BOOKS

Royalty and royalties

John Osborne

ot since the Great Lisbon Earth- quake of 1755, when 30,000 people were killed and 11,000 buildings destroyed with- in six minutes, has a natural, if freakish, phenomenon caused such apocalyptic hys- teria as the collapse of the Royal Heir's marriage. The reason for this monumental upheaval has been confidently located as the Windsor Fault. Seismological theory has it that this is partly due to irreversible atmospheric cooling. What is above becomes too large to fit the interior below and must then collapse. The scars then heal and, the theory adds significantly, 'the pro- cess repeats itself with failures at intervals'.

In the aftershock of Lisbon came firestorms of perfervid prophecy, intima- tions of wickedness and divine interven- tion. The first confirmation of the Windsor Fault, with the Abdication in 1936, might be interpreted on the One-to-Twelve Richter scale as Six. 'Felt by all. Some heavy furniture moved. Damage slight.' The next faulting, the divorce of Princess Margaret, scarcely scores more than Two. 'Delicately balanced objects may swing.' The subsequent uncoupling of Princess Anne and Prince Andrew pushed the graph upwards, and the present glum and gleeful forecasts for the Prince Charles Faulting are needling erratically towards Twelve. 'Damage total. Waves seen on ground sur- faces. Lines of sight destroyed. Objects thrown up into the air.'

The tidal waves from this turmoil have brought with them a relentless drizzle of Windsor-Richter almanacs, almost blotting out the already dark, recessionary skies, as they buffet and blind the tabloid con- science of a sullen democracy, uneasy with its palpable mediocrity, manifest ignorance and dismal achievement. Fanning the epi- demic are what the film producer, Sam Spiegel, used to call his 'opinion-makers'. In his case, a bunch of Hungarian comfort- stooges who unfailingly read out the runes he wished to hear. This lot are mostly upstart journalists and academics of the dimmer sort.

Opinion-making is this country's most virulent growth industry. Everybody has opinions and everybody wants more. The market is insatiable. Newspapers and tele- vision pour out opinion, urged on with the frenzy that stepped up the production of Spitfires during the war. Phone-ins prolif- erate, choked with calls from the semi-liter- ate, bigoted and barmy. Opinion polls, the entrails of despotic democracy, are picked over for prophetic insights. We are becom- ing a nation of babbling back-seat cab drivers. 'What are you giving up for Lent?' I asked my wife. 'Opinions,' she said, adding, 'Permanently'.

At this moment, we are deluged by a cloudburst of opinion-making Windsor books. It's amusing, I suppose, to be told that when Diana informed her puzzled mother-in-law that she needed 'space', the matriarch replied, 'Kensington Palace isn't bijou, is it?' Or that, if you get a gong, the Palace will offer you a £55 video of the great occasion. Your 30 seconds of glory stitched into a standard 25 minutes of rou- tine ritual.

But only one is readable, let alone hon- ourable, (an attribute inimical to what is known in the earthquake trade as 'seismic prospecting',). The exception, astonishing, considering the below-stairs tattling banali- ty, the seedy snobbery and suburban hypocrisy of this factitious genre, is A N Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor, (Sinclair-Stevenson, £14.99, pp. 211). It is written in a cool, amusing, plain- dealing style, devoid of the malignity which informs the solipsism and crass specula- tions of all the other grubbing prospectors. It is not without prejudice but, as Dr John- son possibly said, 'One good prejudice is worth twenty principles.'

'What's it all in aid of — is it just for the The removal man's neral sake of a gloved hand waving from a gold- en coach?' I gave these lines to a naïve but bewildered girl in a play I wrote when I was 26, and was generally reviled for it. Later, in a volume of essays by up and coming opinion-makers, I put in my bit by describ- ing the monarchy as the 'gold filling in a mouthful of decay.' In 1961, I presented The Blood of the Bamburgs, a light-hearted lampoon about the trappings of monarchy, and royal weddings in particular. No one realised that this was not mockery of the institution, but of the lunatics who were using it to shore up the debilitating inertia and conformity that dominated life at the time.

My complaints then were against those whom I thought were exploiting something of poetic and symbolic value for their own sentimental and cynical ends. I was not to know then that those whom I regarded as their victims would ever make the suicidal error of yielding to the alligator smiles of the Fourth Estate and, later, put their heads in its mouth with the expectancy of not mere connivance but loyalty and friendship. Thirty years on, Mr Wilson's harsh and personal judgment on individual members of the Royal Family, particularly Prince Charles (whom he dismisses as a non-runner for the throne) and the Queen, who is damned with the ambiguous praise of being 'uninteresting' will not receive a porchful of excremental tributes as I did. Nor, I suspect, will he be 'targeted' by shooting threats from military men in Bagshot.

Where were all these reckless heretics and seditious opinion-makers when a minor character in a stage play put the plain question about a gloved hand waving from a golden coach? Asleep or unborn, I suppose. Anyway, Wilson provides some eloquently honest responses and, blessedly, without any presumptuous claims to privi- leged access or inspired insights. We can know little enough of the interior life of our closest friends. Only Art can penetrate the guesswork of daily intimacy, and king- ship is probably immune even to such inspired scrutiny.

