ANOTHER VOICE

Prince Charles: the unspoken dread of a new development

AUBERON WAUGH

AJapanese friend I made in the ancient town of Saga on Kyushu island, not far from Nagasaki, surprised me some years ago by saying that the English never said what they meant. Of all occidentals, she claimed, we are the most inscrutable, our real meanings hidden under any num- ber of oblique hints and references to such

works as the Bible, the plays of William Shakespeare, Burke's Peerage and the Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan — the last almost unknown in Japan although I am convinced the Japanese would love them.

Even as an Englishman (albeit an RC) I was puzzled by the intense interest shown in the question of whether the Prince and Princess of Wales (whom God preserve) were going to hear a private Mass said by the Pope. When the Spectator scooped the world's press with the news that they were either going to attend such a function, or not, as the case might be, I could see that a few people might be interested but not many; rather as the great controversialist Mr Ferdinand Mount once remarked about soup, that it is a waste of good eating space, I felt that it was a waste of good reading time. After all the ecumenical gestures of the last few years, it seemed a fairly small milestone along the road to- wards general religious indifference.

But when other newspapers seized upon it as the most significant news of the day, and when a sober publication like the

Sunday Telegraph judged it of such import- ance as merited sending an assistant editor

to Rome and back, I realised that the debate had exposed some raw nerve or other of which I was unaware, despite my considerable knowledge of the Bible, Shakespeare, Burke and Gilbert and Sul- livan.

Brooding about it in the small hours, I decided that the appropriate background information to the general frenzy was probably not to be found in any of the authorities cited, but in the Act of Settle- ment passed in June 1701 to exclude the descendants of James H from the throne. The Prince of Wales, despite his curiously Stuart name, is not, of course, descended from James II, our last Catholic monarch, but only from James I, through his grand- daughter Sophia, electress and dowager duchess of Hanover. The Act of 1701 was intended to settle the succession, after Anne, on Sophia and 'the heirs of her body being Protestants'. It also requires 'that whoever shall hereafter come to the pos- session of the crown shall join in commun- ion with the Church of England as by law established' although this requirement could easily be met by a Roman Catholic in the present ecumenical age.

But it would be impossible for any Catholic descendant of the Electress to claim the throne without a major revision of the Act of Settlement. It has, in fact, been amended many times — originally it forbade the sovereign from leaving the country without Parliament's consent — although I am doubtful whether even the Naturalisation Act of 1870 allows Lord Gowrie, as an unnaturalised citizen of Eire, to be a member of the Privy Council. But that is by the way. The intense interest shown in the question of whether or not the Prince of Wales should attend Mass with the Pope, and the virtual certainty that it was the Queen who prevented it, can be explained only by a great unspoken anxiety in the country: that after his abandonment of hunting and shooting, his adoption of a vegetarian way of life and his new interest in choral singing, the Prince of Wales is about to amaze us all by becoming a Catholic.

I do not know how much foundation there is for such an anxiety, but I am all the more certain that the anxiety exists for the fact that no one has yet mentioned it in public, or even very much in private. If it exists, I feel we should face up to it. On a random sample of Protestant nobility and upper-class intelligentsia in the County of Cornwall last weekend, I found that the suggestion reduced them all to spluttering indignation: of course there could be no question of amending the Act of Settle- ment; even if the Church of England is drifting rapidly towards disestablishment of its own volition, he would have to renounce the succession; if he took his children into the Church of Rome then they would have to renounce it, too, even if this meant King Randy I; yes, they would sooner have no monarchy at all than a Catholic king on the throne of England.

No doubt a substantial part of the Protestant English upper class would answer in the same fashion, at any rate on first being confronted by the idea. But to the man and woman in the street nowa- days, Catholicism probably means little more than its prohibition on any effective means of family planning — largely disre- garded, in any case, by many if not most modern Catholics. Even the Duke of Nor- folk, Britain's leading Catholic layman, expressed his doubts about this aspect of Catholic doctrine at around the time of his daughter's marriage to Mr David Frost, the popular entertainer.

But the Prince of Wales, as a convert — he would also have become Britain's new leading Catholic layman — might be ex- pected to try a little harder. Personally, I would rejoice to see a dozen or so Prince Williams and Prince Harrys at the centre of our national stage, particularly as there is a very good chance, nowadays, that they would all survive into maturity. But already I hear the Scrooge-like voices of those who fear it might be rather expen- sive.

I think they are wrong. Judged purely as national entertainment, the Royal Family gives better value for money than all the soap operas ever put on television. Then, of course, there is the moral uplift, sense of historical continuity, cement in the social fabric, focus of national unity — all hard to put a price on, but seldom cheap. Lloyd George used to complain that every duke cost the nation a battleship, but I should have thought that even the humblest mem- ber of the Royal Family was worth at least a minesweeper.

This weekend the Pope visits Holland, a country with a small Catholic majority in the population and a Protestant monarchy. Vast Protestant demonstrations are plan- ned against him, but very few people bothered to protest when the Pope visited England and prayed in Canterbury Cathedral. In fact I think I was about the only journalist to protest in any national newspaper, and that was against the Pope's visit to the hideous, collapsing Catholic cathedral in Liverpool. Charles was always an odd choice of name for a Protestant monarch. Charles I married a Catholic and Charles II is widely believed to have become one on his death- bed. I may be wrong but I believe that in the entire history of the world there has never been an entirely Protestant King Charles except in Sweden, which scarcely counts. All the rest have been Catholics.

One may wonder whether the monarchY would, in fact, survive another Abdication crisis and whether many people outside a small band of dedicated Protestants really care as much as they think they care. But perhaps the anxiety, whether well founded or not, will do something to check the Church of England's present lackadaisical drift towards the greener grasses of chs- establishment.