STALKING A ROYAL
June 2 is the tenth anniversary of the Queen's Coronation.
By ROGER FULFORD
'WHEN George VI's daughter ascended the throne it was as though champagne was to be suddenly and unexpectedly served at a vicarage tea-party.' So Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge in that foolhardy but not malevolent article in the Saturday Evening Post in October, 1957. What a vicarage tea-party is like in the United States I do not know: in England I loved them, and I can still savour the refreshing sting of the best Indian tea, carefully kept by the vicar's wife for these innocent festivities. In such a setting and with the cake-stands piled high with sugar cakes, champagne would have been about as agreeable as a stew of senna pods. As is true of so much else that is written about the royal family. Mr. Muggeridge's remark seems at first sight full of force and sparkle, and it is only on reflection that the reader realises how flat and inappropriate it is. There were two reasons for the maximum Publicity which was directed on the throne in 1952 and 1953. One—as Mr. Muggeridge says —Was the accession of a young queen, but the other—and it was equally important—was the death of her father. Under King George VI, whose character is likely to command both the attention and admiration of historians, the Monarchy was steadily emerging from the Shadows of the Abdication and the inevitable eclipse of kings which, in England, always ac- companies a world war. His sudden death— and We should have to go back to the hero of Oudenarde and Dettingen for the last occasion When an English sovereign died suddenly— directed the attention of the world on the English monarchy. In these circumstances the young Queen acceded to the throne and her Coronation (which fell a decade ago this week) attracted an amount of Publicity to a single family unrivalled in Mao's history. So far as the events of ten years ago gave the British public an excuse for living in fairyland, for imagining that the golden years would return without effort from those who were to enjoy them, we should be justified in asking from the vantage point of 1963:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream? „That question was voiced at the time by the nlanchester Guardian—at that time still secure from metropolitan frenzies in its Mancunian r,ci miht. On the morning after the Coronation was Paper published a cartoon by Low which 1 tg 1- ahs inspired by feeings at once liberal and en- iened. The drawing is before me as I write, sot' its crowd of puppets—dowagers capari- soned lied in Union Jacks and a figure, apparently er(,),,‘A' himself, kneels blowing a tin trumpet; ii-Pty champagne bottles abound, while from a is"ePsided television set a stern female is to . be
readers labelled 'Reality.' The cartoon disturbed the r aders of the Manchester Guardian, but it will be noticed that Low's genius was not directed against the Queen or the royal family, but at the public. The hysterical audience was pinked, not the actors.
No person, or.for that matter no country, can live for ever on the heights and gaze, in the words of Lloyd George, 'on the great, ever- lasting things that matter for a nation—the great peaks of honour.' Therefore, after the exaltation of ten years ago, the advisers of the Queen were wise to try to keep things on a more workaday level and to avoid any encouragement of per- sonal publicity about the Queen and the royal family. The first and inevitable consequence of this was a howl of rage against the Queen's press secretary, Commander Colville, and the private office in Buckingham Palace. After this had been going ahead for some time, Lord Altrincham published his celebrated article in 1957. Lord Altrincham, a good lord, is impor- tant not for what he said but for the time at which he said it. His strictures against the Queen were exaggerated as they were repeated. His strictures are, in fact, of less consequence than the rather touching view of the royal family, whom he likened' to the moon and the stars in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. The blue sky was to be theirs, and he presumably saw a vision of them as the head of a commonwealth of astronauts.
His sharpest darts—and they suited the mood of the moment—were reserved for the court. As the son of a secretary to the Prince of Wales he perhaps saw things from the inside. Himself nurtured in the spanking fields of Badminton, he doubtless knew a tweed coat when he saw one, and he assured the world that the Queen's
'Colossal!. advisers were all of the tweedy sort—an obser- vation which was almost as deliberately silly as Carlyle's Teufelsdrockh when he pronounced that society was founded upon cloth. He urged that the Queen should be surrounded by a court which was at once classless and commonwealth. The diggers and the mounties were to preserve their Queen from the dangers of the tweedies. The New Statesman. ever quick to catch and echo any little silliness, stated that the Queen's courtiers were so old-fashioned that they would have been out of date in the reign of King Charles II (knowing the habits of that charming man, some of us might think it prudent to be a little out of date at his court). The Daily Mirror —ever ready with a playful hint when royal topics are under discussion—urged that the Queen's dining-table should be filled with scien- tists, explorers and writers The suggestion was more than a century old, and we know Queen Victoria's comment on such a gathering—`rather shy work.' The opinion of Tribune was at least alive and real—`Anyone bursting the business open is a public benefactor.'
