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The Windsors

Sandringham

The British royal family is a unique survivor of the past. This survival is probably due to the fact that Britain has escaped recent revolution or invasion by a foreign power. Because the royal family is an anachronism, a piece of the past which has somehow made it into the modern age, it is of course riven by contradictions. The royal family is felt to define the country, but the family is in fact German in origin. The German link dates to the Act of Settlement of 1701, when Parliament decided to ensure that no catholic could take the throne. The catholic James the Second had been deposed, and following the reign of his protestant daughter Anne, the throne was handed to the protestant kings of Hanover in 1714. The family name of the present royal family is Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, after Albert Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, the husband of Queen Victoria. The name was changed to Windsor by George the Fifth during the First World War, to try and play down what had become an unfortunate connection. His cousin the Kaiser on hearing about this name change made a joke, not a frequent occurrence apparently, about going to the theatre to see a performance of The Merry Wives of Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha.

Perhaps the best place to explore the history of the present royal family is at Sandringham in North Norfolk. Sandringham was originally bought by Edward the Seventh, and the history of this country retreat is coincident with the history of the Windsors.

 

Edward the Seventh succeeded Victoria on the 22nd of November 1901. Edward, the eldest son of Victoria and Albert was never admired, or even liked by his mother. Victoria blamed Edward for the death of her husband: Albert had developed typhoid after a visit to Cambridge to deliver a lecture to Edward on the subject of his dissipated behaviour. Edward got his revenge on his mother's death, smoking huge cigars in rooms where she had banned smoking, and giving orders to destroy hundreds of "rubbishy old photographs." He then embarked on a privately dissipated, but publicly good natured reign, where he played the role of constitutional monarch well. Inspite of some grandiose ideas about influencing affairs of state Mrs Asquith said of Edward: "He subscribes to his cripples, rewards his sailors, reviews his soldiers and opens bridges, bazaars, hospitals and railway tunnels with enviable sweetness." (Quoted A.N Wilson After The Victorians P 7) This might not seem very heroic, but compare this behaviour with that of his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany, who bizarrely wished to rule as an old style absolute monarch. Edward spent the next decade agreeably filling his time doing the things described by Mrs Asquith, and having extra-marital affairs. He died in May 1910.

Edward's successor, his son George the Fifth is a significant monarch in the sense that he reigned through a time when most remaining European royal families disappeared. He continued the figurehead role of Edward, but without the illusions of wider influence that his father had nursed. George, a shy and awkward man, prone to tantrums, lived through years of ceremonial and routine. His main preoccupations were shooting, stamp collecting, clothes and uniforms. Meanwhile in other European countries many of George's relatives were finding that the end had come for their royal role. The royals in a sense represented an influence that went beyond national borders, since they were so interrelated through generations of strategic marriage. This was the age of nationalism, a fact accepted by George, who, as we know, changed the name of the royal family from SaxeCoburg to the English sounding Windsor. Meanwhile, war raged with Germany, ruled by George's cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm.

