The Beginning of the End for Britain’s Monarchy? : Royal Family: The public’s natural sympathy has waned; it’s fashionable to be republican. The symbols of British sovereignty are debated.

This has been the most momentous week in the fortunes of the British monarchy for, say, 40 years. The implications of all that has happened are not going to make themselves known quickly.

The week started with Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth II’s weekend quarters, up in flames--a fire that quickly had political repercussions, as left-wing members of Parliament demanded that the queen should bear at least some of the cost for rebuilding the castle. Windsor Castle, however, is an important part of Britain’s heritage, and it seemed not much to ask the taxpayer to foot the bill to put it right. Still, the monarchy had lost the natural sympathy of the British public.

Then, with a stinking cold, the queen gave a remarkable speech on Nov. 24. There she was, with Windsor Castle still smoldering, surrounded by the wreckage of her family. Her daughter’s divorce was made final this year; her middle son’s wife has left him, and cavorts semi-publicly and semi-clothed with playboys; her elder son and heir has a marriage that is plainly not just on the rocks but, having been wrecked on them, five fathoms deep; her younger son (let us be thankful for small mercies) seems not the slightest bit interested in marriage at all. So the queen said that this year had been an “anus horribilis.”

Then on Nov. 26, the government announced the most important reforms to the royal finances for decades. The queen has let it be known that she will pay income tax (presently she does not) and, moreover, that the taxpayer-funded “civil list” will meet the stipends of only herself, her mother and her husband. The rest of the royals will have to forage for themselves, or depend on the queen’s private fortune, which, since it is substantial, should not provoke any of them into jumping off Westminster Bridge.

The question now is whether this reform package will head off the most intense criticism of the Royal Family for 60 years. That criticism, incidentally, has not been spun out of thin air by the tabloid newspapers, anxious for a cracking good story, though, of course, the antics of the royals are less revered in Britain than seemed possible a decade ago, when Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in a picture-book wedding (remember Kiri te Kanawa?) and the monarchy seemed serenely assured of its place in the hearts and minds of Britons. The new Princess of Wales, whom custom demanded was always described as “radiant,” quickly became pregnant. God was in his heaven, the queen was on the throne and the succession had been secured even unto the second and third generations. Yet, now for the first time since the 1930s, it is fashionable to declare yourself are a republican. How did things come to this pass?

The crisis of the monarch has two sources. The first was the decision of the Royal Family, originally taken in the 1960s, to allow a quasi-religious mystique to be stripped from them, which soon had the effect of allowing them to be marketed as celebrities. In fairness, this process started off with the best of intentions. Until the 1960s, the monarchy had (until everyone relevant was dead) conducted all but its ceremonial functions in secrecy. The decision to let a little sunshine in--to allow the press and television to portray the royals as “just another family”--backfired disastrously.

It backfired, because you can’t be a little bit pregnant. Once the British media had been conditioned to think of the royals as the source of good copy, they were off to the races. That might not have mattered if all the royals were as prim and as dull as the queen, with home lives the epitome of bourgeois values. But the younger generation are not like that: When they are not wild (Fergie and Andy) or beautiful (the Princess of Wales), they are odd (her strange husband). Worse, when the going in the press got tough, the royals seemed to want it both ways; they fell back onto subliminally arrogant demands that their privacy should be respected. But those who live by the sword of media exposure have a nasty habit of dying by it.

The second, and more important, reason for the crisis that the monarchy now faces is that Britain went through a startling, though incomplete, change in the 1980s. Encouraged by Margaret Thatcher, whose role as the preeminent figure in British post-1945 history becomes clearer by the hour, it became a far less deferential place. As one of her backbench critics once said, “She could not see an institution without hitting it with her handbag.” The old class-bound habits of easy submission to authority have gone; in their place is something far less predictable, and not always pleasant, but a good deal more dyanmic. In the British word, the country has become stroppy . There is hardly a British institution now--from the unity of the kingdom to relations with the United States to the BBC--that is not the subject of intense debate. It was inevitable that this national debate would sooner or later encompass the future of the monarchy and, ably assisted by the antics of the royals themselves, it now has.

So, now debate has been joined, and now that reform is in the wind, will the end result by a scaled-down monarchy, along Scandinavian lines, with princes of the blood-royal happily shopping at Marks and Spencer? It is, of course, much too early to say, but my own (biased) view is that this is not how things will finish. The pressures on the monarchy are intense. Some of those pressures are of the Royal Family’s own making: Does anyone really think that the Princess and and Prince of Wales can ever be crowned king and queen when, as one British editor said this week, when they can hardly stand being in the same country at the same time? Some of them are to do with the changing nature of British society and the all-but certain gradual removal of British political power to European institutions over the next 30 years. In sum, I cannot help thinking that we are watching the beginning of the end.

Yet, I am bound to say, that even for a republican like me, there is an element of tragedy in this. In its best, recent moments when Britain stood alone in 1940, the monarchy, in the old phrase, held up a mirror to the country’s better nature. For me, it is plain that the monarchy cannot now perform that role. I doubt that Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, and a man locked in a reverence for a past that most Britons have now rejected, will ever be able to do it--even if he was not locked into a sham of a marriage.

So the search for a new glue to hold British society together is under way. As the debate continues, the voices of those who advocate radical change in the symbols of British sovereignty will be heard ever louder.