In Our Time - The Monarchy

Episode Date: June 10, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the British monarchy. In the last two hundred and fifty years, we’ve beheaded one king, exiled another, hired a distant German-speaking dynasty to fill the monarch’s role, and then mocked and ignored them, suffered a mad man and then a lavish sensualist, threatened a young queen, and then, over a century ago, invented a pageantry which brought majesty to a monarchy which is now tilting at the twenty first century against many and mighty odds. How has the monarchy survived since the execution of Charles the First two hundred and fifty years ago and what relevance does it have in a devolved Britain?With Professor David Cannadine, Director of the Institute of Historical Research, London and former Lecturer in History and Fellow, Christ’s College, Cambridge; Bea Campbell, sociologist, journalist and author of Diana, Princess of Wales.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, I'm joined today by historian David Canardine and social commentator B. Campbell to look at the changing face of monarchy.

How has the moniker survived since the execution of Charles I first 250 years ago? What relevance does it have? in the devolved Britain of the late 20th century. Professor David Canardine is one of Britain's leading historians. He's been a lecturer in history and fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, and has taught at Columbia University in America. He's the author of several books, including The Pleasures of the Past, class in Britain, and the decline and fall of the British aristocracy,

about which Michael Foot wrote that it was how real history should be written. He also wrote a famous essay about the monarchy entitled, The Invention of Tradition. B. Campbell is leading sociologist, journalist and author of Diana, Princess of Wales. Her books include Wigan Pier Revisited, the Iron Ladies about Tory women, and Goliath, Britain's Dangerous Places, and account of the riots of 1991 on estates in Cardiff, Oxford and Tyneside. David, let's take a broad sweep to start with.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, we executed, or the British or certain section of the British people, executed a king. Then not very long after we expelled a king. We brought in foreign implants, which didn't take very well, and they were much mocked. We had a mad king. We had a sort of sensual and corrupt king. We had a queen who was ignored and derided for most of her reign. And then about 100 years ago, hey, presto, it all began to change. So how did that first 150 years post the execution of Charles I first? How did the monarchy survive what looks as a series of total disasters on its part. Well, it is important to remember that this nation did pioneer getting rid of monarchs long before the French thought of it, or even the Americans, by executing Charles I first in the 17th century.

And, of course, they threw out another monarch James II in 1688. So the 17th century wasn't a particularly good time to be an English monarch. And then, of course, they imported the Dutch, that's to say William III, and then they imported the Hanoverians, George I and so on. all of this does appear to give a very unstable picture to the existence and survival of monarchy in England and subsequently in Britain during the 17th and 18th centuries. But I suppose what one does have to remember is that the execution of Charles I first was an utterly extraordinary event

soon lamented by many of the people who had been involved in it and on the whole until the French Revolution, the norm for all European societies was a hierarchical world with monarchs at the top. and that was largely the accepted way of doing things and whatever the personal shortcomings and foibles of individual monarchs having as it were accepted that system, then you tended to put up with it. Was the French Revolution a great blessing for the British monarchy,

the English monarchy? Let's call it the British monarchy, make it easier and probably more accurate. It was the French Revolution a blessing in the sense that we were beginning to pioneer republicanism and then the French Revolution heads off over there the French became our, were our enemy, and because they were an enemy, we were against what they were for, and they were for non-monarchy,

so our monarchy was sort of shored up. And this is really, I'm sorry, I do apologise if I rapidly were going through this, but there's a certain sense. A monarchy was shored up because we were against the French, more than because we were for the monarchy. Is there some sense in that? Well, I think it's certainly true

that at the time of the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic wars that come subsequently, the fact that the British and the French are fighting each other, and that the French are in the first place, revolutionaries executing their monarch and then put in this upstart, corsic and tyrant posturing around as an emperor. The result of this is that the British tend to take the view that their monarch stands for order and stability and even some form of liberty in contradistinction to a world of anarchy and executions and despotism and tyranny. How far this is because they hate the

French and how far it's because they love George III? I think it's very hard to know. But there isn't any doubt that the revival of loyalist sentiment vis-a-vis the British monarch in the late 18th and early 19th century does in considerable part owe that development to the hostility with Republican and subsequently Napoleonic France. Looking at that period, B. Campbell, we obviously come into the present day, but looking at that period from the execution of Chazer 1st to, as it were, maybe let's say, the arrival of Queen Victoria. What's your view of the monarchy in that time? Do you think it hung on by its fingertip? Sure. Well, I think it did, and I think what's interesting about the work that David's done, and I suppose the reading he takes from his research, is that we've got a royal family or royal families whose history is full of tumult.