The beauty of the British Monarchy lies in the fact that it requires no damned merit in its unchosen head. As Wilson points out, there is no perceptible onus on its holder even to be liked. Queen Victoria was popu- larly detested. The no-neck little widow spent most of her 60 glorious years skulk- ing behind closed portcullis doors, leading a life of ineffable dullness, snapping at her huge family, foreign relatives and patient ministers. Her husband was convinced she was mad. The reigning monarch may be drunken and adulterous, cruel and clever like the Tudors, pious or libidinous like the Stuarts, dim and wilful like the Hanoverians, or prosaically worthy-bourgeois like the Saxe- Coburgs. The succession is a constitutional roulette wheel. Sometimes you win, mostly you don't. Consider the reign of Charles II, one of the most glittering periods of English history. Charles is portrayed as lazy and indulgent, but he was a ruthless, articu- late, cultured and sexy man. When asked why he found it necessary to have 39 mis- tresses, he replied: one for each Article of Faith.

He was responsible for Christopher Wren becoming an architect, for John Bun- yan publishing Pilgrim's Progress, for the foundation of six of the original thirteen American colonies and the encouragement therein of religious freedom. When he ascended the throne there was £114 in the kitty. He transformed a bankrupt state into the richest and most feared nation in Europe. He was also directly responsible for the patronage of Henry Purcell. Mr Wilson reproves Prince Charles for unseemly intervention in the Gatt negotia- tions. What matter if he should have said a foolish thing? Why should he yet not find the opportunity to do a wise one? We could do with a Purcell or two, and, most of all, a Wren.

Wilson's final paragraph restores com- mon kindliness and sanity to its lost place in this lunatic debate:

More than the House of Windsor will fall if the Monarchy is allowed to be hounded out by the bullies and brutes. It will be a symp- tom of the coarsening of life in Britain today, in which the brashly new inevitably defeats the old, in which the ugly always overcomes the beautiful, and everything of which the British used to be proud is cast down and vil- ified. Is it too much to hope in Modern Britain — filthy, chaotic, idle, rancorous modern Britain — that sweetness and light could ever triumph over barbarism? The Queen is the only individual in British public life who has held out some hope for that.

Even after reading some 200 pages of such detached intelligence, I was beginning to feel that I had been colonically irrigated With the firm's famous brown soup, and a further flip through the housemaid's dumb twaddling of professional snoopers and barking professors is enough to turn the bowels. Nigel Dempster, as you may know, IS an Australian coxcomb, who assumes the airs of a floor-walker, lately fired from Fortnum's for colonial chippiness, and demoted to the counter of a Jermyn Street shirtmakers, from which he jumped into the arms of a Duke's daughter: a bizarre alliance of patrician beauty and fawning braggart- Together with Peter Evans, he has pro- duced the glossily packaged Behind Closed Doors (Orion, £16.99, pp.264, no index). This one will be the parvenues pick, and it is by some lengths the most sleazy. Viz Charles: 'He is shy, he is sensitive, he is even sometimes desolately lonely, but he is also a shit,' says a 'polo friend'. An unnamed source claims that, 'the girls' talk was that he wasn't a great lover, not even a very good one.' As for Diana, she can take it or leave it, preferably leave it. How dif- ferent from the home life of our own dear Queen. Dempster claims that the Duke of Edinburgh found 'Sex without Elizabeth had been wonderful. Sex with Elizabeth had been a revelation.' Anyone who can stomach some six pages of Dempster-speak deserves a straight-cucumber republic.

James Whitaker is the jovial hack they call the big red tomato, and he would clear- ly rather be a peach. In Diana v. Charles (Signet, £14.99, pp. 237) he is pro-Di, sort of. His royal opinion-manger's CV is impeccable. He was there at the Wales's Majorcan holiday in 1986: They read, they sunbathed, they chatted to others, but never once did they address a sin- gle word to each other. I watched through my fieldgiasses [my italics) completely mes- merised . .. I have since been told that fol- lowing this week in the Majorcan sun the Prince and Princess never slept together again.

End of Fairy Tale. Anthony Holden's The Tarnished Crown (Bantam, £16.99, pp.320) is a loftier number. Bagehot is Holden's man, and his guns are trained on the Wind- sor's venality. Holden is very pro the saint- ed Di, who chooses to fly economy in a seat next to the loot.

The coy, blushing teenager married in front of 700 million people now holds the rest of the world in thrall, and the future of the thousand-year- old British crown in the palm of her elegant hand.

Col.

To the British people, their wronged princess is more than ever an object of adoration.

Cot.

Tom Paine is mad professor Stephen Haseler's man (The End of the House of Windsor, I.B. Tauris, £14.95, pp. 208) and the 'royal-state' his target, but there is not much of the zealot's flame in his belly, or prose. This is a sad, mean book. 'The cul- ture of pseudo-mediaeval kingship bears down upon the hapless British subjects in their very daily routine.' Would your tax demand be more bearable if it wasn't marked On Her Majesty's Service? 'The monarchy has added little to the develop- ment of Britain as a serious country'. What is a serious country? Don't ask. Or the potty prof. will explain.

Whatever the interpretations of the Windsor Fault, it has brought ignominy and humiliation upon the heart of toler- ance, irony and kindliness of the country in which I grew up, a land where the modesty of heroes is now despatched with the same derision and contempt as the most wicked- ly ambitious. The seismic prospectors, the malign opinion-makers, have thrown up a generation to whom the word 'honour' is forgotten, meaningless currency. In the face of this aftershock of concerted brutali- ty, I can only cry: 'God Save the Queen', and confusion to her enemies, for they are Eat your "Happy Meal"!' mine, too. May God rot the tyrannies of equality, streamlining, updating; the deranged dreams of chimerical classless- ness and, most of all, absurd, irrelevant rel- evance. And God help the Prince of Wales.