Part 3

What sort of woman is she? Forget the cloying descriptions of courtiers and the indiscretions of "Crawfie" and her friends, and the portrait is rather an appealing one. Elizabeth II in person is much prettier than her photographs. Her coloring is excellent. Her mouth, a little too wide, can break into a beguiling smile. She is slowly overcoming her nervousness in public, but still becomes very angry when the newsreel and television cameras focus on her for minutes at a time. Her voice, high and girlish on her accession, is taking on a deeper, more musical tone. Years of state duties, of meeting all kinds and classes of people, have diminished her shyness. She was almost tongue-tied when she came to Washington as Princess Elizabeth, but her host on that occasion, President Harry S. Truman, was surprised by the poised and friendly Queen he met in London in 1956.

All her adult life the Queen has been accustomed to the company of the great. Aided by a phenomenal memory and real interest, her acquaintance with world politics is profound. She is intelligent but not an intellectual. She does a great deal of official reading--so much, in fact, that she reads little for pleasure.

The Queen's pleasures and those of her immediate family are so typical of the middle class that intellectuals are often offended. They would prefer more attendance at cultural events such as the Edinburgh Festival and less at race meetings. But the deep thinkers, worried because the cultural tone of Buckingham Palace is pitched to the level of Danny Kaye rather than T.S. Eliot, overlook the fact that attachment to such frivolity strengthens the popularity of the royal house. There is no evidence that the British admire or desire intellectual attainments in a monarch. Nor does history indicate that such lusty figures as Charles II and George IV were less popular than the pious Victoria or the benign George V. Thus, when the Queen spends a week at Ascot to watch the racing, as millions of her subjects would dearly love to do, or attends a London revue, her subjects, aware of the burden of her office, wish her a good time. And the descriptions of such outings, with their invariable reports on what the Queen wore, what she ate and drank, and what she was heard to say, are read avidly by a large percentage of her people.

The people are flattered when the Queen appears at a polo game in sensible shoes and a print dress, accompanied by her children and her dogs. They are equally flattered when they see her in tiara and evening dress, regal and coldly handsome. When the newspapers printed pictures of the Queen and her royal hosts at a state ball during her visit to Sweden, the popular reaction was: "Doesn't she look lovely, a real credit to the country."

Racing is the Queen's favorite sport. When she was returning from her world tour in 1953-4, one of the first messages the royal yacht _Britannia_ transmitted as it neared British shores was an inquiry on the result of a race held the day before.

For Elizabeth, racing is more than a sport; it is an enthusiasm. She knows blood lines and past performances, and her acute judgment of form sometimes conflicts with her personal attachment for one of the royal stable's entries. She likes to watch show jumping and polo, although at polo games she is continually worried about the Duke of Edinburgh, an enthusiastic player. But horse racing: the magic moment when the barrier goes up, the bright silks on the back stretch, the lovely sight of the field rounding the last turn into the stretch--that's her sport. As it is also the sport of millions of her subjects, the sneers of the puritans have little effect.

She is a young woman of determination, having inherited some of her grandfather's temper and his forthright outlook on events. In moments of family crisis she is likely to take what the British call "a strong line." During the row over the romance of Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend, it was reported that the first communication from Buckingham Palace on the situation had been written by the Queen. I find this credible. The announcement certainly had all the faults of a communiqué drafted in anger.

Finally, Elizabeth is religious, very conscious of the importance of her role in British society, and, as she grows older, somewhat censorious of the gay young things enjoying a freedom she never knew.

The monarchy is costly. The Queen is a very wealthy woman in her own right, but, in addition, she receives £60,000 (about $168,000) a year from the Civil List. This is granted to the sovereign by Parliament on the recommendation of a Select Committee. The Civil List not only "pays" the Queen but pays her expenses, which are high. For instance, the salaries of the royal household, secretaries, equerries, servants, and the like, total £185,000 or $418,000 a year, and the running expenses come to £121,800 or $341,040.

Payments charged to the Consolidated Fund maintain the other members of the family. The Duke of Edinburgh's annuity is £40,000 or $112,000 a year, and the Queen Mother's is £70,000 or $196,000.

These payments are only one of many sources of income. The House of Windsor is very rich, although its fortune is modest compared with the holdings of the House of Ford or the House of Rockefeller.