So the notion of stability and the notion of, you know, this enduringly temperate society is not borne out by the history of a royal family. And I think he's probably right, well, I would want to argue with some of what he's saying, in the sense that, sure, this family has been extraordinarily inventive and stalwart and a genius at survival. However, it's done that in conditions of great tumult. Up until this century, surprisingly enough, it's probably had the calmest ride. It's a quiet century for a very quiet century for the royal family, up until now, of course.

It's all beginning to shift and rumble. But do you see it from, before we come to this century, up to the end of the last century, from 1649 to the end of it. Do you see it as an accidental survival, or do you think it because of the hierarchical nature of the societies, it was bound to be there despite the madmen and the expelled men and the corrupt men and so and so forth? I think it's a fascinating filter

through which to look at the nature of our democracy and the nature of our political system. And I suppose to look at the room for manoeuvre for republicanism, And the degree to which our party political system or our parliamentary system has never really connected very passionately with popular rouse about royalty. So it's clear that since the Denise of Charles,

the political system, the parliamentary system, has periodically been volcanic for the royals. Nonetheless, it has collaborated well to ensure its survival. So what we've got, I think, is a contradiction in British politics. Popular feeling, which is interested in the morals and powers of the royal family, which has very little articulation in our parliamentary political system. Do you think it's survival again to the end of the 19th century? Do you think that it could be described as, obviously, it's hindsight now, is accidental,

or is there a connecting thread? Is there something about the British people that always wants it to be there, despite the fact that they're kicked out, executed, we tolerate people who are sadly mad and so and so forth. Or do you think it's just because they were useful now and then? I think... For the real power blocks inside the country. The whole business of why monarchy's end,

and of course the only example in Britain is the execution of Charles I. The whole business of how and why monarchy's end is a very complicated subject. And it always seems to me that one of the things we should not lose sight of in Britain is that on the whole, it's had a pretty good military run for its money in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

And if one looks at why other monarchies have gone, especially if one thinks in the early 20th century of the Austrian monarchy or the Russian monarchy or the German monarchy, it's often but not always due to disaster in war, which discredits an entire social system in a very cataclysmic way and then to a degree of popular discontent which is effective and results in these people being got rid of. Now, in Britain, in the last 200, 250 years, those circumstances have never pertained.

It does, I think, take a lot to get rid of monarchs, actually. If one thinks of what it has taken to remove the German emperor, the Austrian emperor, the Russian emperor, those are indeed seismic convulsions of a sort that this nation has not witnessed in the last 200 years. So I think very often monarchs just survive because there's no reason which seems adequate to get rid of them. There may be no reason to keep them, but that's not enough to get rid of them. They have to be real reasons for popular discontent on a massive scale to throw them out. And that has just not occurred in this country. And actually, I have to say, I don't think it's in prospect of occurring in the foreseeable future.

Now, can you talk us through the way in which Victoria came in with no great prospects, went through a period of being disliked, Mockner-Sense. But by the end of her reign, we had a great icon, matriarch of empire, we had the invention of pageantry. Thanks for the phrase. Now, can you just tell us what happened and why we ended up 100 years ago with much of, in the sense, what is still around now?

I think that is exactly right. The monarchy that Victoria inherits in the late 1830s, early 1840s, is not especially popular, it's not especially wealthy. The pageantry associated with it is not well-performed, and it's not an imperial monarchy in the sense that it becomes towards the end of her reign.

By the end of her reign, the British monarchy has become wealthy in a way that wasn't true before. It's the focus of grand, spectacular pageantry, the Diamond Jubilee, the Golden Jubilee, her own funeral, Edward VIII's coronation. It's an imperial monarchy. She herself is Empress of India from 1877 on, and on the whole it's a venerated monarchy.

