Writing Home (44 page)

A dolly mounted with a ramshackle light-screen trundles the camera round the cloisters with the actors rushing along behind as the King argues with the Prince of Wales and the courtiers scurry after them, trying to keep up. What I hope we capture is how wanting in proper ceremony the eighteenth-century monarchy was, how slipshod and unmanaged were its public appearances, with, whatever the flummery, not much dignity about it at all. Then we shift to School Yard, where the MPs mass on the staircase by the chapel, watching the departure of
the royal party. I sit by the statue of Henry VI (a pigeon feather caught on his nose) as the coaches wheel about the yard and Janine Duvitski as Margaret Nicholson rather shyly tries to assassinate the King.

Afterwards I wander down the immaculately preserved High Street. Here are Coutts Bank and some smart tailor’s, established in the eighteenth century; there’s a grand photographer’s that looks as if it was established not long after, and other smart and elegant shops are hangers-on and camp− followers of the school. The message is plain: these boys are rich. And I hate it, and feel the worse for hating it because the school has been so helpful and cooperative over the film. I can see, though, that to be educated here isn’t an unmixed blessing and that afterwards it could, as in Cyril Connolly’s case, be downhill all the way, even the most lustrous Oxford or Cambridge college something of a comedown after all this.

I go back to the filming to find Greville on camera, knocking at a door covered, as is most Eton woodwork, in ancient graffiti. Some of it, though, is not quite so ancient (or not ancient enough for us), and it’s only when we view the rushes that we see the date 1862 large and plain on this door at which he is knocking in 1788.

3
September, Broughton
. Drive in grey drizzle to Banbury. Feel, even just passing through the town, the rootless anonymity that has swamped the place, the centre still intact and even handsome, but ringed by superstores and huge drive-in centres that service the acres of fuck-hutch estates that house its expanded population. ‘Thriving’ as I suppose it’s called.

Broughton, a mile or two away, could not be in sharper contrast: the most beautiful of houses, medieval in a sixteenth-century or seventeenth-century shell with Gothick additions, entered across a moat and through a gatehouse – almost a
standard kit for an idyll. There are a formal garden, great plush borders along the old ramparts, and cows and sheep grazing in the water meadows beyond, and overlooking it all this rambling honey-coloured house.

On to this rural paradise the film unit has descended like an invading army. Twenty or so vans have ploughed up one of the meadows, thirty cars are parked under the trees; there are half a dozen caravans and two marquees, and the sodden ground is rapidly turning into a quagmire. Churning up the edges of the perfect lawns, company cars ferry the actors to and from the location in the house, where the sparks, who have seen it all before, lug their lights and tripods down the superb vaulted corridors.

Seemingly unaffected by all this is the lady of the house, Mariette Saye – really Lady Saye and Sele (only nobody is quite sure whether one says Saye and Sele or just says Saye; say nothing the simplest). She’s tall, cheerful and wonderfully welcoming, happy to show anybody round the house, which is as magical inside as out, handsome rooms lined with linenfold panelling, and a splendid drawing-room overlooking the moat. My wonder at the place makes me foolish, and I’m sure I gush – though it’s partly to offset the unimpressed one-location-very-much-like-another behaviour inseparable from film crews, who congregate at the door, having coffee and a cig and trampling on yet another bit of lawn.

As always I find I’m pretty surplus to requirements, my only contribution a muttered suggestion to Nick Hytner that Rupert Graves’s ad lib ‘I’m fine, I’m fine’ would be more in period if he said, ‘It is no matter, no matter.’ I watch Nigel H. rehearse the pisspot scene, then walk round the garden with Mark Thompson before buying some plants on sale in the potting-shed and coming away. Except then I call in at the church, which is full of the sound of hoovering – a friendly grey-haired man,
Welsh, who may be the vicar, though I don’t like to ask, seemingly vacuuming the altar. It’s the bats, he explains, the church being disputed territory between English Heritage, who want them expelled, and English Nature, who don’t. In the meantime he hoovers.

