THE JOURNAL
Illustration by Mr Calum Heath
On 6 May, a man in England will go from mortal to deity. Despite Britain’s flirtation with revolutions – Cromwellian or Glorious – British kings and queens have always been invested with the qualities of godliness. They may be responsible to Parliament, but in some senses our constitution is arranged around the notion that their one and only superior is God. And despite this direct line to the big man, we still expect them to lead a life of pure and unadulterated boredom. Who’d be a king these days? I mean, think of all those people, the noise, the endless cutting of ribbons in Swanage. To be royal in the 21st century is to be locked in a cage of pure gold.
You might have access to Windsor Castle, to Buckingham Palace, Sandringham and Balmoral. You might have crowns with rubies and diamonds that have sat on every monarch’s head since Edward the Confessor. But you have all the agency of a rabbit in a hutch.
The problem for a monarch is simple: the people. The thing is, the British tend to have expectations of their sovereign. We want them to be an example. We want them to embody regal dignity. But we don’t want them to be grand. We want them to exemplify the majesty of the state, but we want them to do so as cheaply as possible. A great part of the monarch’s job is to walk a path between their people’s contradictory desires.
Every day is planned a year in advance. Every morning, a red box will arrive on their desk with government papers to receive the regal initials. Even Christmas Day is not sacred. Whitehall refers to you as “Reader Number One”. You will have to meet foreign dictators. And not just meet – entertain, feed and amuse. And you will do so at the behest of the government. For despite being an emissary of God, you are also a slave to Number 10 Downing Street.
Your constitutional role is confined to the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn. Your power is embodied and confined to the raising of an eyebrow.
As Mr Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people”, and, my goodness, you’ll have to meet a lot of people. Queen Mary – the current king’s great-grandmother – shook so many hands of other people during a tour of South Africa that her wrist snapped. She smiled on anyway. A living, breathing embodiment of pre-war Britain: imperious, unflinching, and with all the sense of humour of a boiled egg.
“Queen Victoria was subject to numerous assassination attempts, including being struck around the head with a stick while travelling down Piccadilly”
To suppress your emotions in public is as much a part of your job as opening Parliament. Just think of Princess Anne, who was subject to an armed kidnapping attempt in 1974 and described it with admirable sangfroid, thus: “He opened the door, and we had a sort of discussion of where and where not we were going to go. I was scrupulously polite, because I thought it would be silly to be rude at that stage.” By this point, the assailant had shot both her chauffeur and her police bodyguard.
But you can only suppose she was born to it. Her mother had a starting pistol fired at her during the Trooping of the Colour – though she didn’t know that they weren’t real bullets. She just simply rode on and did so side-saddle.
Anne’s great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, was subject to numerous assassination attempts and more besides, including being struck around the head with a stick in 1850 while travelling down Piccadilly. If that was the President of the US, they would have sent in the cavalry.
Part of being the British monarch is to expose yourself to danger. “I need to be seen to be believed,” as the late Queen said. Hence all those garish coloured outfits. And an absolute indifference to peril. No head of state puts themselves in the line of fire as much as the British monarch.
Even times of grief are not your own. A thousand TV cameras and hundreds of millions of people will look for the slightest tear from your eye. For you are public property. You are not a person, and you are fair game.
Perhaps Mr William Shakespeare had it right in Richard II. The king says:
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king.
And for that is the lot of a British king: to be human, but to have the pretence you are not. England expects every man to do his duty, as the old war phrase goes. But no one more do we expect that from than our king and sovereign.