And that's, in a sense, that monarchy, imperial, popular, rich, grand, splendid, is the monarchy, or is the monarchy, or is the particular embodiment of monarchy, which survives largely unscased, though of course there's a big hiccup with Edward VIII at the time of the abdication, but that monarchy and those essential elements

of the British monarchy survive right the way through until the present queen comes to the throne, and that's the monarchy she inherits. What's your view of the late Victorian, victorious monarchy be? How do you see her? Well, I think what David said is very interesting.

in a way more interesting than Victoria's emergence from the shrouds of mourning into very strategic, popular ceremonial displays. It's consummated by the pathetic, in her view, Bertie, who really becomes a master of ceremony. And it's clear that in the 20th century, the beginning of the 20th century, that the wind has become extraordinary. inventive, improvises of something, this is all from your work, David, of something that suggests an eternal, triumphant, unchanging monarchy. So you've got a paradox. Here we have in the very

moment of its quite eccentric modernisation, the display of rituals and claims to tradition, that of course, you know, they're vaudeville, actually, but nonetheless, extraordinarily So what I think that then has to connect us with is, as I said earlier, the political system that this family hasn't simply invented very brilliantly its own survival. It's entered into a symbiotic relationship with a class, the aristocracy, which is extraordinarily successful and extraordinarily influential in containing, or if like, defining the limits of democratic practice in Britain. And that's what the story, that particular moment in the story of the royal family is all about, I think.

Here's another version of that story, which is that during the 19th century, the British monarchy loses the functions most associated with monarchies. That is, they cease to lead the troops into battle. They're no longer warrior kings. They're no longer governing. They're no longer making laws. And so what you have to do if you've got a monarchy which is going to survive for the reasons we talked about earlier because the forces of inertia are quite considerable is you have to invent new things for them to do. And the history, it seems to me, of the British monarchy over the last 150 years, if one thinks of pageantry, the empire, or also, of course, the royal family. that bees' work has concentrated on.

These are finding new things for them to do or new justifications for their continued existence. And I think the problem the British monarchy face is now is that those new justifications that were invented in the mid and late 19th century are largely falling away, and they've got to start again. We'll come to now in a moment or two, but just that could be interpreted,

quite interesting remark, right? Anyway, we are now now. Anyway, let's talk about, can you just give us some examples of the invention of pageantry, So the listeners have an idea of what was invented, those who are not to speed on that. The sort of thing I'm thinking of is the self-conscious promotion of very grand public spectacles designed to appeal not just to London but throughout the British nation and around the globe where the British Empire was to be found.

And this can I suppose be dated as beginning with the Golden Jubilee in 1887 and is further intensified with the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 and then Victoria's funeral in 1901. If one thinks, for instance, of what we supposed to be the age-old tradition of state funerals having the gun carriage pulled by naval ratings, which was very much in evidence at Lord Mountbatten's funeral and Winston Churchill's funeral, that only dates back to the time of Queen Victoria's funeral, when in fact her gun carriage was pulled by horses, the horses bolted, and so the naval officers pulled the gun carriage up the hill at Windsor, and that's the origin of the tradition that that's the way we do things. Now, before we move to the present day, one more thing.

Important B, and then David, do you think empire was to the re-emergence, probably, the new, the newness, the new monarchy that we invented or found ourselves to have at the end of the 19th century? Absolutely, again, symbiotic relationship, and I suppose what we've seen, we've witnessed is the kind of seamless transition from an empress who presides over one of the greatest, conquests across the planet ever to a queen who presides over a commonwealth apparently of independent and democratic nations. Now, what I think that transition tells us is that it's now the international paraphernalia of Britain's presence across the world

that has been absolutely crucial to the way in which the royal family has displayed itself and appears to be the parent of this great, and then the mother of this commonwealth. The whole tone of her relationship to the commonwealth, I've always thought was kind of sick, actually, of this rather, you know, this maternal woman presiding over embryonic democracies, rather than a royal family that never, never, never once has said sorry.

Even, for instance, in those ridiculous ceremonies of the investiture of the Prince of Wales, again, great examples of, of imbeckons. improvisation of apparently eternal ceremonies. Here we have a prince, we've had two of them now, speaking to the Welsh, in Welsh, with an English accent, in a way that can only, in the most schizoid way, confirm their experience of subordination to the English. So all of these ceremonies are about domination and personal dominion.

When we're talking about the royal family doing this, the royal family doing that, Is that the way to talk about it? Or is the royal family being manipulated to do this and manipulated to do that, David, what do you think? I think the whole business of who is in charge and who is doing what is very difficult to unravel. I think very often the royal family are only dimly aware

of the broader changes in society which in turn change their performance, their behaviour and people's perceptions of them. If I could come back to the empire thing for just one moment, I think it is important to notice that in the late 19th and early 20th century the British monarchy does undenably become much more imperial. But of course, we need to remember that the British monarchy is operating at that time in a world where other great powers or also other great power monarchies, Russia, Germany and Austria, Hungary.

