great. Aided by a phenomenal memory and real interest, her acquaintance
with world politics is profound. She is intelligent but not an
intellectual. She does a great deal of official reading--so much, in
fact, that she reads little for pleasure.
The Queen's pleasures and those of her immediate family are so typical
of the middle class that intellectuals are often offended. They would
prefer more attendance at cultural events such as the Edinburgh
Festival and less at race meetings. But the deep thinkers, worried
because the cultural tone of Buckingham Palace is pitched to the level
of Danny Kaye rather than T.S. Eliot, overlook the fact that attachment
to such frivolity strengthens the popularity of the royal house.
There is no evidence that the British admire or desire intellectual
attainments in a monarch. Nor does history indicate that such lusty
figures as Charles II and George IV were less popular than the pious
Victoria or the benign George V. Thus, when the Queen spends a week at
Ascot to watch the racing, as millions of her subjects would dearly
love to do, or attends a London revue, her subjects, aware of the
burden of her office, wish her a good time. And the descriptions of
such outings, with their invariable reports on what the Queen wore,
what she ate and drank, and what she was heard to say, are read avidly
by a large percentage of her people.
The people are flattered when the Queen appears at a polo game in
sensible shoes and a print dress, accompanied by her children and her
dogs. They are equally flattered when they see her in tiara and evening
dress, regal and coldly handsome. When the newspapers printed pictures
of the Queen and her royal hosts at a state ball during her visit to
Sweden, the popular reaction was: "Doesn't she look lovely, a real
credit to the country."
Racing is the Queen's favorite sport. When she was returning from
her world tour in 1953-4, one of the first messages the royal yacht
_Britannia_ transmitted as it neared British shores was an inquiry on
the result of a race held the day before.
For Elizabeth, racing is more than a sport; it is an enthusiasm. She
knows blood lines and past performances, and her acute judgment of form
sometimes conflicts with her personal attachment for one of the royal
stable's entries. She likes to watch show jumping and polo, although
at polo games she is continually worried about the Duke of Edinburgh,
an enthusiastic player. But horse racing: the magic moment when the
barrier goes up, the bright silks on the back stretch, the lovely sight
of the field rounding the last turn into the stretch--that's her sport.
As it is also the sport of millions of her subjects, the sneers of the
puritans have little effect.
She is a young woman of determination, having inherited some of her
grandfather's temper and his forthright outlook on events. In moments
of family crisis she is likely to take what the British call "a strong
line." During the row over the romance of Princess Margaret and Peter
Townsend, it was reported that the first communication from Buckingham
Palace on the situation had been written by the Queen. I find this
credible. The announcement certainly had all the faults of a communiqué
drafted in anger.
Finally, Elizabeth is religious, very conscious of the importance
of her role in British society, and, as she grows older, somewhat
censorious of the gay young things enjoying a freedom she never knew.
The monarchy is costly. The Queen is a very wealthy woman in her own
right, but, in addition, she receives £60,000 (about $168,000) a year
from the Civil List. This is granted to the sovereign by Parliament
on the recommendation of a Select Committee. The Civil List not only
"pays" the Queen but pays her expenses, which are high. For instance,
the salaries of the royal household, secretaries, equerries, servants,
and the like, total £185,000 or $418,000 a year, and the running
expenses come to £121,800 or $341,040.
Payments charged to the Consolidated Fund maintain the other members of
the family. The Duke of Edinburgh's annuity is £40,000 or $112,000 a
year, and the Queen Mother's is £70,000 or $196,000.
These payments are only one of many sources of income. The House of
Windsor is very rich, although its fortune is modest compared with the
holdings of the House of Ford or the House of Rockefeller.