Queen Victoria died leaving the monarchy more firmly established than ever before and her family richer by millions of pounds. During her long reign the remarkable daughter of an unambitious Duke of Kent and an improvident German princess amassed a fortune of about £5,000,000 or, at the exchange rates of the day, about $25,000,000. The financial dealings of the royal house are secret. But both Albert, Victoria's Prince Consort, and his son Edward VII benefited from the advice of financiers. Reputedly the family owns large blocks of American railroad stock. The financial structure is complex, however. It is hard to say just how much Elizabeth owns as Queen and how much as an individual.

As one of the greatest landowners, the Queen derives an income of about £94,600 or $265,000 a year from the Duchy of Lancaster. The royal family also receives the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, which amount to about £90,000 or approximately $250,000 a year. This duchy, comprising about 133,000 acres spread throughout the west of England, includes farms, hotels, tin mines, even pubs. Seven palaces and eight royal houses also are the property of Elizabeth as Queen. One, Sandringham in Norfolk, an estate of 17,000 acres including fifteen well-kept farms, is a family holding. The Balmoral estate in Scotland comprises 80,000 acres. The family holds more than seventy-five choice bits of London real estate. Both fortune and property are carefully managed. Nothing is wasted. The game birds that fall to the guns of shooting parties at Sandringham and Balmoral are sold on the commercial market after the household's requirements have been met.

The Crown is not only a prosperous and wealthy establishment. It is also the center of a unique complex of commercial interests. The manufacture of souvenirs connected with the royal family is big business. These souvenirs range from hideous, cheap glass ash trays and "silver" spoons stamped with a picture of Buckingham Palace or of the Queen and the Duke to "coronation" wineglasses and dinner services sold to wealthy tourists. A whole section of British publishing is devoted to postcards, picture books, and other records of royal lives and royal occasions.

The Queen's world tour in 1953-4 produced a bumper crop of pictorial and prose reports to fit every purse and the prevailing taste for flowery adulation. These books were bought and read, or at least looked at, after the British public already had been exposed to newspaper accounts, magazine reports, radio bulletins, and television newsreels. Once at a dinner party the wife of a famous writer remarked: "I'm sick of this damned tour." The other guests broke into a flurry of conversation that had nothing to do with the royal voyage. Yet I learned that three of them felt "exactly as dear Betty does, but, my dear, you don't say it."

Some thoughtful students of the institution believe that the newspapers, magazines, radio, and television have forgotten Bagehot's injunction about letting too much light fall on the monarchy. But I have seen no diminution of popular interest. The highbrows may be bored, but the lowbrows and middlebrows love it.

The extensive coverage given the royal family has propaganda uses. In the years since the war there has been a quiet but intensive effort to reinforce the position of the monarch as the titular head of the Commonwealth. The rulers of Britain, Labor or Conservative, recognizing how slender are the ties that bind the Commonwealth, have worked steadily to strengthen the chief spiritual tie, the Crown, as political and economic ties have become attenuated.

The Queen is the Queen of Canada and Australia as well as of the United Kingdom. Canada, in fact, is a monarchy. Royal tours of Commonwealth countries emphasize the common tie of monarchy and are also intended to reawaken interest in Britain and, as these are a commercial people, British manufactures.

The reports that have reached London show that, from the standpoint of strengthening identity with the Commonwealth, the visit to Australia and New Zealand during the world tour was an outstanding success. To the exuberant, vigorous Australians, for instance, the Queen symbolized their relationship with the island many of them still call home. Criticism of the "pommies," the slang term for the British, was drowned in the swell of cheers for the Queen of Australia.

Nor should the effect of such tours on the younger members of the Commonwealth be underestimated. The visit to Nigeria in 1956 flattered its people and gave new meaning to the honors and titles that successive governments have bestowed on worthy--which in this context means loyal--natives of the country. Those in government who value the Commonwealth and Empire see such visits as a method of impressing new members of the Commonwealth with the permanence of a symbol that binds all members. Perhaps only South Africa, in its present government's mood of Boer republicanism, is proof against the loan of the Crown.