Unnoted in my diary were locations even more spectacular. The opening concert was shot in the Double Cube room at Wilton, where the handbell ringers give their somnolent rendering of Greensleeves‘(’Fascinating stuff!’ says the King) in front of the sumptuous backcloth of Van Dyck’s portrait of the Earl of Pembroke and his family. The Prince of Wales’s lodging were at Wilton and the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, where Wren’s Painted Hall was the setting for the second concert, when the King runs amok. The long gallery in which George III sees Pitt at the start of the film and its close, and down which Pitt bows himself endlessly out, is at Syon House, as was the Prince of Wales’s breakfast room. Arundel Castle doubled for Windsor. Medievalized around the same time, Arundel shares many of the features of its more familiar counterpart, though catch either of them on a wet day and they look like long-stay institutions for the criminally insane.

The title of the stage play is
The Madness of George III
and of the film
The Madness of King George
. This was a marketing decision: the American backers somewhat shamefacedly explained that the audience might think, seeing
The Madness of
George III
, that they had missed out on
The Madness of George
and
The Madness of George II
, a survey having apparently shown that there were many moviegoers who came away from
Kenneth Branagh’s film of
Henry V
wishing they had seen its four predecessors. Where this leaves
The Third Man
(or
The
Second Mrs
Tanqueray
) I’m not sure.

Many of the actors and actresses in the stage play took part in the film, though not always in the same roles. Nigel Hawthorne remained George III, and Julian Wadham Pitt, and two of the King’s doctors and two of his pages were the same on stage and on film. Even when this continuity wasn’t possible there was often a niche in the film for actors who had been displaced: Iain Mitchell, who played Sheridan on the stage, is the pig farmer (with terrible teeth) at the start of the film. Helen Mirren played Queen Charlotte, but Selina Cadell, who had played the Queen in the second National Theatre production, became Mrs Cordwell, a patient in Dr Willis’s Lincolnshire asylum who lost her wits when her sea-captain husband was drowned off the Goodwin Sands. The scene in the asylum was originally much longer, with the patients due to be played by some of our leading stage directors, including Richard Eyre, Sam Mendes and Declan Donnellan. The directors proved, of course, much more temperamental and hard to please than actors and one by one got cold feet, leaving only Stephen Daldry gamely plying a lonely sickle. Alas for his loyalty, his scene was one of the earliest cuts.

The marriage of the Prince of Wales to Mrs Maria Fitzherbert comes into the film as it didn’t into the play. The Prince had married her secretly (in her own drawing-room) in 1785, really in order to satisfy Mrs Fitzherbert’s Catholic conscience, as she refused to sleep with him otherwise. Valid in the eyes of her Church, the marriage was always invalid in legal and constitutional terms, as the Prince could not marry without his father’s permission and if he married a Catholic he forfeited his right to the throne. Not that this mattered to Mrs Fitzherbert, who –
sensible woman that she was – had no interest in the throne anyway. No one has a wrong word for her: sweet-natured, amiable and no great beauty, she was received at court and was on good terms with the King and Queen, both of them seemingly in no doubt about her relation to the Prince. However, when, early in 1787, the existence of the marriage was raised in Parliament, the Prince of Wales denied it even to his friend Fox, who, believing him, stood up in the Commons and denied it too. Not surprisingly, Mrs Fitzherbert was very cross and, though she forgave the Prince, she never forgave Fox, who in turn found it hard to forgive the Prince.

All this had blown over by the time George III became ill late in 1788, and the marriage played no part in what came to be called the Regency Crisis. In my script it does, partly because the plot needed thickening and also because I wanted Mrs Fitzherbert to have her own story and not just be sitting around as the companion of the Prince. At the end of the film the Prince is seen to have rejected Mrs Fitzherbert, but in fact they lived together openly for another fourteen years, even after the Prince’s marriage (legal but disastrous) to Princess Caroline of Brunswick. Rejection, when it did come in 1803, was as crude and brutal as royal behaviour often is, recalling the unfeeling-ness with which a later Prince of Wales, having met Mrs Simpson, briskly put aside his long-time mistress, Mrs Dudley-Ward. Sometimes it’s as if royalty know about good behaviour by hearsay and can give only a faulty imitation of it, or, as Willis remarks before meeting the King, ‘Deferred to, agreed with, acquiesced in. Who can flourish on such a daily diet of compliance? To be curbed, stood up to, in a word thwarted, exercises the character, elasticates the spirit, makes it more pliant. It is the want of such exercise that makes rulers rigid.’ Or spoiled, as Nanny would say.