Queen Victoria died leaving the monarchy more firmly established than
ever before and her family richer by millions of pounds. During her
long reign the remarkable daughter of an unambitious Duke of Kent and
an improvident German princess amassed a fortune of about £5,000,000
or, at the exchange rates of the day, about $25,000,000. The financial
dealings of the royal house are secret. But both Albert, Victoria's
Prince Consort, and his son Edward VII benefited from the advice of
financiers. Reputedly the family owns large blocks of American railroad
stock. The financial structure is complex, however. It is hard to say
just how much Elizabeth owns as Queen and how much as an individual.
As one of the greatest landowners, the Queen derives an income of about
£94,600 or $265,000 a year from the Duchy of Lancaster. The royal
family also receives the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, which
amount to about £90,000 or approximately $250,000 a year. This duchy,
comprising about 133,000 acres spread throughout the west of England,
includes farms, hotels, tin mines, even pubs. Seven palaces and
eight royal houses also are the property of Elizabeth as Queen. One,
Sandringham in Norfolk, an estate of 17,000 acres including fifteen
well-kept farms, is a family holding. The Balmoral estate in Scotland
comprises 80,000 acres. The family holds more than seventy-five choice
bits of London real estate. Both fortune and property are carefully
managed. Nothing is wasted. The game birds that fall to the guns of
shooting parties at Sandringham and Balmoral are sold on the commercial
market after the household's requirements have been met.
The Crown is not only a prosperous and wealthy establishment. It is
also the center of a unique complex of commercial interests. The
manufacture of souvenirs connected with the royal family is big
business. These souvenirs range from hideous, cheap glass ash trays and
"silver" spoons stamped with a picture of Buckingham Palace or of the
Queen and the Duke to "coronation" wineglasses and dinner services sold
to wealthy tourists. A whole section of British publishing is devoted
to postcards, picture books, and other records of royal lives and royal
occasions.
The Queen's world tour in 1953-4 produced a bumper crop of pictorial
and prose reports to fit every purse and the prevailing taste for
flowery adulation. These books were bought and read, or at least looked
at, after the British public already had been exposed to newspaper
accounts, magazine reports, radio bulletins, and television newsreels.
Once at a dinner party the wife of a famous writer remarked: "I'm
sick of this damned tour." The other guests broke into a flurry of
conversation that had nothing to do with the royal voyage. Yet I
learned that three of them felt "exactly as dear Betty does, but, my
dear, you don't say it."
Some thoughtful students of the institution believe that the
newspapers, magazines, radio, and television have forgotten Bagehot's
injunction about letting too much light fall on the monarchy. But I
have seen no diminution of popular interest. The highbrows may be
bored, but the lowbrows and middlebrows love it.
The extensive coverage given the royal family has propaganda uses. In
the years since the war there has been a quiet but intensive effort
to reinforce the position of the monarch as the titular head of the
Commonwealth. The rulers of Britain, Labor or Conservative, recognizing
how slender are the ties that bind the Commonwealth, have worked
steadily to strengthen the chief spiritual tie, the Crown, as political
and economic ties have become attenuated.
The Queen is the Queen of Canada and Australia as well as of the United
Kingdom. Canada, in fact, is a monarchy. Royal tours of Commonwealth
countries emphasize the common tie of monarchy and are also intended
to reawaken interest in Britain and, as these are a commercial people,
British manufactures.
The reports that have reached London show that, from the standpoint of
strengthening identity with the Commonwealth, the visit to Australia
and New Zealand during the world tour was an outstanding success. To
the exuberant, vigorous Australians, for instance, the Queen symbolized
their relationship with the island many of them still call home.
Criticism of the "pommies," the slang term for the British, was drowned
in the swell of cheers for the Queen of Australia.
Nor should the effect of such tours on the younger members of the
Commonwealth be underestimated. The visit to Nigeria in 1956 flattered
its people and gave new meaning to the honors and titles that
successive governments have bestowed on worthy--which in this context
means loyal--natives of the country. Those in government who value the
Commonwealth and Empire see such visits as a method of impressing new
members of the Commonwealth with the permanence of a symbol that binds
all members. Perhaps only South Africa, in its present government's
mood of Boer republicanism, is proof against the loan of the Crown.