Curiously, this extension of the monarchy is not generally appreciated in Britain. There the supporters of the Crown are gratified, of course, when the newspapers report an ovation for the Queen in Wellington. But they are slow to accept the idea of the Queen as Queen of New Zealand.

The process of identifying the Queen with various parts of the Commonwealth may go further than visits to its members. Some officials suggest that the Queen should live a part of each year in one or another of the Commonwealth countries. From the constitutional standpoint this is a revolutionary suggestion. And Britain prefers evolution to revolution. But it is an indication of the progressive viewpoint that some supporters of the Crown have adopted toward its political uses in the modern world.

No institution in Britain escapes attack, and so the institution of monarchy is attacked. But such criticism is rarely coherent, popular, or direct. On the whole, there is less criticism than there was a century ago. Republicanism died as a political force in the 1870's. The Chartists in their peak period, roughly between 1838 and 1849, included in their demands the establishment of a republic. When Victoria withdrew into her grief after the death of the Prince Consort, a republican movement of some importance developed. New impetus was given by the establishment of the Third Republic in France in 1871. Charles Bradlaugh and George Odger, men of some importance, spoke eloquently in support of a republic. But the last "Republican Conference" was held in 1873, and Sir Charles Dilke later ascribed his youthful republicanism to "political infancy."

The Labor Party, despite its strong infusion of Marxism, treats the issue as a dead letter. Not since the party conference of 1923 has there been a serious debate on the monarchy. At that conference a motion that republicanism should be the policy of the party was rejected by 3,694,000 votes to 386,000.

Criticism of the monarchy in contemporary Britain is most telling when it hits the cost of the institution. The great wealth of the royal family and the heavy expenses of the monarchial institution invite criticism in a period when Britain seems to live perennially on the rim of economic disaster.

Early in 1956 it was suggested that the Queen's Flight, her personal transport planes, be re-equipped with one, possibly more, of the big new Britannias, the nation's newest air liner. At the same time a new dining-car was ordered for royal travel, and it became known that the royal waiting-room at London airport was to be renovated at considerable expense. These matters received extraordinarily detailed coverage in the newspapers owned by Lord Beaverbrook. Letters criticizing the added expenses found their way into the letter columns of the _Daily Express_, the _Evening Standard_, and the _Sunday Express_. Columnists inquired the reason for such expenditures when the nation was being asked to tighten its belt, spend less, and defeat inflation.

Constant readers of these newspapers, which are among the most sprightly and technically expert in Britain, have long noted their oblique criticism of Duke of Edinburgh. Usually this deals with the Duke's "interference" in the field of industrial relations. It is believed to spring from Lord Beaverbrook's long-standing animus for the Duke's uncle, Earl Mountbatten. The criticism of the proposed expenditures for the Britannias, the dining-car, and the waiting-room gave the newspapers a chance to hint that the young man was getting a bit above himself.

The _Sunday Express_ gave the widest possible publicity to its serialization of the autobiography of the Duchess of Windsor, an opus that, although interesting, cannot be considered an enthusiastic recommendation for the institution of monarchy.

The inevitable conclusion is that William Maxwell Aitken, first Baron Beaverbrook, New Brunswick, and Cherkley, nurses crypto-republican sentiments at heart. He has confessed to being a propagandist in his newspapers, and he is so unpredictable that he might sometime direct all his energies against the institution. I mentioned this to a cabinet minister, who replied that the monarchy would welcome it. "Nothing helps a politician more than the enmity of the Beaver," he commented.

Although republicanism is no longer an issue in the Labor Party, the party itself contains a strong element that is hostile to the monarchy. Yet neither the _Daily Mirror_ nor the _Daily Herald_, the journalistic pillars of the left, snipe quite so often or so accurately as the Beaverbrook press.

The _New Statesman and Nation_ does. Its indirect attacks on royalty are based on establishing a link between royalty and the wealthy, showy, and, of course, non-socialist world of London's fashionable West End. The _New Statesman_'s complaint, delivered in the tones of a touring schoolmarm who has been pinched by a lascivious Latin, is that the Queen should use her influence to halt ostentatious spending on debutante parties and the revels of the young. Its anonymous editorial-writer was severe with young people who drink too much (although abstinence has never been particularly popular on the left) and generally whoop it up. The editorial ended with a hint that the Queen would have to exercise some restraint when a Labor government came to power.

