The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (20 page)

Ceremonial is part and parcel of the monarch’s ability to represent the nation to itself, and anyone who advocates a bicycling monarchy, like the Scandinavians, where the King of Sweden was once asked for proof of identity when he presented his credit card in a shop, has been a lousy student of history. The British love ceremonial – so do tourists. The sight of the Irish State Coach or the Golden Coach drawn by four pairs of immaculate Windsor Greys, uniforms dating back to Tudor times and serried ranks of soldiers, moving with the precision of a Patek Philippe watch, is not just stirring, it touches the very heart of what it is to be British.

It is something that critics of the monarchy seize on regularly; why, they ask, does the Queen have to travel by coach and horses with all the paraphernalia to open Parliament? Why can’t she just go by car?

These are the sort of questions that come up for discussion from time to time inside Buckingham Palace, a custom encouraged by Lord Airlie when he was Lord Chamberlain. He would get papers written on the subject – not just platitudes but genuine, thought-provoking papers which got out into the open issues, many of them difficult, that it would have been much more comfortable to have left forgotten. They would
then discuss the paper, look at the pros and cons and try to form a view. And find, as in the case of the ceremonial, that there might be changes that they could make at the margins, but that there was not a strong argument for doing away with it. Once you have done away with it, it is gone for ever.

Lord Airlie’s view is that they do it very professionally and it is something the British love. Ceremonial is an important part of the image of the monarchy and the respect that people have for it. They want to see the Queen up there in her magnificent coach – even if not every car driver and bus passenger caught in the resultant traffic jam in London agrees.

The State Opening of Parliament is a tradition that goes back centuries and is the very essence of what our constitutional monarchy is all about. It establishes the Queen’s role and Parliament’s role and the relationship between them. And the ceremonial aspect, rooted so deeply in history, and so incongruous with modern life, serves as a vivid reminder, even if only subliminally, of the continuity and stability of our system. Society may be changing rapidly, technology turning our world upside down, but in the sea of so much change and uncertainty there is a rock – a landmark that is reassuringly constant. No matter which individual is wearing the crown, the sovereign performs the same ritual year in year out.

In October or November, or at other times if there is a change of government, the Queen makes the journey from Buckingham Palace in the Irish State Coach (on view in the Royal Mews) drawn by four horses with a Household Cavalry escort. They take the traditional processional route down the Mall, across Horse Guards Parade, through the Horse Guards Arch into Whitehall and along to the Palace of Westminster where a guard of honour awaits – three officers and 101 men with a colour and a band. The Queen wears a long evening dress with long white gloves and the George IV diamond State
Diadem on her head, which normally resides with the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. The rest of the regalia travels in its own coach ahead of the Queen’s; the Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office carries the Imperial State Crown (set with three thousand precious stones and weighing two pounds thirteen ounces) for which she exchanges the diadem during the ceremony. His assistant carries the Cap of Maintenance, and other bits of regalia are carried by Gentlemen Ushers and Serjeants-at-Arms. Before he became Diana’s rock, Paul Burrell was at one time one of the Queen’s personal footmen at Buckingham Palace; on the eve of the State Opening one year he found his boss, late at night, working on her boxes with pink mule slippers on her feet and the Imperial State Crown on her head. She was practising carrying the equivalent of nearly two standard bags of sugar on her head – as she does every year – but the absurdity of the picture she presented was not lost on her. Before the Trooping the Colour ceremony, the Prince of Wales practises wearing a bearskin, which is also several bags of sugar, and he has the added hazard of having to sit on the back of a horse at the same time.

Before the royal party sets out a detachment of ten Yeomen of the Guard – the oldest of the royal bodyguards (formed by Henry VII in 1485) and the oldest military corps in existence – search the cellars under the Houses of Parliament with lanterns to make sure the building is safe. This dates back to 4 November 1605 when they found Guy Fawkes busily preparing to blow up the place; nowadays they are helped in their task by policemen with sniffer dogs and other devices but the ten Yeomen of the Guard in their scarlet doublets still go too.