Curiously, this extension of the monarchy is not generally appreciated
in Britain. There the supporters of the Crown are gratified, of course,
when the newspapers report an ovation for the Queen in Wellington. But
they are slow to accept the idea of the Queen as Queen of New Zealand.
The process of identifying the Queen with various parts of the
Commonwealth may go further than visits to its members. Some officials
suggest that the Queen should live a part of each year in one or
another of the Commonwealth countries. From the constitutional
standpoint this is a revolutionary suggestion. And Britain prefers
evolution to revolution. But it is an indication of the progressive
viewpoint that some supporters of the Crown have adopted toward its
political uses in the modern world.
No institution in Britain escapes attack, and so the institution of
monarchy is attacked. But such criticism is rarely coherent, popular,
or direct. On the whole, there is less criticism than there was a
century ago. Republicanism died as a political force in the 1870's. The
Chartists in their peak period, roughly between 1838 and 1849, included
in their demands the establishment of a republic. When Victoria
withdrew into her grief after the death of the Prince Consort, a
republican movement of some importance developed. New impetus was given
by the establishment of the Third Republic in France in 1871. Charles
Bradlaugh and George Odger, men of some importance, spoke eloquently in
support of a republic. But the last "Republican Conference" was held in
1873, and Sir Charles Dilke later ascribed his youthful republicanism
to "political infancy."
The Labor Party, despite its strong infusion of Marxism, treats the
issue as a dead letter. Not since the party conference of 1923 has
there been a serious debate on the monarchy. At that conference a
motion that republicanism should be the policy of the party was
rejected by 3,694,000 votes to 386,000.
Criticism of the monarchy in contemporary Britain is most telling when
it hits the cost of the institution. The great wealth of the royal
family and the heavy expenses of the monarchial institution invite
criticism in a period when Britain seems to live perennially on the rim
of economic disaster.
Early in 1956 it was suggested that the Queen's Flight, her personal
transport planes, be re-equipped with one, possibly more, of the
big new Britannias, the nation's newest air liner. At the same time
a new dining-car was ordered for royal travel, and it became known
that the royal waiting-room at London airport was to be renovated at
considerable expense. These matters received extraordinarily detailed
coverage in the newspapers owned by Lord Beaverbrook. Letters
criticizing the added expenses found their way into the letter columns
of the _Daily Express_, the _Evening Standard_, and the _Sunday
Express_. Columnists inquired the reason for such expenditures when
the nation was being asked to tighten its belt, spend less, and defeat
inflation.
Constant readers of these newspapers, which are among the most
sprightly and technically expert in Britain, have long noted their
oblique criticism of Duke of Edinburgh. Usually this deals with the
Duke's "interference" in the field of industrial relations. It is
believed to spring from Lord Beaverbrook's long-standing animus for
the Duke's uncle, Earl Mountbatten. The criticism of the proposed
expenditures for the Britannias, the dining-car, and the waiting-room
gave the newspapers a chance to hint that the young man was getting a
bit above himself.
The _Sunday Express_ gave the widest possible publicity to its
serialization of the autobiography of the Duchess of Windsor, an opus
that, although interesting, cannot be considered an enthusiastic
recommendation for the institution of monarchy.
The inevitable conclusion is that William Maxwell Aitken, first Baron
Beaverbrook, New Brunswick, and Cherkley, nurses crypto-republican
sentiments at heart. He has confessed to being a propagandist in his
newspapers, and he is so unpredictable that he might sometime direct
all his energies against the institution. I mentioned this to a cabinet
minister, who replied that the monarchy would welcome it. "Nothing
helps a politician more than the enmity of the Beaver," he commented.
Although republicanism is no longer an issue in the Labor Party, the
party itself contains a strong element that is hostile to the monarchy.
Yet neither the _Daily Mirror_ nor the _Daily Herald_, the journalistic
pillars of the left, snipe quite so often or so accurately as the
Beaverbrook press.
