The death of Prince Philip cannot long precede the end of the longest reign in English history. Outdoing the 64 years of Queen Victoria and 59 years of George III, Elizabeth II’s ultimate demise at likely 70 years-plus on the throne will jolt the latent regality which has been the backdrop to life for virtually all of us. But apart from regret, respect and a week or two of wall-to-wall commemoration, will it make much difference?
I suspect the main change will be to the monarchy itself, and maybe to the continuance of the United Kingdom, but not to the essential life of England, where the monarchy is a diminishing symbol and Churchill, war and empire are now as distant and mythical as Arthur, Merlin and the round table.
Since the Tudors, long monarchical reigns have been common. There have been six of more than 30 years, totalling an astonishing 308 years between them. Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Victoria embody eras and dominate the national memories of their years. The German George II is less remembered from the second third of the 18th century, while his grandson George III competes in the national story with Wellington and Nelson. Even so, his forthcoming biography by Andrew Roberts is tellingly entitled “the last King of America”: enduring fame or infamy, according to taste.
Elizabeth II will not stand out in this way. Partly this is because, despite 1950s talk of a new Elizabethan age, her reign was not great or glorious but one of steady retreat in “realms and territories across the seas.” At home, royal power, and the hereditary peerage and deferential society on which it still rested even in the 1950s and 1960s, are now so attenuated that the monarchy is becoming steadily more Scandinavian in the public mind, even if its own behaviour is yet to catch up.
No one understood this better than Philip, an astute semi-outside observer with his Greek, Danish and German lineage. His obituary in the Times contains this telling passage: “In preparation for becoming consort, Philip had read Albert’s biography [as consort of Victoria], but found it unhelpful, remarking that Victoria was ‘an executive sovereign’ while modern monarchy was ‘an institution.’” Compared to Albert, who masterminded the Great Exhibition of 1851 and personified “Victorian” science and industry, Philip was little more than figurehead of an outward-bound youth scheme.
I greatly respect the Queen, and not just because I am one of her privy counsellors. If one of Turing’s early computers had designed a constitutional monarch after the Second World War, it would have come up with something like Elizabeth II. Not least of her attributes is her relentless, quasi-religious obeisance to the unity of her Kingdoms: her fixed annual routine involves three months in Scotland, in contrast with the fleeting visits of her non-Scottish prime ministers.
Charles will not command the same aura, and Eton-and-Home-Counties William and Kate may lose the Scottish dimension entirely. They will also be under pressure to downsize the vast royal possessions, estates and incomes, which few have wished to question while the Queen maintained them—virtually in aspic—as inherited in 1952 from George VI, the last King-Emperor and symbolic wartime saviour alongside Churchill.
So I suspect it may soon be a time of change at John of Gaunt’s “royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle.”
… and Shirley
Very few politicians, even of the first rank, leave much of a mark on society but Shirley Williams, who died on Monday aged 90, is one of the exceptions. She was an inspirational moral force, one of the first generation of prominent female politicians, unique in her appeal to the British liberal conscience.
While a student at Oxford, she acted as Cordelia to the King Lear of Peter Parker, a one-time boyfriend who went on to chair British Rail. In the 1970s and 1980s few of us realised just how much her strong and reassuring public face masked deep personal vulnerability and insecurity, as she had initially struggled as a single parent in a boozy, aggressive, male-dominated political world of endless late-night parliamentary votes. “Like many women of my generation and of the generation before mine,” she wrote in her engaging autobiography, “I thought of myself as not quite good enough for the very highest positions in politics.”
This helps explain the biggest missed opportunity of her career, one that left me, a student SDP activist at the time, aghast: her decision not to fight the safe Labour seat of Warrington at a by-election of July 1981, which she would probably have won. Roy Jenkins assumed the mantle and came within 1,800 votes of one of the biggest upsets in modern political history. She described this as “probably the single biggest mistake of my political life,” even describing as “wounding and clever” the anagram of her name put about by those who criticised her indecisiveness: “I whirl aimlessly.”
Had Williams won Warrington, she rather than Jenkins would probably have become leader of the SDP, and just possibly the outcome of the 1983 election would have been different. By such fine margins is history made in John of Gaunt’s “fortress built by Nature for herself / Against infection and the hand of war.”
