The Book of Tells (Peter Collett)[unlocked]

THE BOOK OF TELLS
Queen usually adopts a rather grave expression, but there
are times - for example, when her horse does well in the
Derby - when her spontaneous emotions come to the fore.
The Queen is at her best on formal social occasions and
when she's being completely relaxed. It's situations that
are neither one thing nor the other that she seems to find
most difficult.
Symbolic distance is sometimes conveyed by language
- for example, the way that members of the royal family
might refer to 'we' or 'one' when they mean 'I' or 'me'.
The use of 'we' by monarchs has a long tradition - it
derives from the notion of the ruler as more than a single
individual, which is said to go back to the time when the
Roman Empire was split in two, with one Emperor in
Rome and another in Constantinople. Queen Victoria is
reputed to have said, 'We are not amused' to show that
she, herself, was not impressed. This is misleading on two
counts. Firstly, there is no record that she ever used this
expression. Secondly, there is lots of evidence that Queen
Victoria was frequently amused - her journals repeatedly
include the phrase, 'I was very much amused', and it's
known that she was given to uncontrollable attacks of the
giggles. 7 But royal use of the term 'we' isn't always
straightforward. Edward VIII, for example, often used the
term in correspondence with his beloved Wallis Simpson.
In one letter he wrote, 'not anybody or anything can
separate WE .. . God bless WE'. 8 The reference here
was not to himself, but to both of them, where 'WE' was
obtained by combining the first letters of Wallis and
Edward.
Members of the royal family are more likely to use the
pronoun 'one' when referring to themselves. When he was
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