And they were also imperial monarchies. And of course, one of the strange aspects of the British monarchy is that those imperial monarchies disappear at the end of the First World War. And those nations reconstruct themselves and reconstruct their political regimes. Whereas in Britain, this comes back to the business of success in war. that imperial late Victorian monarchy has continued to survive almost until our own time. And the Queen as head of the Commonwealth is, I suppose, the latest reinvention of this imperial monarchy. And it gives her, of course, a global role which no other monarch has

and which she wouldn't have if she wasn't head of the Commonwealth. Okay, well, it became taboo to criticise the monarchs. And when Grigg and Mugridge and John Osborne did so in the 50s, they were much howled down. But the 60s, things started to change, but the monarchy still went on. So let's try to shift it forward into the last part of the century. You have said, Be Camel, one of the things that disappoints you is that the Queen has failed to feminize the monarchy. Quote, feminize the monarchy, unquote.

Your phrase. What do you mean by that and why do you think that failure is a failure? Right, well, the first thing, well, I have to say, Melvin, is I don't care. In fact, I'm rather glad that she did feel. What I'm trying to suggest there is that here was an icon. who was heralded as someone who would both be modern and because she was a woman infuse the monarchy with a sense of connection

to the world of women. And she's a very good example of how, if you like, biology is not your destiny. What she has been is very much her father's daughter and what she's implemented is a regime which represents the last bastion of an ancient form of patriarchal power. And what's unfortunate, I think, for her family and for her, is that her

insistence that she would do things as her father would have done them. In other words, to be her father means that she hasn't connected with the world of women. At precisely that point in our history, in modern history, when the social relationship between men and women is the site of enormous tumult. Men and women are trying to sort out something different with each other, a more democratic deal with each other. And what she's bequeathed to her son is an extraordinarily patriarchal regime with patriarchal values. And that landed him in the midst of a generation from which he was essentially estranged, because he thought that he could behave like Princes of Wales always have.

At a time when he was going to be under scrutiny and when his own generation was going through remarkable changes in terms of sexual politics. So I think that what the Queen did by, if you like, reinstating, reproducing a patriarchal way of going about their business, which was to give a feminine authority to that ancient project, which of course has now lost its legitimate, not its power. Do you think that gender in the Queen's case is as important as character? Do you think that what her main job is she's,

sought to do was to continue with the monarchy as a monarchy and connected with the constitution as a constitution, whether it was masculine or feminine was neither here or there. And it was her character as she thought and a lot of people think is the most important thing about her success

rather than, and the business of feminising it was as far as she is concerned, neither here nor there. That's not the game. Ah, but you see, this is where it all gets a bit sort of tacky and difficult. Clearly, at one level the fact that this woman was a woman

subliminally connected her popularity, I think, to a sense that this woman was going to be womanly and she was going to bring a kind of womanly tone to the exercise of public power. She didn't do that, and that would be one of the great mistakes of her reign as a queen. David, Kenanate, indeed, taking that point, but taking it into another point,

the personalisation of the royal family, the 60s, 70s and 80s, television, films were made about, they lent themselves to interviews, they got involved with the press, especially the younger members, took the press on and the press took them on and so and so, and they became, it's been called a sort of, I think you called it, lots of people call it, great soap opera and so and so forth. What do you think that's done to the monarchy? How do you think it stands after that, the wash of the last, say, 20 years? I think that it has been disadvantaged, let's put it that way,

having presented itself for so long, with varying degrees of plausibility across the generation since Queen Victoria, as the emblematic, the ideal national family. This was, I think, one of the new things that was found to justify it or to render it popular from the mid-Victorian period on. And they have, in a sense, been hoist with their own partard, because, of course, what we've discovered in the 80s and 90s is that it's, in fact, not an emblematic family at all. Well, actually, you could argue that it is, actually, in one way.

You could say that lots of families are having lots of trouble with children not being able to succeed in marriages and relationships are much more all over the place than there were because things are. This might be for the better because people held together in marriages before which caused them nothing but suffering. In the emblematic sense, there's an argument that says,

well, actually they're like a lot of families knocking around at the moment. Yes, I think that's right, but they're not happy with that. Can I make one other point, by the way, I actually don't agree with this notion that it's a patriarchal monarchy. It seems to me that what we actually have here is a much more complicated thing than that, The dominant figures in the British Royal family for the last half century and probably more are women. There is a sense in which constitutional monarchy is itself emasculated monarchy,

that is that the male functions are taken away, and so you're left with the stress on the female functions of family and clothes and so on. And I think that Prince Charles, though, in some sense, is a child of a patriarchal world, is by the standards of most princes of Wales, a man with a much more complicated split personality, tending towards, as it were, scepticism of his own upbringing. I don't think this picture of it, I don't think this picture of it as a, as a traditional patriarchal monarchy is historically either right or nuanced.

