Royal Babylon (34 page)

The Duke of Windsor was unrepentant about his Nazi connections to his death. “Of course, if I'd been King,” he once chillingly observed, “there'd have been no war.”

The participants in the so-called Romance of the Century were to live lifestyles of epic vacuity. After the abdication, the Duke and Duchess would step on to a treadmill of endless partying and free-spending drifting. Very few British taxpayers were aware that they were actually paying to keep the playboy ex-King and his American wife in the jewelry to which she had become accustomed. When he abdicated as Edward VIII and emerged a humble Duke of Windsor, he decided that it was time to fall back on the family tradition of pleading poverty. Although he already had the equivalent of about
£
24 million accrued from his earnings as Prince of Wales, he told the British government that he was almost broke, and was subsequently awarded
£
21,000 a year on the Civil List. The money was sent to him via his brother's bank account to make it look as if it was coming directly from the royal family's purse. The French government had also given them a rent-free mansion and declined to charge them any income tax. This meant that the exiled couple were able to live at the expense of the taxpayers of two countries, on a scale that was probably even more lavish than the one Edward had tasted as King.

The one outstanding accomplishment of the Duchess of Windsor, people noted, was her ability to wear about three times her own body weight in jewelry. Her most memorable bon mot was “You can never be too rich, or too thin.” Throughout the austere post-war years she staggered around Europe smothered from head to toe in diamonds, rubies and
emeralds. In one month her husband spent the equivalent of about
£
500,000 on her jewelry. The Duchess once complained that she had been reduced to an allowance of only $4,000 a year on new dresses—about $240,000 today.

The royal family shunned the Duchess until her husband's death in 1972, when Queen Elizabeth finally invited her to stay in Buckingham Palace. Wallis survived Edward by fourteen years, spending the last eleven of them wasted and bedridden, unable to walk or eat. Finally, in 1986, the Duchess of Windsor discovered that it was possible to be too thin after all. One day, Churchill predicted, the British people would erect a statue to her.

         

Some of Britain's most successful monarchs were dull, lackluster men and women who kept their heads below the parapet at times of change and emerged unscathed. The fight for democracy which swept Europe in the nineteenth century had dire consequences for royalty, but King William IV's complete lack of charisma was probably instrumental in the British monarchy passing through the era unscathed. In fact, William was the only European monarch of the age to survive republicanism. George VI was desperately ill-equipped to lead his country into a world war, but his weaknesses and his lack of charisma worked in his favor, and it is now generally accepted that his succession was the best thing that could have happened in the circumstances.

As his father had done before him, the King visited troops, munitions factories, supply docks, and bomb sites.
The actions of the new King and Princess Elizabeth during the war years built the prestige of the monarchy to a new high. The pressure of public life left the highly strung King physically and emotionally drained by the time of his death, but he left the monarchy in better condition than he found it.

Elizabeth II's enigmatic style is more or less straight from Queen Mary's copybook: to show nothing of her private self and to give nothing away. Winston Churchill, who had served four monarchs, said he found her to be knowledgeable, witty, and capable of a rare sense of humor seldom exhibited in public. A later Prime Minister, James Callaghan, on the other hand, found her to have little direct experience of anything at all apart from racing and breeding horses.

         

By the early 1990s, half a century of adulation had led the British royal family into a fossilized complacency. The litany of disasters that followed for the beleaguered House of Windsor is still fresh in the memory. Three of the Queen's children were divorced, with the fourth reluctant to get married; Windsor Castle burned; the tabloid press published photos of the Duchess of York having her toes sucked by a man who was not her husband; the heir to the throne revealed in a six-minute taped telephone conversation that he fantasized about reincarnation as his forty-five-year-old mistress's tampon. Then, in August 1997, the woman once intended to be Britain's Queen died in a Paris underpass with her lover.

This was the single most important event in the history of the British monarchy since the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936. Mass demonstrations of public grief turned to anger, much of the bitterness directed at an apparently unbending and uncaring royal family. For a few nail-biting days, support for the monarch among the majority of the British population, taken for granted for more than a century, was apparently on the wane. The reputation of the Prince of Wales seemed beyond rescue. There was talk of the Queen “skipping a generation” by passing over Prince Charles and handing the Crown, when the time came, to Prince William (never an option as it is not within the gift of the Queen to decide who succeeds her). Shorn of their star attraction, the British royal family, once the greatest show on earth, suddenly began to look like an outmoded, almost purely ceremonial, unpopular and discredited institution. The Windsors were briefly but totally eclipsed by the cult of Diana: the supreme manipulators had found themselves outmaneuvered and outclassed by a commoner, the girl they employed to provide them with an heir.

The House of Windsor had presented themselves as guardians of family values. They had been slow to perceive that therefore they were obliged to at least pretend to lead respectable lives. However, they had always survived times of crisis by skillful presentation, and seldom had there been a better time for a spot of rebranding. The Queen appointed a “spin doctor” to take strategic control of the royal image; Buckingham Palace also acquired a web site. Charles the adulterous husband was reinvented as Charles the caring single parent. Royal weddings, royal jubilees, even royal funerals,
breathe new life into the cult of monarchy. Diana's death, far from having seriously weakened the monarchy, may have even reinforced its place at the heart of British nationhood. It was business as usual—at least for another generation.

         

ROYAL IGNOMINY HAS
a long pedigree, and this book has revealed some, but not all, of the personal tragedy, gross sexual license, madness, wickedness and plain naivety that has bedeviled the history of European monarchy.

World War I cast a shadow over the career prospects of many a prince, and monarchy as an institution had largely disappeared in Europe by 1945. Today, only ten monarchs remain, seven of whom have familial ties to the House of Windsor. The British monarchy alone continues to reign by a set of rules written in the late-seventeenth century.

Sentimental attachment to monarchy is a singularly British institution, like drizzle, fox hunting, soiled beaches and nostalgia for hangings. Two hundred years after the American and French Revolutions, even the far left in British politics retains a mysterious soft spot for their royal family.

Whether you take the view that monarchy is a useless and dysfunctional remnant of dynastic inbreeding, or that at best it is an iconic symbol of national unity and identity, at worst, eccentric artifice, bringing in the tourists and giving comfort to many while harming no one—there is no doubting the continuing fascination with royalty. No one can predict how many of Europe's royal families will survive the twenty-first century, or even the next twenty-five years; the institution is, however, far from dead.

         

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