George the Fifth died on the 28th of January 1936, and the story of his son Edward the Eighth is one of the most remarkable royal stories in recent history. Edward was young, in his early forties, good looking, and in royal terms at least, intelligent. The government, by contrast was made up of old men, who weren't good looking, and were only intelligent in what A.N Wilson called a dull kind of way. Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, was nearly seventy. The only member of the government who was even close to Edward in age was Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and he was unsympathetic to Edward. Many interpretations have been placed on what happened next, but as A.N. Wilson has suggested it seems that the old men of government were scared of the young king's popularity. Edward had an effect on people that can only be compared with that of Princess Diana in more recent times. Apart from being good looking he had that quality of personal unhappiness that seems to make for a good idol. Edward had been to Myrthyr Tydfil to see the situation following the disastrous closure of the Dowlais steel works. The unemployed factory workers had sung hymns for the king, and Edward had remarked: "These works brought all these people here. Something must be done to find them work." This was deemed an inappropriate political remark. Baldwin wanted someone like Edward's father, George the Fifth, who had sat quietly at his stamp collection. So when Edward dumped his long time girlfriend, the married woman Freda Dudley Ward, and took up with a divorcee, Wallis Simpson, the government saw its chance. Wallis was divorced from her former husband by the time of Edward's succession in 1936 and was legally free to marry the new king. But with Baldwin pulling the strings, the Church was asked to help with some constitutional smoke screen about not approving of a divorcee. Edward was effectively sacked as King, although it was called an abdication. The recording of his voice announcing the abdication was then banned. Much was made of Edward's apparent fascist sympathies, although there is little to substantiate such allegations. In fact it was found in 2008 that documents in the National Archives purporting to demonstrate Edward's Nazi sympathies were actually fakes. (Forgeries Revealed in the National Archives, Sunday Times May 4 2008). The source of the forgeries is not known, but efforts seemed to be made to blacken Edward's reputation,and break his popularity. Even in age age when the monarch is only supposed to act as a ceremonial figurehead Parliament appeared afraid of a popular and energetic king. Edward had to go. He was replaced by his stamp collecting brother George the Sixth, who was much more to Baldwin's liking.

Archbishop Lang then made a smug broadcast lamenting the fact that Edward could not live up to the morals of Christianity, or the "best instincts and traditions of his people." This broadcast made Lang widely unpopular and was to rebound back on the royal family. Setting any family up as a model of good behaviour is asking for trouble. Although George the Sixth led a suitably blameless life, and although he and his wife surrounded their daughters Elizabeth and Margaret with the safest and stuffiest of Scottish nobility, the truth of real life would inevitably reassert itself. Princess Margaret gave up the man she loved because he was divorced, and went on to a life that no doubt Archbishop Lang would have had a few smug words for. And Elizabeth, the future Elizabeth the Second, living as model a life as her father, had to endure seeing three of her four children ending their marriages in divorce.

Diana Memorial Fountain, Hyde Park

It was the marriage and divorce of her eldest son Charles that was to cause Elizabeth the greatest crisis of her reign. In 1981 a vulnerable young woman called Diana Spencer, with a personality deeply bruised by a difficult childhood, walked into the strange royal world. She was plucked from her job as a nursery school teacher to become the first English woman in the present royal family to marry a British king or his heir apparent. It appears that Diana was chosen largely because she was considered suitable as a young, easily controlled show wife, while Charles continued his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, who he could never bring himself to leave. This was a recipe for a disastrous marriage, and the disaster played itself out in the full glare of cruel media attention.

When Diana died in 1997, the year after her official divorce from Charles, there was a huge and spontaneous outpouring of grief, which was incredible to witness. This was the power that perhaps Stanley Baldwin had been so afraid of in Edward the Eighth. Diana, the young English woman who once worked as a nursery school teacher, was easy to identify with. This, combined with her natural empathy, and her seemingly constant need for media attention, even in claiming to hate it, produced a potent mixture which captured the British public's attention. Perhaps the tragedy of Diana was the tragedy of the modern age colliding with the past, an old fashioned marriage of convenience colliding with the expectations of modern marriage.

St James's Palace

If you visit London in June you can see living history, as the Queen attends the Trooping of the Colour on Horse Guards Parade just off the Mall. Start queuing from 6.00am to get a good view. Also I'd suggest a walk past St James's Palace. This palace built by Henry the Eighth is the place where the Accession Council meets on the death of a monarch, and where the announcement of a new monarch is made. The modern royal family's role is simply to be there, in an almost Biblical manner, generation after generation. The Bible loved its genealogies. Genealogies take you back into the past in easy steps, back in the case of the Bible to the beginning of time. The families of the Bible were famously turbulent, and did not represent stability in their behaviour. Genealogies represent stability in their presence, a chain leading back to a land of distant origins. The royal family does the same for Britain,and the links in the chain are held at St James Palace.