Dan Snow's History Hit - The Crown: A Short History of British Monarchy

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

For at least 1,500 years, since the mists swirling around the Dark Ages began to clear, the British Isles have had monarchical rulers. For hundreds of years, they were the central figures of the nation: the focus of its politics and society, consecrated by God, endorsed (or not) by the nobility, the arbiters of its arts and culture, the makers of its laws, the directors of its government and the leaders in its wars.Stephen Bates is an award-winning author and journalist, most recently, the Royalty and Religious Affairs correspondent for the Guardian from 2000-2012. Stephen joins Dan to explore how and why the monarchy in these islands has endured and evolved, and what will become of its survival in the future.This episode was produced by Hannah Ward and James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Following the sad passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II earlier this year, we felt it would be an interesting time to talk about the recent monarchs. How the monarchy has survived in Britain, where in so many other countries it has withered and died or been violently terminated. As Britain comes to terms with life after Elizabeth, what state is the monarchy in? What can history tell us? We talk to the award-winning journalist and author Stephen Bates. He was royalty and religious affairs correspondent for The Guardian for years.

He's just written a book called The Shortest History of the Crown. He's the man to talk to. We start with Victoria. We end up with Charles. Enjoy. T minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. start with Victoria, we end up with Charles. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Stephen, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Good to be with you, Dan. What's so striking in the period that you talk about, in this modern period, is how so many other nations and empires around the world got rid of their hereditary heads of state, and yet somehow the British monarchy survives intact.

Big question, why do you think that is? Well, the first and most straightforward answer, I suppose, is that Britain was seen to have won the wars it partook in. The French had lost their monarchy really after the French Revolution. The Russians lost theirs in the First World War with the Russian Revolution. revolution. The Russians lost theirs in the First World War with the Russian revolution. So Britain had a monarchy at the head of its state, and the state was perceived to be victorious, so that always helps. I think the monarchy in the early half of the 20th century was also quite fleet-footed in moving in a sort of conciliatory direction, I suppose. The story about the change of the surname during the First World War from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor,

which seems now like a fairly straightforward and maybe even trivial thing to do, but actually was quite a symbolically important thing, I suspect, for the monarchy, especially as the king then effectively refused asylum to the Tsar's family, where that would have aroused certain difficulties with public opinion, I suspect. But what about the individual performance of these monarchs as well? Victoria, Edward, performance of these monarchs as well. Victoria, Edward, Elizabeth II, both Georges, they were quite deft operatives, weren't they? Yes. The Queen's most commonly used phrase is, you have to be seen to be believed. It's no surprise that the most unpopular period,

probably in the last 150 years for the monarchy, was when Queen Victoria retreated into seclusion following the death of her husband, Prince Albert. Lord Salisbury, her prime minister, said that the popularity of the monarchy required a constant revelation. They needed to be seen. And certainly after Victoria, the monarch has always been a public figure. They haven't retreated behind the walls of either the palace or the castle. I think that plays an important part in the mystique of the monarchy and its continued popularity. There is a sense of cultivation of a sort of middle-class propriety, that they're like the rest of us, only not quite like the rest of us. They dress in clothes which are recognisable. They speak in tones which are understandable. They're accessible to the general public in a very limited way, but with the illusion that they are much more close to their subjects

than might otherwise be the case. And do you think, really, from Victoria, I mean, Victoria's dodgy uncles accepted, but her grandfather, George III, ruled as a monarch. And from Victoria, has there been an acceptance of their reduced role? Have they managed their own political decline, certainly far more effectively than many of their cousins, literally cousin monarchs elsewhere? Yes, that's absolutely true. Victoria is the last monarch really to have expressed an opinion on an item of legislation. She's the last monarch to

have attempted to change the government of the country, which she did temporarily successfully in the 1830s, but that's nearly 200 years ago now. And by and large, the constitutional settlement has been accepted by both her and her successors. They may have demanded a sort of appreciation of their role. They may have been a bit sniffy about paying tax and making sure that their privileges are more or less maintained. But by and large, they've accepted, and probably quite relievedly, the fact that they're a decorative, ceremonial part of the executive of Britain and the 14 other realms across the old empire. And so I think their acceptance has been an important part in their absence from political partisanship.

Surely her reign is important in that respect. Well, all that direction is set under Victoria's reign, isn't it? I mean, she's activist at the beginning, she's able to choose her prime ministers. By the end of the reign, there's no suggestion that she's able to do that. Was that just forced upon her? Was that something that she went along with? How active or passive was she in that process? She was increasingly passive, certainly following the death of Prince Albert. Albert was probably the most significant royal of the last 200 years in that I think he played a considerable part in persuading her that she was not an absolute but a constitutional monarch and changing the frame of the royal family from a remote institution, not seen a huge amount in

public, to one which was very common, very easily recognised. Lots of photographs taken of the royal family in more or less formal and informal poses from the 1850s onwards. So for a start, everyone knew what the Queen looked like, and her statue decorated the empire from Calcutta to Canterbury. So the change to a ceremonial and a sort of respectable monarchy really developed during Queen Victoria's long reign. And it was partly to fill the void that she left for a considerable period of the latter half of her reign when she didn't want to do anything, didn't see why she should go out in public despite what everyone was telling her she needed to do.

