Their Royal Mess Has British Taking Bets

Consider the plight of Queen Elizabeth II.

Her children can’t stay married; their late-night, steamy telephone calls, and those of their spouses (not to each other), are taped and published, and now the monarch has to surrender some of her huge income to the tax collector, just like her lowliest subject.

In addition, the queen is the center of a raging debate over whether she might or should be the last in the long line of Britain’s reigning kings and queens.

To all the talk of the end of the royal house, historian David Cannadine snorts:

“The British monarch has survived executions, abdications and revolutions. The notion that it is going to collapse because Charles is talking dirty to Camilla is ridiculous.”

But there is some big money being bet with Britain’s legal bookies that says the monarchy has pushed the self-destruct button and will be gone by the year 2000, when Elizabeth will be approaching age 74.

On the opposite pole from Cannadine--who takes the long view, a thousand years long, of the latest crisis in the House of Windsor--is Tony Benn.

A veteran legislator and fearless iconoclast, Benn thinks it’s about time the monarchy was abolished and has introduced such a bill in Parliament, although there is no question of it ever becoming law.

Public debate on this sensitive issue burgeoned as the monarchy staggered from one public-image disaster to another all last year.

The queen’s loyal subjects had barely recovered from the topless antics in France by the Duchess of York and newspaper allegations about Princess Diana’s late-night phone calls when “Camillagate” hit like a body blow.

Earnest Prince Charles, champion of unemployed youth, the arts and the ozone layer, seems to have been overheard in amorous conversation with a married woman, and not his wife Diana. And--most embarrassing--the chat was more lavatorial than royal.

The 44-year-old heir to the throne has not denied newspaper allegations that the taped telephone call was between himself and his old flame, Camilla Parker Bowles, 45.

So readers of the widely printed transcript are left to assume the worst. Of course they do, and wonder what it means for the future of the throne.

Vernon Bogdanor of Oxford University doesn’t think the present royal troubles are causing serious damage: “I think it’s a minor blip. The British are a very monarchical people.”

Irreverent columnists expressed relief that Charles wasn’t the dry old stick they’d thought he was. But there was no getting around the damage to the public image of the future king.

The Duchess of York may have been a little wayward, and the Princess of Wales not quite the saint she was painted. They have disappointed but, after all, they weren’t originally from royal lineage.

Charles, scion of the House of Windsor, was brought up to be king and supreme governor of the Church of England. Now he is separated from his wife and it seems likely that they will divorce.

That same church opposes divorce--which would put it and Charles in an uncomfortable spot if he became a divorced king.

A solution would be to sever the tie between church and state or to modify Anglican rules about remarriage. Both ideas have been thrown into the media debate and have some supporters.

It is not as if all England’s kings have been paragons of virtue. Some were downright disreputable by today’s standards. But their subjects were stuck with them.

Today’s monarchy is financed by voters and sensitive to public opinion. It is also weighed down by a burden that absolute monarchs did not carry: the expectation that the royal family should represent an ideal of British family life and reflect the nation’s image of itself.

“In every generation, the British have projected on the person of their sovereign their own collective hopes, anxieties, speculations,” Cannadine said. “In so doing, they have created and re-created their monarchy in their own self-image.”

King George III was a popular king with a fondness for family life, but it was his granddaughter, Queen Victoria, who is identified in the public mind as the source of the sovereign’s family image.

She was an adoring wife and a prolific, if domineering, mother. At her death in 1901, after a 63-year reign, she left a legacy of rigid middle-class respectability that has echoed down four generations.

Today’s monarch, shorn of power, is head of state and a focus of national identity and pride. The government is Her Majesty’s Government, but in fact the sovereign must do as it asks and say what it wishes.

Queen Elizabeth II has done this for 40 years to the satisfaction of almost everybody. She has changed the monarchy subtly and shows a will to continue doing so.

The queen soothed some serious rumblings with the decision to pay income tax, although the continued exemption from inheritance tax will protect the luxurious trappings that set Britain’s sovereigns apart from the “bicycling” monarchs of Holland and Scandinavia.

The palace held its first news conference on Feb. 11 to announce details of the tax arrangements, a small but significant breach of the wall of secrecy that surrounds the royal family.

David Starkey, a constitutional historian from the London School of Economics, believes adaptability has protected this monarchy from the fate of others.

“The past is on their side,” he says. “The reason that the English monarchy survived is it changed, and changed repeatedly. . . . We want a monarchy that has got the wit, the courage and strength to reinvent itself as it’s so often done in the past.”

But 1992 was a very bad year. Support for the monarchy dropped from 82% in a 1988 Gallup Poll to 69% in a December Gallup Poll taken two days after Charles and Diana separated.

Another Gallup Poll taken after the “Camilla” transcript was published found that only 24% wanted the monarchy unchanged, and 65% favored a less grandiose, “democratic” monarchy, like that of the Netherlands. Only 9% wanted to be rid of the monarchy entirely.

Prime Minister John Major, speaking to an audience of Tory faithful on Feb. 3, expressed some of the unease felt by so many deeply conservative British people as the monarchy and the nation face hard times.

“Institutions that embodied our nationhood have come under attack,” Major said. “I sense a growing fear that we may lose so much that is precious to this country; a feeling among people that our deepest values as a civilized nation are being threatened.”

But politicians seem to have little appetite for debate on the issue. Speaking against monarchy or the present occupant of the throne is no way to get elected. And abolition is so remote a possibility that it is barely worth the time to discuss.

One politician willing to talk monarchy is Roy Hattersley, former deputy leader of the opposition Labor Party, who says Britain needs a modern, minimal monarchy, “stripped of all the bogus mysticism by which it is surrounded today.”

Britain suffers from a debilitating attachment to its past, Hattersley recently wrote in the Observer newspaper. “Unless the monarchy accepts a new--and less regal--status, it will slide into terminal unpopularity.”

Paddy Ashdown, head of the small Liberal Democrat Party, came out in favor of a scaled-down monarchy, shorn of some of its pomp and “closer to the reality of life in Britain.”

Bogdanor, a fellow of Oxford’s Brasenose College, pointed out that “constitutional monarchy is a democratic institution. If people didn’t want a monarchy they wouldn’t have it.”

Easier said than done.

It would take an act of Parliament and something would have to be ready to put in its place, said Prof. Peter Hennessy of Queen Mary and Westfield College of London University.

“So much is done in the name of the queen. . . . You’d have to suck out the vile element from the whole swath of British government. . . . It would paralyze Parliament for a year,” he said.

“It would split the country, split the parties.”

A bill also would be needed if the heir to the throne gave up his place in the line of succession.

The suggestion that Charles step aside for his elder son, William, had support after the separation was announced. The latest Gallup Poll found that 50% thought Charles should take the throne eventually, but 38% thought he should renounce it in William’s favor.

Cannadine was not one of them.

“I think Charles has no choice but to soldier on,” he said in an interview. “To give up would be an admission of total failure on his part.

“Once you abandon the principle that it has to go generation to generation--and people can either do it or not, depending on whether they’re any good--the whole show is really on the skids.”

Crisis may follow crisis, but the monarchy does not appear in danger of disappearing.