The Level Headed Old Pheasant Strangler
National Post
Abstract (Summary)
Will she ever abdicate in favour of [Charles Stuart]? In 1990, before the publication of Andrew Morton’s infamous book, [Diana Spencer], Her True Story, she was said to be thinking of it. At the time, researching a profile of the Queen for Chatelaine, I called around various courtiers and friends of the Queen to ask just that question. They avoided me, or hung up on me, until one finally said, thoroughly exasperated, “Don’t you see? She rules by the grace of God. She believes this is her sacred duty. She will not abdicate. She will die first.”
“Diana could touch and feel,” wrote Martin Amis, “perhaps she believed she could heal.” Diana, at least for a while, demonstrated the ancient powers of royalty. As Ben Pimlott points out in The Queen, by the time of Diana’s death, the royal touch, the healing touch of the divine, the mythic power of royalty, was operating full- blown in thePrincess. She was beautiful, and mad, but what gave her most of her power was her connection to royalty. That which is royal is religious, sacred, familial, dynastic and traditional and receives reverence and commands authority because of a combination of these features.
Which meant, in 1998, that it was time to hire a modern public relations firm. In the disaster left by the mad Princess’s death in 1997, faced with catastrophically dropping public-approval ratings, the firm finally woke up to the fact that they needed some help. A committee to examine their collective future was struck. Repositioning took place. The Queen, they said, and it was true enough, was not cold and remote: She was iron-willed, disciplined and orderly, and stoically resistant to expressions of emotion. We were reminded of her youthful speech, dedicating her life to the service of her people. Devotion, dedication, self-sacrifice, duty: That was Elizabeth and would be Charles and William. The model family was cast once again as the recuperating, post-traumatic family, in which the Queen and Duke could be seen as “joint pillars” in a royal sea of discord. Family relationships improved — again, in a way that represented ourselves and demonstrated qualities of character that overcome all disaster.»Jump to indexing (document details)
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(Copyright National Post 2002)
The level-headed old pheasant-strangler is amongst us again, leaving us to marvel at her staying power, and the cultural elite to decry her popularity among “the people.”
“Will we ever be clear of this, this … this … ATAVISM,” one can imagine them saying. “We need a bureaucrat, er, a real Canadian, to be so venerated. Will no one rid us of this troublesome … ” and so on.
Yet, Elizabeth II stays on. Three years ago, Australian republicans made a stab at ending the monarchy in their country, only to realize, once people were aroused enough to ponder the debate, that actually, people wanted it, thanks. They weren’t quite sure why, couldn’t be bothered to think about it, frankly, but somehow, instinctively, they realized that compared to the alternatives, the monarchy, stripped of most of its power, but none of its myth, is a very good thing.
An enormous part of this esteem is due to Elizabeth Windsor’s character. The woman has lived, has she not? Lived enough for us to see exactly how she behaves under enormous pressure, which is to say, with enormous dignity. And she has lived to bring the circle all the way round to the starting point on Bruton Street, in Mayfair, where she was born to a loving couple who only wanted a peaceable, simple domestic life.
Elizabeth is happiest, says a friend, when she’s “rushing around in tatty clothes, laughing, joking, joining in, singing dirty songs.” She is a chatterbox, whose painters and dressmakers despair of ever making her shut up long enough so that they can do their work.
She is a private person who is devoted to her duty, and in that, she is entirely ordinary. She is the best of us, who we would like to be, behaving as we would like to behave were we in her shoes facing what she faces every day.
It seems almost redundant to say this, but when Elizabeth was born, most people were devoted to family. The family was sacrosanct and precious and even when troubled, was still considered the bedrock, the cornerstone and fundament of society.
The Duke and Duchess of York, he stuttering and painfully shy, she a smiling round soul, were thoroughly ordinary and not in the slightest way ambitious.
For the first few years of Elizabeth’s life, before she became the heiress presumptive, she, her sister and her parents modelled for the Commonwealth and the world a perfectly happy family life. Every morning, she and her sister would bounce for an hour on their parents’ bed and roughhouse, and every evening, the family would stay together by the fire and read.
Her parents did not like society, and they certainly did not enjoy cafe society, leaving it to the then Prince of Wales, Edward. Yes, they were grand, but with every action they seemed to say that even though we can have anything or go anywhere and meet anyone, we choose to be here, tucked up with our children, at home. Just like you.
And in that one simplicity, we find the truth of Victorian constitutional historian Walter Bagehot’s much-cited dictum about not letting in daylight on the monarchy’s magic. In the 1980s and 1990s, the institution teetered because cafe society had become so big, and the great maw of the celebrity-creating machine needed new fodder.