Edward, the playboy prince, turned out to be a half-decent monarch, Edward VII. I've always been quite impressed with him. Yes, I think so too. He was more serious than people were expecting. He did his duty. It was partly because Queen Victoria had allowed him absolutely no part in constitutional affairs. He wasn't allowed to see state papers. He wasn't allowed to take a role which supplanted her while she was out of commission. And instead, he filled his time with what he obviously thought and people did believe were good works. A lot of them involved going to dinners and opening hospitals and things,

things that the royal family have done ever since, but which they hadn't really done in public before that. So he was known to the public. He was known in a slightly saucy way. People knew he'd appeared in court twice giving evidence. They knew he had a racy reputation. They probably knew that Queen Victoria didn't think very highly of him. So anything that was positive came as a bonus. And he did play a significant part, both in helping secure the Entente Cordiale in France, with France in 1904, and subsequently in at least nominally agreeing to the liberal government's reforms shortly before he died, he certainly would have

caused great controversy for the Conservative opposition, unless he offered a way for the Liberals to unblock the parliamentary cork. Well, speaking of unblocking parliamentary corks, you've got George V, who was a real Tory, and people are rather rude about his kind of intellect. But I mean, he kept the show on the road through probably the darkest periods of modern British history. You've got at least one constitutional crisis. You've got the Civil War in Ireland threatened to break out in 1914, the First War actually breaking out.

And he does pretty well. Yeah, I think he does. He was rather surprised at the end of his reign when he had the Silver Jubilee in 1935, a few months before he died, to see the crowds that turned out to cheer him, saying, goodness me, I didn't realize I was so popular. When he died in early 1936, there were popular ditties about losing our dear old dad. So whatever his private manner and his manner towards his children was not exactly cuddly, whatever that private persona was, the public persona of an avuncular and rather cheery old naval type, went down very well with the British public. And I think it is true that with all the things that were happening around him, not only the

First World War, of course, all the loss of Ireland, but the Great Depression, the general strike, that turmoil, the formation of a national government to deal with an economic crisis. He was a permanent and continuing fixture. During the First World War, that sort of importance of the crown setting an example in the media age, he had his bath no deeper than the lads on the Western Front. He gave up alcohol. I find all that quite striking. Yeah, and it's rather touching, isn't it? Yeah. Particularly when you think that other monarchs at the time lost popularity and eventually lost their thrones precisely because they didn't assume the manner and the living conditions of their subjects.

It's all very limited, of course. He still had Buckingham Palace, although it was rather cold and drafty and they only had one electric light bulb in any given room. But he showed he was sharing the burdens of ordinary citizens. Compare and contrast Boris Johnson's famous parties at Downing Street during COVID and the reaction the public showed that they really didn't like that. They thought he was doing a them and us routine. George V certainly made sure that that wasn't the image of the monarchy even 100 years ago. You listened to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the monarchy. More coming up. Gone Medieval is History Hit's podcast dedicated to the greatest millennium in human history. I'm Dr Kat Jarman, a Viking Age bioarchaeologist and author. And I'm Matt Lewis, a medievalist and writer. Every Tuesday and Saturday, we'll explore some of the biggest stories,

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by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Now, his son, Edward, seemed to lack much of that good sense. Edward VIII never crowned, but did, of course, become king on the death of his father. In fact, let's talk about the death of his father before we leave George behind. One of the most remarkable moments in history. What happened to him? Yes, his end was speeded through the judicious use of morphine by his doctor, who thought it was not appropriate that the monarch's death should be recorded first in the afternoon, evening newspapers, and should appear first in the Times, which of course was

printing up until midnight or early hours of the morning, so could get in the Times, which of course was printing up until midnight or early hours of the morning, so could get in the final editions, how things change. It was not known for a great many years that his passing, which the BBC famously said was drawing gently to its close, had been actually accelerated. Goodness knows what would have happened in previous generations and centuries if it had been known that the king's doctor was deliberately putting him to sleep. His son Edward, a little bit like his grandfather, his namesake, a wild prince, and there was great concern that he wasn't fit for the throne. Yes, George V famously told Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, that the lad will ruin himself within a year. And he was just about right,

because his reign lasted for about 10 months. And as you say, he never got crowned. He was monarch, but he hadn't gone through the coronation ceremony. And I think people certainly now draw a massive sigh of relief because he was, by all accounts and to all intents, over-friendly with the Nazis. Goodness knows what would have happened if he'd been on the throne three years later. Did he get sort of chucked out against his will, or did he not want the job? I think he probably did want the job. The royals tend to like the trappings, and he was certainly someone who liked the trappings of authority. He liked the fast cars. He liked the flunkies. He liked the celebrity that went with it. I'm not so sure that he was terribly keen to do the job. And he certainly miscalculated over the acceptability of