The ceremony itself takes place in the House of Lords – the Commons are summoned from their chamber to hear The Queen’s Speech – and when the Queen arrives at the Sovereign’s Entrance she is met by the Earl Marshal and the Lord
Great Chamberlain, both in scarlet court dress, the latter carrying the golden key to the Palace of Westminster. The entire ritual is performed by a collection of officers with ancient titles in ancient costumes and when the Queen finally arrives in the chamber of the House of Lords (having been up the Royal Staircase past two lines of troopers of the Household Cavalry in full dress uniform with swords drawn) to the Robing Room to put on the crown in the ceremony for which she has been practising, plus the Garter collar with diamond George (the figure of St George and the dragon) and the same parliamentary robe she wore for her coronation – eighteen feet of crimson velvet and ermine – she is ready for a throne to sit on.

The Lord Chancellor then advances – and, despite the present incumbent Lord Falconer’s attempt to abolish the ancient office in 2003, much to the Queen’s surprise and dismay – removes The Queen’s Speech (written by the Cabinet) from its special silk bag and on bended knee hands it to the sovereign. Before she reads it, the ‘faithful Commons’ have to be summoned. What follows is a reminder, dating back to 1642, when Charles I burst into the Commons with troops in the vain hope of arresting five MPs, that the Commons have the right to exclude everyone from the chamber except the sovereign’s messenger. The Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod is that messenger; dressed in black cutaway tunic, knee breeches, silk stockings and buckled shoes with white lace jabot and cuffs and a sword at his side, he makes his way to the House of Commons and as he approaches the Serjeant-at-Arms slams the door in his face. Black Rod knocks three times with his rod – three and a half feet long and made of ebony – the Serjeant-at-Arms looks through the grille to make sure there are no troops and opens the door. Black Rod then says, ‘Mr Speaker, the Queen commands this Honourable House to attend Her Majesty immediately in the House of Peers.’ With
traditional lack of haste, the Speaker and the Serjeant-at-Arms baring his mace then lead MPs to the Upper Chamber, chatting deliberately as they go to demonstrate they stand in no awe of ‘the other place’. The other place can’t hold the full complement so a token 250 MPs stand at the opposite end of the Chamber to the sovereign to listen to ‘the most Gracious Speech from the Throne’ at the end of which Parliament is officially open.

‘On the face of it, it is the Queen giving these common folk their instructions about what they are to do,’ says Lord Garel-Jones, the former MP (as Tristan Garel-Jones) and pairing whip and, as such, for seven years held sinecure positions within the royal household.

But everyone knows the government has written it. Well, what is the first thing the House of Commons does when it gets back? It approves, on the nod, no debate, supply for the Armed Forces. It votes money so that the monarch can pay her soldiers, and the symbolism of that is, ‘You may be head of the Armed Forces, all those soldiers may have sworn an oath of allegiance to you but, we, Parliament, the people, we actually pay for all of this.’ It is a symbol but it doesn’t do any harm to remind people about these things.

As vice-chamberlain, comptroller and treasurer, Garel-Jones played a part in the State Opening, walking backwards with his rod of office at the ready. ‘It’s all part of the pantomime but there’s no harm in it and a lot of the pantomime represents part of Britain’s evolution from absolutism to being widely regarded as one of the most solid democracies in the world. Each one of these things that goes on reminds us. It hasn’t happened by chance. It has happened through history.’

It was steaming hot in the hospital. There was no air conditioning and, despite the pioneering work going on here, not many creature comforts. This was Tashkent in Uzbekistan, once part of the Soviet Union and still communist to its fingertips in everything but name. Life was still bureaucratic, cheerless and very hand-to-mouth.

The hospital specialized in treating children with cerebral palsy and the Princess Royal had come to visit. It was July 1993, she had recently remarried and this was her first foreign trip with her new husband, Tim Lawrence. They had already been to neighbouring Mongolia, where they had narrowly avoided eating sheep’s eyeballs in a nomadic camel breeder’s yurt – a great honour in those parts – and been soaked to the skin in a sudden storm in the Gobi Desert; from there they had travelled to Kazakhstan. The trip was a mixture of Foreign Office fixtures, the British Royal Family extending the hand of friendship abroad, and charity, which more often than not in foreign parts is Save the Children. Uzbekistan was the last leg of the ten-day trip.

As is the way of these things, the people she was due to meet had been ready and in place for well over an hour, and so as to look good for their important visitor the children were
out of their beds and standing to attention in their pyjamas. One little boy’s body was so buckled that he had been strapped to a board to keep him upright; whether it was the wait, the discomfort or general anxiety about what was going on around him, he whimpered as a trickle of pee ran down his leg to form a puddle on the linoleum floor.