The _New Statesman and Nation_ does. Its indirect attacks on royalty
are based on establishing a link between royalty and the wealthy,
showy, and, of course, non-socialist world of London's fashionable
West End. The _New Statesman_'s complaint, delivered in the tones of
a touring schoolmarm who has been pinched by a lascivious Latin, is
that the Queen should use her influence to halt ostentatious spending
on debutante parties and the revels of the young. Its anonymous
editorial-writer was severe with young people who drink too much
(although abstinence has never been particularly popular on the left)
and generally whoop it up. The editorial ended with a hint that the
Queen would have to exercise some restraint when a Labor government
came to power.
Despite such criticisms and warnings, the monarchy pursues its course
virtually unchallenged. One reason for the lack of a serious political
challenge may be that the monarchy is not now identified with a rich,
powerful, and coherent aristocracy, as it was a century ago, but with
the ordinary citizen. Then, too, there are many who look to the royal
family as an example.
Long ago a compositor in a London newspaper, a good union man and a
Socialist, explained this attitude. "I'd rather have my two daughters
reading about the Queen and all that stuff than reading those magazines
about the flicks. Who'd you want your daughter to follow, Lana Turner
or the Queen?"
So we return again to the indefinable and powerful tie that binds
people and Crown.
Perhaps it is a sense of historical identity experienced as the Queen
rides past, carrying with her the atmosphere of other Englands. Here
before the eyes of her people is a reassurance of survival, an example
of continuity. This is one of those periods in history when the British
need reassuring.
Perhaps as the monotony of life in a nation that is becoming one huge
industrial suburb spreads over Britain, the ceremony and glitter of
the Crown mean more than ever before. The great noblemen are prosaic
characters in business suits showing the crowds through empty palaces
and castles. But the Queen, amid the uniforms and palaces and castles,
remains the Queen.
Perhaps as the storms buffet England in this second half of the
century, the position of the Queen as a personification of goodness
and justice becomes more important. Here is an enduring symbol, a
token of the past and a promise for the future. As the world and its
problems become more complex, the single, simple attraction of the
representative of an institution that has survived so many complexities
and problems will grow upon the confused and unhappy.
The Crown stands as it has for a thousand years. Its power is less and
its influence is greater than many know. It is an integral part of a
flexible and progressive society.
[Illustration]
III. _How the British Govern Themselves_
_Parliament can do anything but turn a boy into a girl._
ENGLISH PROVERB
_Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the
ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and
convenience to itself._
WOODROW WILSON
[Illustration]
The British are pre-eminently a political people, as Americans are,
and as Germans, Russians, and Italians are not. They regard politics
and government as serious, honorable, and, above all, interesting
occupations. To many Britons the techniques of government and politics
in Nigeria or Louisiana or Iceland are as fascinating as the newest jet
fighter is to an aviation enthusiast. They have been at it a long time,
and yet politics and government remain eternally fascinating.
The comparative stability and prestige of government and politics
result in part from tradition and experience. The British govern
themselves by a system evolved over a thousand years from the times of
the Saxon kings, and they have given much of what is best and some of
what is worst in that system to nations and continents unknown when
first a Parliament sat in Westminster. Although it was dominated by
peers and bullied by the King, a Parliament met in Westminster when
France seethed under the absolute rule of His Most Christian Majesty.
Some of the greatest speeches made against the royal policy during the
American War of Independence were made in Parliament.
The course of history has strengthened the position of parliamentary
government. Parliament and Britain have survived and triumphed, but
where is the Europe of Louis XIV, of Napoleon, of Wilhelm II, of
Hitler? Even in times of great stress the business of government must
go on. I remember my astonishment in June of 1940 when I returned from
a stricken, hopeless France to learn from a Member of Parliament that a
committee was considering plans for uniting the West Indian islands in
a single Commonwealth unit after the war.
