour. Prince Philip was the first to feel the barbs of a much less deferential press when his questionable sense of humour would make national and international news. In 1965, for example, when presented to a blind girl he told her the joke of a blind man twirling his seeing-eye dog over his head so as to “have a look around.”[29] In 1986, during the first ever royal visit to the Chinese mainland by the Queen and her husband, Philip was introduced to a group of British students in Xi’an and proceeded to jokingly warn them that if they stayed in China too long they would acquire “slitty eyes.”[30] In 1995, when meeting a Scottish driving instructor, he asked, “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough for them to pass the test?” And in 2003, when meeting the president of Nigeria, who was wearing traditional dress, he laughed and said, “You look like you’re ready for bed.”[31] Indeed, Prince Philip provided endless fodder for his critics.
The younger generation of royals have also felt the sting of critical media coverage, with Prince Harry especially being confronted with headlines raising the question, “What was he thinking?” On January 13, 2005, the twenty-year-old prince was photographed arriving at a friend’s costume party wearing a Nazi Afrika Korps uniform, complete with swastika. Once this photo was published, the prince was quickly compelled to issue a public apology for his poor judgment.[32] In August 2012, Prince Harry found himself in the midst of another media firestorm when photographs were published of him playing “strip billiards” in Las Vegas with six young women, all in various stages of undress. Quickly given the moniker of the “Party Prince,” Harry was again compelled to issue an apology for his unbecoming behaviour.[33]
While the media inevitably play up these examples of royal indiscretions, much to the consternation of officials in Buckingham Palace, Jeremy Paxman is quick to remind us that the recent scandals that have beset the modern royal family pale in comparison to examples of earlier royal misbehaviour. Perhaps the greatest royal secret, one spawning a cover-up lasting decades, involved the scandalous behaviour of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson as Duke and Duchess of Windsor, following his abdication as king in December 1936. Edward always had strong right-wing and reactionary attitudes toward politics, while Wallis Simpson was known by British intelligence agencies as early as 1936 to be very sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazis, allegedly having been a lover of Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1935.[34] Within a year after his abdication and their marriage, the ducal couple travelled to Germany in October 1937, meeting such Nazi luminaries as Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, and Joseph Goebbels, along with von Ribbentrop and Adolf Hitler himself. In all cases, they were able to communicate in fluent German. In the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Hitler saw a possible Nazi king and queen of Britain and its Empire, a couple who would relish being returned to Buckingham Palace following a German conquest of the British Isles and would loyally do his bidding.[35]
In the summer of 1940, Britain was struggling in the Second World War, following the fall of France in June and the advent of the Battle of Britain in July, the latter of which witnessed the German air force bombing British targets in the prelude to invasion. At this time, the ducal couple were in Spain and then Portugal, having fled France. They were under orders from the British government to return to the United Kingdom and then move to the Bahamas, where the duke was posted as the new governor general. German diplomatic cables from their embassies in Madrid and Lisbon to Hitler throughout July reveal that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were meeting with influential pro-fascist Spanish aristocrats who were in direct communication with German officials.