These children had no idea who the Princess Royal was; neither had their carers. But someone somewhere had singled the hospital out as a place of excellence which she should visit on a tour of the country. And so it was sandwiched, if memory serves me right, between a visit to a poet’s grave, a look at some very splendid Islamic architecture and a wander round the spice market in Samarkand.

If the Princess’s expression changed for any of these sights, I didn’t notice it. It certainly didn’t change for the cameras; if anything, she simply scowled more fiercely. As she walked round, hearing about the work of the hospital – which clearly fascinated her – she turned to the doctor in a white coat escorting her, removed one hand from behind her back – where, Duke of Edinburgh-style, they spent most of the day – and pointed at two or three of the children as if they were exhibits on a trestle table at a WI fête. She seemed quite unmoved by the sight of their twisted limbs, bright, brave little faces and liquid brown eyes. She didn’t reach out to one of them; she didn’t smile; she didn’t even make eye contact. The visit was an academic exercise for her: the children were incidental. What mattered was the question of how you diagnose and treat cerebral palsy and fund research in a country which has so many inherent problems.

That same week the Princess of Wales was visiting sick and starving children in Africa, spoon-feeding gruel into their open mouths, comforting lepers and AIDS victims and hugging emaciated babies, watched and admired by the world’s media. Those children wouldn’t have known who Diana was any
more than the Uzbeki children knew who Princess Anne was, but almost instantaneously the world knew about their plight; heart-wrenching images were on television screens and in newspapers and magazines all over the globe and the funds for humanitarian aid began rolling in. Publicity is what charities feed on and the bigger the star they can enlist to the cause the better the public awareness and the greater, therefore, their generosity. Diana was so glamorous and photogenic that any picture was certain to be front-page news, and when she announced she was retiring from public life in December 1993 and giving up all but a handful of her charities, the remainder were horrified.

‘Your Royal Highness,’ wrote the director of the Welsh National Opera, Brian McMaster, in one of several hundred similar letters from others equally aghast. ‘It is just so helpful to be able to use your name. We only ask you to do one engagement a year which is a reception followed by an opera, but 20 per cent or so of all our fundraising is achieved that night. What are we going to do now?’

Four years earlier the WNO had accepted a highly prestigious invitation to play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in America – the apogee of its forty-three-year history, but expensive. The tour was going to cost almost a million pounds. Diana agreed to fly to New York for the first night, to attend a reception in the interval and a fundraising dinner after the performance for a thousand people each paying $1000 for their meal and the privilege of eating it in the same room as the Princess of Wales. She looked a million dollars, charmed everyone and in that one evening the charity recouped the entire cost of the tour.

And yet, Save the Children, the charity of which Anne has been President since 1970, wouldn’t have swapped her for two
Dianas, nor, I suspect, for anyone else. Because although she has probably never cuddled a stranger’s child in her life – and one wonders even about her own – and has never knowingly smiled for a press camera, the Princess Royal is the most effective President they could hope to have. She is professional to her fingertips; she chairs meetings with utter precision, has a memory like an elephant’s, speaks superbly and usually without notes and is always completely on top of her brief. She is also a brilliant fundraiser.

Her attitude in that hospital in Uzbekistan shocked me at the time. I longed for her to reach out to one of those children, as any mother – as anyone with an ounce of humanity – would. But she is very clear about her role in life and doesn’t believe being touchy-feely forms a part of it. There are other people who can do the hands-on stuff. Her value, she knows, is to get things done, to persuade governments to give money to hospitals such as the one in Tashkent, to bring in funds to run them or to buy beds and equipment. And she is not going to stand and pose with a sickly child in order to do it.

Charity work has become one of the monarchy’s main and most important functions. The tradition of a charitable monarchy goes back to the reign of George III, but in the Queen’s reign it has become an integral part of her family’s daily work. In the immediate post-war years, the assumption that the welfare state would take care of the poorer and weaker in society and make charitable giving unnecessary, did not materialize. What the welfare state did was make people think they didn’t need to look after their neighbours any more, and wealthy employers felt that ageing employees, their widowed spouses or orphaned children were no longer their responsibility. And although the rich have continued to grow richer, and those at the bottom of the heap poorer, the rich have become increasingly tight-fisted.

