Yes the Queen made it. She has been Sixty Years a Queen. For a moment we forget about equality and all the other cant of the age. For a moment the republicans and trendy people fall silent.
There are many reasons why people love the monarchy. I like the monarchy for all those reasons but most of all because there is no damned merit in it.
The Queen is marvellous, has never put a foot wrong, we all agree. She has managed when everything was going so badly to save our national face. She has reminded us of our institutions and our state religion when these things are often downplayed or attacked.
But did the British public ever fully take the present Queen to their heart? Certainly not in the same way that they did the Queen Mother or the old Prince of Wales, ‘the first gentleman of the Empire’, who turned out not to be a gentleman at all, or the dark Diana, Princess of Wales, who was mad, bad and, in the Prince of Wales’s case, dangerous to know.
Lord Altrincham shocked a lot of people in all classes when he said of our present Queen in 1957, “The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation." But even at her present great age she still has something of the well brought-up, earnest schoolgirl. King George V's and Queen Mary's slightly Germanic accents made them oddly classless. Queen Elizabeth is not 'grand', despite being the Queen but she is very pre-1939 upper class.
Lord Altrincham shocked a lot of people in all classes when he said of our present Queen in 1957, “The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation." But even at her present great age she still has something of the well brought-up, earnest schoolgirl. King George V's and Queen Mary's slightly Germanic accents made them oddly classless. Queen Elizabeth is not 'grand', despite being the Queen but she is very pre-1939 upper class.
The public greatly respected the Queen but had not really taken her to their hearts before I left England in 1998. They may well have done so since. Nor does this matter anyway - monarchy is not a popularity contest. The Queen believes in the divine right of kings but is increasingly seen by her subjects as a public servant whom they employ and the great majority of them are very pleased with the service they receive.
In Romania I see how lucky England is to have a decent monarchy and ruling class. Likewise the resignation a few days ago of the German President makes the same point. (If only French Presidents resigned when they behaved unethically.) Only 8 countries have preserved their system of government without violent interruption for the last 100 years and the Queen is Queen of 4 of them. And a fifth South Africa is a former dominion of hers. The others are Sweden, Switzerland and (another former British colony) the USA.
The Queen is a descendant of Mahomet, via King Pedro the Cruel of Portugal. She descends too from Brian Boru, High King of Ireland and she is related to Vlad the Impaler as well as George Washington, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton. She is also Queen of France of course.
She is very funny we are often told in private. When Clare Short was about to kiss hands her mobile telephone went off in her bag. She scattered the contents of the bag over the floor in front of the Queen before dredging up the telephone which died in her hands. The Queen said, ‘I do hope it wasn’t somebody important.’
She is very funny we are often told in private. When Clare Short was about to kiss hands her mobile telephone went off in her bag. She scattered the contents of the bag over the floor in front of the Queen before dredging up the telephone which died in her hands. The Queen said, ‘I do hope it wasn’t somebody important.’
She is wonderfully old-fashioned and asked Norman Hartnell “not to make me look like Miss Collins”.
Our Queen has I am told a lot of influence which is very reassuring. But I wish she had used it to stop the very many awful things that have happened since 1952 from women priests to abolishing habeas corpus, to making smoking illegal in clubs, to building over the green belt, to selling out Northern Ireland, to.... to... to....
Do we have as much to celebrate as we had in 1897? We have much more, despite the loss of the Empire. For most of Her Majesty's the last 60 years have been ones of miraculous prosperity and improved living standards. The Englishman living on the dole or old age pension is far richer in many respects than a Victorian Duke. But very very much has been lost. We now have vast numbers of divorces and abortions, AIDS, loss of religious faith, violence and gang crime, loss of belief in our traditions, more practical freedom but far fewer civil liberties in the true sense of restraints on the state. We have all the problems that always come with ethnic minorities. All very different from the homogeneous respectable sexually conservative vaguely Christian England over which the Queen came to reign in 1952 in what was called the 'Second Elizabethan Era', when net curtains twitched, people worried what the nighbours might think, England still thought she was a great power and people expected Kenya would be a good colony for English emigrants to settle.
Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay. My father grandmother and adults who remembered working class life in London before the war all told me how much better life was in those days. It was better because they were young but when I came to Romania in 1998, a country where it still seemed to be the 1950s in many respects I saw their point.
Do we have as much to celebrate as we had in 1897? We have much more, despite the loss of the Empire. For most of Her Majesty's the last 60 years have been ones of miraculous prosperity and improved living standards. The Englishman living on the dole or old age pension is far richer in many respects than a Victorian Duke. But very very much has been lost. We now have vast numbers of divorces and abortions, AIDS, loss of religious faith, violence and gang crime, loss of belief in our traditions, more practical freedom but far fewer civil liberties in the true sense of restraints on the state. We have all the problems that always come with ethnic minorities. All very different from the homogeneous respectable sexually conservative vaguely Christian England over which the Queen came to reign in 1952 in what was called the 'Second Elizabethan Era', when net curtains twitched, people worried what the nighbours might think, England still thought she was a great power and people expected Kenya would be a good colony for English emigrants to settle.
Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay. My father grandmother and adults who remembered working class life in London before the war all told me how much better life was in those days. It was better because they were young but when I came to Romania in 1998, a country where it still seemed to be the 1950s in many respects I saw their point.
Princess Margaret the Queen's very beautiful younger sister was far more regal. I met her when I was twenty and she was fifty and completely to my surprise I was very smitten. Elizabeth Taylor was not in it. Princess Margaret was a true Hanoverian whereas Her Majesty is Saxe-Coburg Gotha. She would have made an impossibly glamorous, possibly rather naughty and extremely haughty Queen – like a Queen from the pages of a romantic novelist. It would probably not have done. Instead poor Princess Margaret slid from view in the last thirty years. She was cremated in Slough Crematorium, which somehow seems a Joe Orton ending to a William Douglas-Home drama.
P.S A good post on the Queen as England's most impressive religious leader by Damian Thompson whom I always greatly enjoy - he is so much better than more famous journalists like D'Ancona, those various talentless women or, save the mark, the ghastly Hari. I utterly wasted my talents in the late 80s when I almost got myself a job on the Daily Telegraph where I would have fitted in very well. I remember meeting the people who worked on the Peterborough column at the Telegraph and Damien asked me: "What's your religion?" "I'm a papist." (Alas, in those days lapsed.) "Good. We're all papists here and we want to keep it that way." Sound man, Thompson.
P.S A good post on the Queen as England's most impressive religious leader by Damian Thompson whom I always greatly enjoy - he is so much better than more famous journalists like D'Ancona, those various talentless women or, save the mark, the ghastly Hari. I utterly wasted my talents in the late 80s when I almost got myself a job on the Daily Telegraph where I would have fitted in very well. I remember meeting the people who worked on the Peterborough column at the Telegraph and Damien asked me: "What's your religion?" "I'm a papist." (Alas, in those days lapsed.) "Good. We're all papists here and we want to keep it that way." Sound man, Thompson.
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