Unknown to either the Germans or the duke, however, British espionage agents were reporting the contents of these communications to the British government. Winston Churchill and George VI closely followed the duke’s dalliance with treason. On numerous occasions, Edward expressed his belief “that Great Britain faced a catastrophic military defeat which could only be avoided through a peace settlement with Germany.”[36] On July 10, 1940, the German ambassador to Portugal reported to Berlin that the Duke of Windsor saw himself as an emissary who could broker peace between Britain and Germany, but that he could only achieve this if and when Churchill was removed from power in London. “[The Duke] is convinced,” wrote the ambassador Hoyningen-Huene to von Ribbentrop, “that had he remained on the throne war could have been avoided and describes himself as a firm supporter of a peaceful compromise with Germany. The Duke believes with certainty that continued heavy bombing will make England ready for peace.”[37]
Having delayed their return to Britain for weeks, providing time for diplomatic channels of communication to remain open between themselves and Berlin, the ducal couple finally boarded a ship for the Bahamas on August 1, 1940. But even as they left, Edward was informing the German ambassador in Portugal that he would look forward to remaining in “continuous communication” with their joint Portuguese friends and that he would gladly “co-operate at a suitable time in the establishment of peace.” The duke also wanted it to be known in Berlin that, with his “deepest sincerity,” he had “admiration and sympathy for the Führer.”[38]
The Duke of Windsor’s treacherous behaviour did not escape disapproving eyes in Britain. It was indeed on account of the ducal couple’s misbehaviour that Churchill wanted Edward and his wife far away from Europe and out of communication with German agents. Once established in his vice-regal office in Nassau in the fall of 1940, Edward continued to harbour defeatist beliefs. In speaking to an American journalist, who was also an undercover FBI agent, in December 1940, the duke suggested that American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt could lead a peace initiative to stop the war between Germany and Great Britain. He added that this was the kind of effort he would join and support. After learning that his interviewer had never met Hitler, the duke said, “Hitler is the right and logical leader of the German people. It is a pity you never met Hitler, just as it is a pity I never met Mussolini. Hitler is a very great man.”[39]
Had any ordinary British, Imperial, or Commonwealth subject uttered any of these words during the war and been proven to be in direct communication with the enemy, he or she would have been tried, convicted, and executed for treason. The only thing that kept the Duke and Duchess of Windsor alive during the war, long after Churchill and his senior intelligence officers knew of the duke’s disloyalty, was his royal blood. It would not look good for the British to have to execute their former king and his wife for seeking a Nazi victory.
To those with republican sentiments, this sorry saga of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of hereditary leadership. While monarchists argue that the hereditary principle assures a clear line of succession, with the heir to the throne being well educated to assume the constitutional and social burdens of his or her office, republicans counter that the practice of hereditary leadership can just as easily result in someone utterly unfit for such a high office, assuming its status and influence. Edward VIII serves as their strongest example. Only his abdication in 1936 prevented a king with Nazi sympathies being on the throne at the outset of the Second World War.
A final word on public interest in the private lives of the royals should go to the erstwhile champion of the republican movement in the United Kingdom, Polly Toynbee, a columnist for The Guardian. Perhaps her most damning indictment of the monarchy in Britain is that it “subjugates the national imagination, infantilizing us with false imaginings and a bogus heritage of our island story.” The relentless media focus on the lives of the royals, their comings and goings, their personal habits and foibles, and their wealth and lavish lifestyles has the effect of directing public attention to childish trivialities and a “majestic delusion,” which distracts from the real issues people should be concerned about in modern Britain: social inequality, poverty, racism and intolerance, a democratic deficit, and government that governs for the wealthy few at the expense of the needy. The “infantilization effect” is that the “pomp and circumstance” of royalty conditions Britons to see themselves as “obedient servants worshiping an ermine-wrapped fantasy” of greatness. Rather than seeing British history as the slow evolution of popular sovereignty by which the common people incrementally built a social and democratic state over the long-standing opposition of the British elite and the royal family, and rather than focusing as mature adults on the real problems facing their country, the British people are taught, from an early age, to have a childlike interest in the lives of the royals, their supposed superiors. Rather than focusing on the anti-democratic and elitist nature of royalty, Britons are encouraged to focus on such inane things as what the royals wear, where they go, who they are seen with, what they eat, and how they party and vacation. The public are spurred on to follow royal gossip and to be titillated by their misbehaviours. In reality, Toynbee points out, the regal elite in Britain are not in any way deserving of respect and admiration. Rather, they are “only ordinary like all the other dull and talentless plutocrats with nothing remarkable about them but their bank balance.” British society and politics is thus stunted. The monarchy trivializes life in Britain, extolling that which is “a grand vacuity” while ignoring the needs of the nation. “Beneath the splendour, the squalor.”[40]
The great debate on the future of the monarchy in Canada has always existed in this country. Sometimes it has been muted, as in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, at least in English Canada, but since the 1960s it has increased in intensity. By the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, some opinion surveys suggested over half of Canadians wished to see Canada abolish the monarchy, severing this last constitutional and seemingly colonial link with the United Kingdom. In this scenario, Elizabeth II would be the last monarch to reign over Canada and, in future and for all time, a Canadian would finally rise to be this country’s head of state. Canada’s long progression to full national sovereignty would be complete. If Canadians really do want this, however, how can it be achieved? What political and administrative procedures need to be followed in order to terminate the monarchy in Canada? How difficult might this process be? Battle Royal continues as we enter the field of constitutional law and the politics of constitutional amendment.