Yet before we decide whom to crown with laurels we ought first to decide what has taken the place of the possibly excessive adulation of the royal family, of what the Manchester Guardian once happily called 'too much pontifical unction.' In exchange for a story founded on official news, are we being treated to too rich a diet of gossip? During the past few years tittle-tattle about the royal family has gone on apace. People are in- clined to say that the treatment of the royal family by the press is now much 'healthier' than it was. But since when has it been a symptom of a healthy body or a healthy mind to delight in what is trivial?
Of course, it is commonly said that newspaper proprietors have no direct responsibility for what is published: the responsibility is purely edi- torial. 'If you believe that, you will believe anything,' as the Duke of Wellington said to the gentleman who struck up a conversation with him, beginning, 'Mr. Smith, 1 believe.' Our forbears perhaps saw these things in their true light. Many years ago The Times published a scurrilous notice about the then Prince of Wales. The writer was not punished, but the proprietor was. He was placed in the pillory at Charing Cross for one hour between twelve and three in the afternoon. Mr. John Walter is one of the few leading proprietors who can claim that his family have climbed the road to ownership the hard way. No one can seriously dispute that our forbears were sensible in visiting on the heads of the proprietors any shortcomings in manners towards the royal family. Every student of newspaper history knows how the whims and fancies of Northcliffe were studied by his staff and coloured the Daily Mail and even The Times. 'No booming of the Asquith wedding' (Lady Violet Bonham Carter's), 'not too much jazz,' say pleasant things about the clergy of the Church of England,' I hate to see perform- ing animals,' and so on through a vigorous cata- logue of the unexpected. Woe betide the unhappy scribe who forgot these high matters.
Whether, in addition to responsibility for what is said in the papers about the royal family, we can attach to the proprietors what the lawyers understand by intention is a far more subtle and interesting point. Sir Martin Lindsay, a Conservative Member of Parliament, raised this matter—so far as the Express newspapers were concerned—in the House of Commons a year ago. The Member for Solihull listed sixty-six examples of attacks on the royal family in the Express newspapers. The Express newspapers then republished them in pamphlet form with comments in justification. In passing, it is interesting to notice that the justification in over half the cases was that the facts were also published by another newspaper. (After the Vassall Tribunal this defence sounds somewhat thin.) Episodes such as those raised by Sir Martin have inevitably disturbed even the warmest ad- mirers of Lord Beaverbrook. Some, casting round for an explanation, find it in the sugges- tion that Lord Beaverbrook was piqued by a personal reference to himself in Sir Harold Nicolson's biography of King George V. Those who believe that public men are influenced by such trifles are childish, but the matter merits explanation, if only in justice to Lord Beaver- brook. Here is the passage: A flagrant case of such disregard [of the views of the King over Honours] occurred in 1916. Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law, desiring to obtain a seat in the House of Commons for one of the new Ministers, offered a peerage to a Conservative Member represent- ing a safe constituency. The King, when asked for his consent, replied that he did not `see his way' to approve of this honour since he did not consider that 'the public services' of the individual in question 'called for such special recognition' Although no names are mentioned, there are several reasons which make this extract singu- larly unfortunate. Anyone with a working know- ledge of those times could not fail to guess who is meant. When Asquith fell, two peerages were given by those who supplanted him. One went to Lord Stuart of Wortley, a Conservative Mem- ber of long standing, and the other to Sir Max Aitken. In the inner circles of politics Beaver- brook was known to have been largely respon- sible for the overthrow of Asquith, and the cutting reference to what is meant by 'public services' is obvious. `Bunty pulled the strings' was how the Morning Post amiably described Lord Beaverbrook's part. In many biographies, royal and otherwise, a remark of this kind would not have greatly mattered; it would have sunk to oblivion. But Sir Harold Nicolson's life of George V is, in my judgment, the outstanding biography of the post-war years and will cer- tainly remain an authority of prime distinction to which other writers will turn. Moreover, in a biography sanctioned by the Monarch there is a particular force.
On top of all this, Lord Beaverbrook has made it abundantly clear that he regarded his accep- tance of a peerage as a great mistake. 'I had been jockeyed, or had jockeyed myself, into a position in which I thought I had no choice. The peerage was the way to escape. I took it. It would be absurd to deny that it was a very foolish way of escape.' Moreover, the peerage had been offered to him by Lloyd George in unfeeling terms, rather like a country squire giving a pair of old boots to a tramp. To find out thirty-six years later that what was hesi- tatingly accepted and contemptuously given was regarded by the Sovereign as far above his deserts was a stinging end to a galling episode.
