ANOTHER VOICE
Why we should declare a civil war against the unspeakable puritans
CHARLES MOORE
When Guy Crouchback heard of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he felt a huge sense of exhilaration. At last, the enemy was in plain view. He could happily take arms against the infamy of the 20th century. I felt rather the same after reading last Sunday's Independent.
The issue at stake might not appear momentous. According to the newspaper and to Granada's World in Action, the monarch used to pay income tax, but found shady ways to wriggle out of it. In 1931, for example, George V won great public ac- claim for taking a 10 per cent cut in the Civil List, but then, in 1933, got the Government to remove the tax on his very much greater profits from the Duchy of Lancaster. In 1937, matters were finally settled to the royal advantage, when, a few weeks after acceding to the throne, King George VI received an assurance from the Inland Revenue that he would not have to pay any tax at all.
Needless to say, the paper did not report the fact that when the present Queen came to the throne she made over her Crown Estates revenues to her Government for the course of her reign, thereby giving it much more than it gives her in the Civil List. But one should not make too much of this fact, because it concedes the case that she should pay money to her own Exche- quer. Not that there is a question of eternal principle here. Most of English history until the 18th century was consumed by the monarch's struggle to extract loot from his people (mainly rich people because before egalitarianism no one thought much of taxing the poor), and the counter-struggle of those people to prevent him getting it. A baron who had to deal with King John or a nobleman who faced a descent upon his country house by Elizabeth I plus retinue on one of her rapacious progresses, de- served every sympathy, and one can only regret that their modern equivalents — the people who handed over their dinner services to the late Queen Mary when she said how much she liked them, the bookies whose services are required but not re- warded in some royal quarters — have been more supine. These battles were necessary, and good for English liberty.
No, what is repulsive about the Indepen- dent is not its lack of deference but its unspeakable puritanism. It dignified its news report by following it with a leading article: 'The Queen should be taxed in the same way as anyone else. She should be allowed to claim business expenses, but these should be subject to Inland Revenue scrutiny.' Her private and public wealth should be more clearly separated: 'This would put the monarchy on a proper business footing.'
The article did not explain why the Queen should be taxed in the same way as anyone else. Why shouldn't she be housed in the same way as anyone else, then? Why shouldn't she queue at Sainsbury's like anyone else? Because she's the Queen, of course. Why should the monarchy be put `on a proper business footing'? When has a monarchy ever been a 'proper business'? Mr Andreas Whittam Smith is at present doing his best to put his newspapers on a proper business footing by weeding out whatever talent lurks in them. That is his job, but he is not, he must be reminded, a monarch, and his own difficulties have no application to the House of Windsor.
It may just be an adverse cash-flow which has driven Mr Whittam Smith to write about the royal family, something which, for years, the Independent grandly refused to do, but I think that it is part of a more general design, which began with the Murdoch papers, and now extends among the educated, to turn us into a republic.
In a way, this is a welcome development. Until now, almost everyone alive has been brought up with the idea that Britain is a monarchist country. Like cockney humour in the Blitz it has been part of the myth (by which I do not necessarily mean lie) about national unity, cultural homogeneity, and so on. The idea had its value, but it discouraged people from discussing, as they did in the 19th century, whether a monarchy or a republic was better, and drove them instead towards an originally sentimental and later prurient and now extraordinarily nasty interest in the indi- viduals whom heredity threw up. 'Doesn't the Queen seem a nice person?' they were encouraged to say, and now, which is only the flip-side of the same thing, 'Doesn't that Fergie seem stuck-up?' or, 'Doesn't Prince Charles seem unhappy?' Probably people still think they are 'monarchist', as they gulp down the latest attempt by a newspaper to break up a royal marriage.
The time has come to recognise that we are not all monarchist. We are divided, as perhaps we always have been, between cavaliers and roundheads, and we may be reaching the moment when we need another civil war.
How do we divide? On the one side are arrayed Messrs Murdoch and Whittam Smith and everyone, like the Labour and Liberal parties, who is now clamouring for a written constitution, and everyone, in- cluding perhaps a third of Conservative MPs, who wants a federal Europe, and people who want to ban smoking, and Esther Rantzen. On the other, I am confident, are most of the readers of The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph and most of our coloured population and lovers of poetry and, most to the point, the armed services.
It is only with the prospect of battle that we can recover the true beauty of monar- chy, only if it is threatened that we can turn the frankly rather workaday reality into the stuff of romance. No matter that the Duke of York is not Prince Rupert, that the Princess Royal has launched a thousand ships only in a strictly official capacity, that Princess Michael appears to have priva- tised some of the family silver. Let im- agination set to work. Let us be like Burke, who managed this on Marie-Antoinette: . . . surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delight- ful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere which she had just begun to move in; glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy.
Let's hear it for Elizabeth Windsor.
The only snag, at this stage, is that the royal family itself does not seem to want such assistance. It has not yet suffered a sufficiently great indignity. It still appears to display a touching faith in the loyalty of the Queen's subjects. She, it is said, favours the return of a Labour govern- ment, believing, perhaps, that its laws to control Mr Murdoch will be enough to keep her safe. Every time she looks at a coin or a stamp (assuming she ever does look at a coin or a stamp), she sees her own portrait. Ordinary people, smile at her when she walks among them. She feels reasonably secure. I hope she is, but quote Burke once more. When he saw Marie Antoinette, he wrote afterwards, 'I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbords to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.' Less then 20 years later, she was executed.
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