In general the Prince of Wales is more forceful and more of a
villain in the film than he was on the stage or in life. There’s no doubt that he was anxious to be made Regent, but he was more careful of appearances than I have made him and was more governed too by that fellow-feeling all royals have for each other. The Prince of Wales, for instance, was understandably sensitive to any suggestions, particularly in the press, that his father was mad. For a subject to remark on the King’s state of mind seemed to the Prince insolent and intolerable. Or
sometimes
seemed to him insolent and intolerable. For the Prince himself to make such a suggestion (and to make jokes on the subject) was permissible, and permissible for his cronies too, a lot of the time. But suddenly they would find they had gone too far, the Prince would get on his high royal horse again, and his friends would have to mind their p’s and q’s for a bit. It’s a characteristic of royalty that one minute they are happy to masquerade as ordinary persons and the next they demand to be treated as a race apart. Like the rest of us, I suppose, they just want things both ways, but this ‘Now you “Sir” me, now you don’t’ must make intimacy with royalty a little wearing, and friendship with them must always involve an element of Grandmother’s Footsteps. Like Fitzroy, courtiers must learn to be pretty surefooted, with little hope of ever being ‘natural’, the ideal being somewhere between those who can’t forget the royals’ highness (and so are stilted) and those who forget it altogether (and so are cheeky).

These reservations apart, I found I was less sceptical about the monarchy as an institution than my colleagues on the production team, partly because (and slightly to my surprise) I was older than most of them and more set in my ways. Certainly I’m no republican and find nothing particularly extraordinary in the difficulties and embarrassments of the present Prince of Wales. It’s a role, after all, which has seldom been satisfactorily filled; I suppose George V was good enough at it, but he was a
dull man who was heir-apparent for a relatively short time, acceding to the position on the unexpected death of his much less suitable elder brother for whom no one had a good word, some even identifying him with Jack the Ripper. (Even the
Sun
hasn’t managed to insinuate that Prince Charles is a serial killer.) But when the Prince of Wales in the film says that to be heir to the throne is not a position, it is a predicament, it’s meant to be both a cry from the heart and a statement of an obvious truth.

Given my royalist inclinations, I haven’t followed the goings-on over the break-up of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, or read any of the literature it has occasioned. I don’t say this prissily. In my own circle of friends divorce dismays me for entirely selfish reasons: it alters the social landscape in unpredictable ways, curtailing friendships, shutting down havens, and generally making life less comfortable. The Prince of Wales’s marriage, I need hardly add, does not impinge in quite this way, but like everything to do with the monarchy I’d just like to be able to take it for granted as one used to do. I don’t want to have to think about it. I just want it to be
there
.

However, I would like to tiptoe into a royal bedroom if only to see how far, when one party is royal and the other not, the game of Grandmother’s Footsteps still goes on between the sheets. At what point is rank suspended and royalty discontinued, and is the subject, even when forgetting him/herself utterly, still obliged to remember his/her place? Toiling over that regal eminence, I can imagine Edward VII’s mistresses still feeling constrained to call him ‘Sir’, and without their ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am’ royals may feel too naked altogether. Though maybe the discarding of this last rag of distinction gives them a thrill denied to the rest of us who, when we have no clothes on, have nothing left to take off. More reports please.

The parallels with today’s monarchy were largely unsought, but they became more obvious as the film proceeds, the final
shot of St Paul’s consciously recalling the television coverage of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales. (On the other hand, if one is going to film the entry into St Paul’s, there is only one place from which to do it; television chose it and so did we.)

Still, the conversation as the royal family pauses at the top of the steps to acknowledge the crowds has acquired a resonance it did not quite have when the play was written in 1991.

‘We must try to be more of a family,’ says the King. ‘There are model farms now, model villages, even model factories. Well, we must be a model family for the nation to look to.’