As Will Hutton, journalist and chief executive of the Work Foundation, wrote in 2003, ‘As inequality of wealth balloons back to nineteenth-century levels there is no sign of nineteenth-century levels of civil engagement and philanthropy by the rich.’ Six per cent of the British population provides 60 per cent of the money given to charity, but it is the poor who give away proportionately more of their money than the rich. In America, giving is part of the culture – to be rich and not give to charity is to be a social outcast – and there is a tradition of the super-rich setting up charitable foundations. Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is the world’s biggest philanthropist. His foundation is worth $30 billion and he plans to give away 90 per cent of his $50 billion fortune. When Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, gave a billion dollars to the United Nations in 1997 he mocked his fellow billionaires: ‘What good is wealth sitting in the bank?’ he asked. The rich lists were really lists of shame – encapsulated in the words of Andrew Carnegie a century earlier, who gave away his fortune to finance free libraries and a peace foundation: ‘He who dies rich, dies disgraced.’ There seems to be no such stigma in Britain, where old money finds ingenious ways of passing it on to its children and new money simply flaunts it. But if anyone can squeeze money out of the rich it is the Royal Family.

According to one historian the charitable work done by the monarchy today has ‘made a genuine contribution to national wellbeing, but one which is largely ignored or misunderstood … It may sound curious to those obsessed by constitutional niceties or royal spectacles, but the humdrum, day-in day-out charitable activity of the monarchy may be far more important than the “dignified” duties.’ The charitable sector is now a huge industry and covers all manner of areas of society which government seems to have chosen to leave underfunded. The Charity Commission has 166,129 ‘main’ charities on its
register which last year raised a total income of £34,567 billion. The Queen is currently patron or president of 635 organizations and charities, the Duke 863, the Prince of Wales 619, Princess Anne 270, Prince Andrew 161, Prince Edward 30 and his wife, Sophie, Countess of Wessex, 61. And as was painfully clear when Diana ducked out of hers, those charities that manage to secure a royal patron to put on their letterhead do appreciably better in the fundraising stakes than those that don’t. The WNO claimed that Diana’s presence brought in 20 per cent of the charity’s annual income – others have put the value of a single royal appearance at 10 per cent. Either way, it is a major contribution – and however you do the sums, the monarchy raises far more for charity than it receives in payment from the Civil List and Grant-in-Aid funding put together. In the last year Prince Charles has helped raise around £100 million for his own seventeen core charities and millions more for the others with which he is associated – and on the polo field alone he raises about £800,000 a year for charity.

The Queen has less time to devote to charity than the other members of the Royal Family because of her constitutional obligations, so for the most part the value she brings to her charities is the respectability of the sovereign’s name on the letterhead, which sets them in a class of its own. She has added a few to the list during the course of her reign but most of them were taken over from King George VI at the time of her accession – and in those days patronages were given far more readily than they are today. Prince Philip also inherited a large number of patronages, but he took the view (which his children have followed) that it was better to limit the number of new patronages to those organizations in which he could take an intelligent and active interest.

The first he took on was the National Playing Fields Association
in 1949, the only national organization, then and now, devoted to stopping Britain’s open spaces and playing fields being sold and concreted over by developers. It ‘has specific responsibility for acquiring, protecting and improving playing fields, playgrounds and playspace where they are most needed, and for those who need them most – in particular, children of all ages and people with disabilities’. George VI had been involved with the charity before his own accession and thought it would be a useful vehicle for his son-in-law to forge links with the community. ‘I want to assure you,’ said Prince Philip at his first meeting, ‘that I have no intention of being a sitting tenant in the post.’ He immediately redrafted a £500,000 appeal that was to go out in his name and masterminded an elaborate publicity campaign to back it up. He worked regularly at the NPFA office, then in Buckingham Gate, walking there from Clarence House, and went all over the country raising money and opening new playing fields. He played charity cricket matches, held fundraising lunches at Buckingham Palace and made an appeal film; he even persuaded Frank Sinatra to donate the royalties from two of his best-selling records – although associating with a divorcee, as Sinatra was (and dancing a samba with Ava Gardner, the voluptuous film star), thoroughly shocked his critics at court. He raised hundreds of thousands of pounds through his efforts – by 1953 playing fields were being opened at the rate of two hundred a year – and he is still at it, still President and still active. And the need is still as great as ever. The government makes noises about refusing planning permission but they have allowed nearly two hundred playing fields to be sold since 1998.