I've got to bring in Princess Diana here, not only because you've written, in my view, a very provoking and excellent book about it, but because it'd be silly not to. She has been the dominating figure in the last 10, 15 years. Now, what do you think, if anything, the legacy of her, alas, short life has been, is on the British monarch at the end of the 20th century.

Be Campbell first. I think what she, did that was so very remarkable. And remember, we're talking about a woman who we didn't hear for a decade, who was a very good girl. She did what they wanted her to do, which is to be seen but not heard. So it took a long time for this woman to find her voice. And when she found it, what she had to say connected her with popular feeling because it was about what?

First of all, the experience of a woman who would have, for most women, appeared to have everything. and actually what she had was a deceiving husband, a dreadful marriage, marries into a horrible, cold, very functional, not dysfunctional, very functional family, whose project began an end with the preservation of their own public and personal power. And what she does, this is as much as rather than power, don't you think, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's a commitment to extraordinary, to being witnessed as persons who have personal power,

and wield personal dominion. And what she does is to call them to account, to expose the disgracefulness and deceptions of that internal regime. She connects, therefore, with a great movement outside herself. She may not have been a heroic feminist. It doesn't matter. What she does in her critique of the royal family is expose them to the kind of scrutiny

that shows that they were involved in a similar sort-out as the rest of us. I think that that's a very, very strong argument and very persuasive, but you could also argue that since her death, David, the waters have closed over, the queen continues to be very popular, the monarchy is strong, Prince Charles's reputation increases, and so on we go. The show goes on. Well, the show does have a habit of going on, even though, of course,

many people predict and some people want for it to end. I mean, you yourself describe it as irresistibly irrelevant, but the interesting thing is irresistible. Yes, I think that's right. does go on. As far as Diana is concerned, I think the most poignant aspect of her life, which is not often discussed, is that she was the great advertisement by the fact that she didn't have it for the need for women to be properly educated. And it's always seemed to me that one of the most

poignant aspects of her life was a woman trying to come to terms with an utterly extraordinary world. I don't contest that. And lacking any real mental signpost as to how to do that. But that was very important. I think people began to see, my goodness, you know, the rest of us wouldn't dream of delivering our daughters to a marriage like that or a family like that. And I think people were chilled once they discovered what the fate of this union would have been.

I think that's all true, but to come back to the point of is it going to go on, I have four ways in which the British moniker could be brought to an end. Devolution will change all this. Parliamentary legislation to abolish it, which isn't going to happen. People taking them off to execute them, which isn't going to happen. They themselves give up, which isn't going to happen. And then it seems to me we have a set of things which are rather more iffy, one of which is a referendum, which was once much talked about,

but I think is now gone. Devolution, I think, will be interesting. I think it will be very interesting to see how it plays out in Scotland and in Wales. But on the whole, I must repeat that although people regularly say the House of Windsor is going to end, one has to keep asking the question, what is the mechanism whereby it would happen? But something is unleashed now through devolution that I think could not have been imagined. And clearly, the United Kingdom is no longer that thing. It's very hard to imagine, a Prince of Wales, cavorting around Scotland,

and expecting people to, as it were, fall to their knees. It won't happen. It won't happen anymore. You seem in your writing is rather disappointed that the British don't take a firm a line with the monarchy and, as it were, put them in the place you would like them to be put in. You're rather disappointed in us all, be. No, I'm not disappointed in us at all. I am, I think, interested in the failure of political parties

to connect with popular feeling which has a republican kind of rumble in it. But there isn't much of it really, is that? It's surprising. You could say. You could say surprisingly there doesn't seem to be much of it. What we have is an extraordinarily deferential parliamentary political system that dare not raise this question. Yes, we haven't talked about the influence of deference,

which is a nuisance because it's a very important point. It's crucial to all this. And so what you've got, I think, is sentiment, feeling unease, unsettlement that doesn't have a champion in the parliamentary system. So there's this great chasm in British politics between popular feeling with small peas and political resolution with a big pea in the House of Commons. Thank you both for turning up. Thanks David Kennedy.

Thanks, Pete Campbell. Next week I'll be joined by Francis Fukuyama and the Israeli writer Amos Oz to discuss the changes that have taken place through the century and so on. Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.com. Thank you.