The idea that politics and government are essential to the well-being
of the nation fortifies tolerance in British public life. The political
and military disasters of 1940 were far more damaging and dangerous
to Britain than Pearl Harbor was to the United States. They invited
bitter recrimination. Yet Winston Churchill, himself bitterly attacked
in the locust years for predicting these very disasters, took Neville
Chamberlain into his cabinet and silenced recrimination with the
salient reminder that if the nation dwelt too much on the past it might
lose the future.
For a century the British have avoided the dangers of an important
extremist political party comparable to the Communists in France and
Italy or the Nazis in Germany. The Communist Party exists in Britain,
of course, but only barely. Sir Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts made
some impression just before and just after the last war, but their
direct political influence is negligible.
The British don't think extremism is good practical politics. They went
through their own period of extremism in the sixteenth, seventeenth,
and early eighteenth centuries when for a variety of reasons,
religious as well as political, they cut off one king's head, tried
a dictatorship, brought back a king, and finally found comparative
tranquillity in the development of a constitutional monarchy.
The memory of these troubled times is not dead. At the height of
McCarthyism in the United States a British diplomat explained: "We're
very fortunate; we went through the same sort of period under the
Tudors and the Stuarts when treason and slander and libel were the
common coin of politics."
With exceptions, the great political parties in the country have now
identified themselves with the national interest rather than with a
partisan one. Even the exceptions change. As the status of the working
class has changed for the better, the Labor Party has moved perceptibly
away from its early position as a one-class party. The heirs of Keir
Hardy--the Attlees, Morrisons, and Gaitskells--understand that Labor
must appeal now to the whole people.
The national interest is something the whole people has always
understood and accepted in the past. For the British are guided
politically not by an ideology but by interest. This interest is a free
world, free from the economic as well as the political standpoint. One
factor in the decision to withdraw from India was the conviction that,
in the end, withdrawal would serve British commercial interests. I do
not suggest that this was the only factor. There were others, including
the belief of the leaders of the Labor government that India could not
and should not be kept within the Empire by force.
Similarly, Britain is ready to give way on the independence of
other parts of the Empire when she thinks these areas are ready for
independence as democracies, and when she believes that their emergence
as independent democracies will benefit her own commercial interests.
This mixture of realism and idealism is difficult for outsiders to
grasp, especially when the British cling to a territory such as Cyprus
for reasons that are largely connected with their commercial interests
in that part of the world.
Yet although the British have acquired, and are now in the process
of losing, a world-wide empire, they never suffered from a desire to
remake the world as did the French of 1789, or the Russians of 1917, or
the Germans of 1939. As a commercial people their basic interest was,
and is, peace. The British will go to almost any lengths to prevent a
war, as they did in 1938 and 1939. Once at war, however, they fight
with cold ruthlessness.
The allegiance of the great political parties to the national interest
is one reason why British politics and politicians are flexible and
tolerant. Another is that politics are still touched by the shadowy
influence of the Crown. Here is a higher, if weaker, authority than
Prime Minister or cabinet. Does the presence of the sovereign at the
peak of government draw some of the exaggeration and extremism from
politics?
Certainly no British Prime Minister, not even Churchill in 1940, has
ever been bathed in the sycophancy that deluged President Eisenhower
in his first term. Certainly no British Prime Minister, not even
Chamberlain in 1938 and 1939, has been reviled so relentlessly by
critics as were Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Convictions are as
deeply held in London as in Washington. But anyone moving between the
two cities must be convinced that the political atmosphere in London is
calmer, less subject to emotional cloudbursts.
The center of British politics is Parliament--the House of Commons and,
to a lesser degree, the House of Lords.
Parliament represents all the countries of the United Kingdom. It
can legislate for the whole kingdom or for Great Britain itself or,
separately, for England and Wales. But, as this is Britain, the
country of contradictions, the Parliament at Westminster is not the
only parliament. Northern Ireland has its own. But it also sends MP's
to Westminster. The Tynewald sits in the Isle of Man, and the States
legislate for the Channel Islands.