But those who argue that this slight explains the paragraphs in the Express newspapers would not seem to know their man. These are the knocks which public men have to accept with equani- mity, and Lord Beaverbrook has always been completely frank about his own career and what is said of it, 'good and bad, pleasing and dis- agreeable.' No, those who want to offer an ex- planation for the comments in the newspapers about the royal family would probably be wiser to turn to their history books rather than to their biographies. And if we wished to wound Fleet Street we should probably say that teasing the reigning family is so ancient as to be almost fusty: for it springs from the aristocratic and in- sular superiority which governed our minds in the eighteenth century. A modern editor would burn with indignation when he read how King George II snubbed Lord Hervey for not knowing the exact relationship between the Prince of Sulzbach and the Elector Palatine. (So did I till I went to Schwetzingen, where the Prince lived, saw its beauties and realised that it was the favourite home of the English princess from whom George II was descended.) Then there is the left-wing stream, the kind of book published by Bradlaugh, on which Sir Winston's father trampled in the House of Commons. 'I plead against the White Horse of Hanover. I loathe these small German breast- bestarred wanderers whose only merit is their loving hatred of one another.' Lord Rosebery told us that the lives of German princes were as dull as those of the carp in their own stew- ponds. On such strong and ancient foundations was built all the prejudice engendered by two world wars. 'German' became a pejorative word. Yet to use the word German in its scornful sense of the Queen's ancestors, of Prince Philip's relations or of the Queen of the Hellenes is about as sensible as saying that the Jewish martyrs at Belsen belonged to. Nazi Germany. The royal persons mentioned were part of the 'We, Major, prefer to call a spade a spade.' German nation, but they were the first victims of what we mean by the word German—the first prey devoured by Prussia on the road to German unity. Queen Frederika, named after an English royal duchess, is a member of the House of Hanover which was driven out of Germany and robbed of its wealth by the Prussians. Her husband, the King of the Hellenes, belonged to a family which was likewise savaged by Prussia. Lord Northcliffe was in large part responsible for the modern attacks on the Germanic con- nections of the royal family. He drove Prince Louis of Battenberg from the Admiralty; he forced King George V to anglicise the titles and name of the family; he was responsible for making the royal family slightly ashamed of its origins. But these ancient battles are scarcelY worthy of the British public in 1963. They have led in the past to pretence that the royal family had no relations—a pretence which was seen when the Queen married and we were told that Prince Philip belonged to one of the very 01d families of Europe which had no surname. Now we have become much more frank and the Queen was able to say in public: 'Indeed, the connee' tions between my family and the old States of Germany go back many generations.' The recent wedding of Princess Alexandra has enabled us to see how a section of the newspapers deals with this rather fine point of royal relationships. The Daily Mirror, shoal)/ before the wedding, published an article on the wedding guests based on a thoughtful and valu- able article on them which • had been published in the Observer just before. The readers of the Mirror were told that these guests were `royal deadbeats,' pretenders and pensioners.' Queen Victoria-Eugenie is here in London for the do. Hell, the Spanish monarchy fell in 1931.' Some may have felt that an English princess, born at Balmoral, returning to her native land after a lifetime of tribulation, was entitled to a some' what less frosty welcome. Now, here there is all the difference between being rude for the sake of being rude, and belog rude for the sake of a principle or a belief. It Was interesting in this connection to compare the article in the Daily Mirror with the articles 111 the Daily Worker or the New Leader at the time of the wedding of the bride's mother In 1934. Then the occasion and the guests all cattle under attack, but with the object of contrasting the display at one end of the scale and the misery at the other. The New Leader suggested that the menu for the royal banquet might six', with Unemployment Soup, through Starvation Stew to Means Test Trifle. Such things treYt strike the reader as somewhat feeble, but Ta: least they sprang from something sincerelY feL'i The Mirror article suggested that the spirit 01 Andy Capps reigns supreme in Holborn Circus. Lord Northcliffe once said something abed the biting habits of mankind: his nephew sbOs us in the Mirror that he is well equipped to OP' But perhaps at long last Fleet Street might be persuaded to draw down the curtains on the t foreign connections of the reigning house. At the end of his life Northcliffe is believed to have said of his newspapers, 'I don't supPrise they have done any harm.' Let us hope that th°se rather plaintive words can be said of the British press in the Sixties.
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