Sarah Ferguson and Diana Spencer, two genuinely silly women, provided it, and the sacred task of monarchy — to quietly represent ourselves to ourselves — was drowned in fluff and personal-growth therapy noise. The crack created by the abdication of the Duke of Windsor to marry another genuinely silly woman, Wallis Simpson, widened, tragedy ensued, and by 1997, most people thought it was time for a change.
No longer. Elizabeth II is almost more loved today, in far less innocent times, than when she was born in 1926. If at 50 you have the face you deserve, then at 75, the respect you have earned is your own as well. A great part of that earned respect is due to the fact that despite her wealth and glamour, her life has mirrored the most difficult of many of her middle-class subjects.
Her husband, Philip, has been, by most reports, a difficult husband, with a temper. Duty often keeps them apart. She has lived through the divorces of three of her four children and endured a biography of her son wherein he cites her as a neglectful and cold mother. Her friends are dying; her mother and her sister are dead. Despite her money and power, she is often alone, eating by herself off a tray in front of the television. Her best and closest companions? Her dogs.
Will she ever abdicate in favour of Charles? In 1990, before the publication of Andrew Morton’s infamous book, Diana, Her True Story, she was said to be thinking of it. At the time, researching a profile of the Queen for Chatelaine, I called around various courtiers and friends of the Queen to ask just that question. They avoided me, or hung up on me, until one finally said, thoroughly exasperated, “Don’t you see? She rules by the grace of God. She believes this is her sacred duty. She will not abdicate. She will die first.”
In his classic book The English Constitution, Walter Bagehot said, “If you ask the immense majority of the Queen’s subjects by what right she rules, they would never tell you that she rules by Parliamentary right, by virtue of 6 Anne c.7. They will say she rules by ‘God’s grace,’ they believe that they have a mystic obligation to obey her.”
This still prevails, much as other ancient forms of power, such as Parliament itself and the law courts. There is an element of “unalienable right” that can only be explained in terms of antiquity and tradition. And as British constitutional historian John Neville Figgis once put it, any believer in natural rights is an inheritor of the doctrine of “divine right.”
“Diana could touch and feel,” wrote Martin Amis, “perhaps she believed she could heal.” Diana, at least for a while, demonstrated the ancient powers of royalty. As Ben Pimlott points out in The Queen, by the time of Diana’s death, the royal touch, the healing touch of the divine, the mythic power of royalty, was operating full- blown in the Princess. She was beautiful, and mad, but what gave her most of her power was her connection to royalty. That which is royal is religious, sacred, familial, dynastic and traditional and receives reverence and commands authority because of a combination of these features.
The royal touch has been invoked by kings and queens since pre- history. This power was believed to have come from their own anointing with holy oil at their coronations. For centuries, the belief that the monarch could perform a miraculous cure was so universal and persistent that it was almost a defining quality of monarchy itself. The last member of royalty to practise it outright was Charles Stuart in Italy in 1786.
Therein lies the power of the Windsor family. They represent the ancient springs of humankind, the battle and triumph over the animal in us. They reach back to the Woden-sprung monarchs of the Anglo- Saxon kingdoms, their selection determined exclusively from members of the royal race, who alone possessed the key quality of hereditary mana, or semi-divine luck, providing a vital link between the tribe and the divine, on which the tribe’s well-being depended. Thus they represent our history of successes, triumphs and breakthroughs that connect us to our past, to the vast legacy of freedom and prosperity wrung from the primitive. Very powerful stuff.
Which meant, in 1998, that it was time to hire a modern public relations firm. In the disaster left by the mad Princess’s death in 1997, faced with catastrophically dropping public-approval ratings, the firm finally woke up to the fact that they needed some help. A committee to examine their collective future was struck. Repositioning took place. The Queen, they said, and it was true enough, was not cold and remote: She was iron-willed, disciplined and orderly, and stoically resistant to expressions of emotion. We were reminded of her youthful speech, dedicating her life to the service of her people. Devotion, dedication, self-sacrifice, duty: That was Elizabeth and would be Charles and William. The model family was cast once again as the recuperating, post-traumatic family, in which the Queen and Duke could be seen as “joint pillars” in a royal sea of discord. Family relationships improved — again, in a way that represented ourselves and demonstrated qualities of character that overcome all disaster.
For four generations, royal watchers had believed and widely quoted the Walter Bagehot dictum that daylight should never be let in upon magic. Yet the press in the 1980s and ’90s had done just that, yet somehow, the magic prevailed.
