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Epilogue
‘Everyone thinks what fun to be the Queen if you can be Queen for a day: but for a
lifetime…’ Elizabeth’s cousin, Lady Pamela Hicks’s face expressed her horror at the
prospect of such a fate. There can be no retirement for Elizabeth. She will remain in
office until she dies or is mentally incapacitated. Even in the latter case, she will still be
Queen until the day of her death.
Her reign has been one of the longest in British history – and one of the most difficult
of recent times. Despite her hard work and total dedication, she has seen the standing of
the monarchy as an institution diminish from the high peak of glamour and adulation
which it reached in her Coronation year to the point where serious questions are being
asked as to whether it will survive her. The 1990s witnessed an unprecedented wave of
criticism and, perhaps worse, derision directed at Buckingham Palace. Republicanism
has become fashionable again although it is principally among intellectuals and, more
dangerously, powerful and influential people in the media and government. The advent
of the New Labour government in May 1997 with an avowed programme of
constitutional reform, including devolution and the removal of the hereditary element of
the House of Lords, posed further questions. The new administration, composed largely
of politicians who had been student radicals in the 1960s and ‘70s, some of them openly
republican, was dedicated to the ‘modernization’ of Britain in which history and
tradition were seen as irrelevant obstacles. A proportion of the population regard the
monarchy with indifference, an attitude which would have been unthinkable in the early
years of Elizabeth’s reign.
The trigger for this wider public disaffection has undoubtedly been the behaviour of
the younger royals and the break-up of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales
in particular. As the novelist Julian Barnes wrote in his Letters from London in 1992:
When I was growing up, the Royal Family still operated as a moral and domestic exemplar for most of Her
Britannic Majesty’s subjects. This function is currently in abeyance. You could try to argue that Elizabeth’s
children are showing how democratically close to ordinary people they are by their ability to screw up their
own lives; but that would be sophistry. Part of the unspoken deal between the Royals and the populace is
that the Royals, in return for privilege, wealth and adoration, must occasionally be seen to suffer, or give the
appearance of suffering; they must also indicate from time to time that they are subject to burdensome duty,
to long-term conditions and restrictions that the rest of us do not envy. They can’t be seen to wallow in the
benefits and then walk away when things get sticky. Otherwise the Royal Family will quickly decline into
mere illustrators of what is known in advertising as an aspirational life-style: this is how we plebs could and
would live, had we the luck, the history, the tax breaks. Whether this would be a strong enough
philosophical justification for the House of Windsor’s continuance is doubtful. 1