Mrs. Simpson. My parents were of a generation which could remember the abdication. And it was a toss up in my mother's opinion, whether the chief strike against Mrs. Simpson was that she was American, or that she had been divorced several times. Both of them contributed to the image of a scarlet woman, and that didn't help when the crisis came. Had the media been perhaps a bit more intrusive, there might have been more time for the king to present Mrs. Simpson as someone it was acceptable for him to marry. But the crisis, when it finally erupted, was over in about a week. So in the state of the media in those days,

there was not a great deal of time to summon a king's party to defend Edward and his choice of a bride. We've got then his younger brother, the stammerer, famously, King George VI comes on the throne. Again, how reluctant was he? Do we bind that fairy tale that he and his wife just wanted a quiet life or do we think that there was ambition there? I think he did want a quiet life.

I mean, he was notoriously stilted in his public appearances, as we all know from the King's speech and all that. And certainly if you see the newsreels of him making speeches at the time, it is a painful thing to watch. He burst into tears when he was told that his brother was abdicating. And yet the sense of duty, which runs like a thread through certainly the House of Windsor was strong enough for him to not only stay at his post and be a figurehead during the war, but also for him, by and large, to accept the constitutional constraints on him. It's known now that he was in favour of appeasement and that he didn't particularly want Churchill to succeed Neville Chamberlain.

But he certainly didn't make that particularly well known at the time. There was the grave mistake, actually, of welcoming Neville Chamberlain back from Munich on the Buckingham Palace balcony. Chamberlain himself realised it was a mistake later. Chamberlain himself realized it was a mistake later. But by and large, he fulfilled the constitutional position of the king to lead his nation and to share their deprivations. Nothing destroys or undermines the authority of the monarchy more than a sense of entitlement. And you can see that with Prince Andrew maybe today, there's a sense of being owed something rather than applying duty to the job that you've been thrust into.

Stephen, his daughter, Elizabeth, people will now be very familiar after the events this year with her career and life. How did she steer the monarchy, other than just living a long time, how did she steer the monarchy through some potentially very, very turbulent times? She was a remarkable example of passivity. She didn't really direct events. In fact, changes to the monarchy rather happened to her. She went along with them rather than initiating them. And maybe that's a good thing for a conservative institution, to be sufficiently flexible, but insufficiently dynamic to change the character of the monarchy. And I'm sure that a long reign coming to an end will lead people to appreciate the fact that she didn't meddle. She wasn't a dynamic monarch, unlike Elizabeth I. It's not really ever been called an Elizabethan age.

move the needle? I mean, I'm always very frustrated with these prime ministers who maintain this dignified silence about what happens between them and their monarch. Because as a historian, he has aspirates to know. Do you think she did advise? Do you think she comes from a particular point of view? I'm sure she did advise. I'm sure she was pretty discreet in what she advised and how she advised it. Her relations with her prime ministers are largely gossip and rumour and innuendo. As I say, I don't think that she initiated change, but she certainly went along with change. If you think what Britain was like at the start of her reign in 1952, when the BBC announced the death of her father over the radio, shockingly, one February morning, people actually stopped their cars in the street, got out and took their hats off.

Can you imagine that sort of deference and sort of religiosity happening today? She wasn't allowed to meet divorcees because that was regarded as frightful. At the end of her reign, you know, she was having a podcast, she was doing Facebook, all sorts of modern things. She went along with television documentaries, something that would have been pretty unthinkable before her reign started. These were not initiatives that she came up with, but they were certainly ideas that were pressed by her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, who was very keen to have, for instance, more television access, the famous 1968 documentary, The Royal Family. As an example of that looks a bit stilted and naive now, but was extraordinary at the time. Huge audience, people thinking that they were seeing the Queen as informally as she would normally be seen. And

as we know, that wasn't actually the case, but it was the sort of initiative that had television been more widely available in earlier reigns, I doubt very much that monarchs would have gone along with appearing on the silver screen. Will the future of the monarchy depend on the characters of the monarchs, or will it all be sorted out in terms of the changing world, culture, ideas about religion, education, all that kind of thing? I think it will depend on the character of the monarch. We already know, if things don't change, who the heir was, who his heir will be, and who his heir will be. So theoretically, if Prince George lives as long as his great-grandmother, then the monarchy is proceeding into the next century.

I think it depends very much on keeping the traditional watchwords of the monarchy, duty, respect, selflessness. These are attributes that have enabled the monarchy not only to modify its nature, but to thrive. It is still the most popular institution in the country. It could easily all go wrong. And it really depends how well Charles and William have imbibed the royal duties. Stephen, thank you very much for mulling all this over in a momentous year. You've written the shortest history of the Crown, so everyone head out and get that. Stephen Bates, thank you very much for coming on the pod.

Thank you, Dan. It's lovely to speak to you. you