Despite such criticisms and warnings, the monarchy pursues its course virtually unchallenged. One reason for the lack of a serious political challenge may be that the monarchy is not now identified with a rich, powerful, and coherent aristocracy, as it was a century ago, but with the ordinary citizen. Then, too, there are many who look to the royal family as an example.

Long ago a compositor in a London newspaper, a good union man and a Socialist, explained this attitude. "I'd rather have my two daughters reading about the Queen and all that stuff than reading those magazines about the flicks. Who'd you want your daughter to follow, Lana Turner or the Queen?"

So we return again to the indefinable and powerful tie that binds people and Crown.

Perhaps it is a sense of historical identity experienced as the Queen rides past, carrying with her the atmosphere of other Englands. Here before the eyes of her people is a reassurance of survival, an example of continuity. This is one of those periods in history when the British need reassuring.

Perhaps as the monotony of life in a nation that is becoming one huge industrial suburb spreads over Britain, the ceremony and glitter of the Crown mean more than ever before. The great noblemen are prosaic characters in business suits showing the crowds through empty palaces and castles. But the Queen, amid the uniforms and palaces and castles, remains the Queen.

Perhaps as the storms buffet England in this second half of the century, the position of the Queen as a personification of goodness and justice becomes more important. Here is an enduring symbol, a token of the past and a promise for the future. As the world and its problems become more complex, the single, simple attraction of the representative of an institution that has survived so many complexities and problems will grow upon the confused and unhappy.

The Crown stands as it has for a thousand years. Its power is less and its influence is greater than many know. It is an integral part of a flexible and progressive society.

III. _How the British Govern Themselves_

_Parliament can do anything but turn a boy into a girl._

ENGLISH PROVERB

_Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself._

WOODROW WILSON

The British are pre-eminently a political people, as Americans are, and as Germans, Russians, and Italians are not. They regard politics and government as serious, honorable, and, above all, interesting occupations. To many Britons the techniques of government and politics in Nigeria or Louisiana or Iceland are as fascinating as the newest jet fighter is to an aviation enthusiast. They have been at it a long time, and yet politics and government remain eternally fascinating.

The comparative stability and prestige of government and politics result in part from tradition and experience. The British govern themselves by a system evolved over a thousand years from the times of the Saxon kings, and they have given much of what is best and some of what is worst in that system to nations and continents unknown when first a Parliament sat in Westminster. Although it was dominated by peers and bullied by the King, a Parliament met in Westminster when France seethed under the absolute rule of His Most Christian Majesty. Some of the greatest speeches made against the royal policy during the American War of Independence were made in Parliament.

The course of history has strengthened the position of parliamentary government. Parliament and Britain have survived and triumphed, but where is the Europe of Louis XIV, of Napoleon, of Wilhelm II, of Hitler? Even in times of great stress the business of government must go on. I remember my astonishment in June of 1940 when I returned from a stricken, hopeless France to learn from a Member of Parliament that a committee was considering plans for uniting the West Indian islands in a single Commonwealth unit after the war.

The idea that politics and government are essential to the well-being of the nation fortifies tolerance in British public life. The political and military disasters of 1940 were far more damaging and dangerous to Britain than Pearl Harbor was to the United States. They invited bitter recrimination. Yet Winston Churchill, himself bitterly attacked in the locust years for predicting these very disasters, took Neville Chamberlain into his cabinet and silenced recrimination with the salient reminder that if the nation dwelt too much on the past it might lose the future.

For a century the British have avoided the dangers of an important extremist political party comparable to the Communists in France and Italy or the Nazis in Germany. The Communist Party exists in Britain, of course, but only barely. Sir Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts made some impression just before and just after the last war, but their direct political influence is negligible.

The British don't think extremism is good practical politics. They went through their own period of extremism in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries when for a variety of reasons, religious as well as political, they cut off one king's head, tried a dictatorship, brought back a king, and finally found comparative tranquillity in the development of a constitutional monarchy.

The memory of these troubled times is not dead. At the height of McCarthyism in the United States a British diplomat explained: "We're very fortunate; we went through the same sort of period under the Tudors and the Stuarts when treason and slander and libel were the common coin of politics."

With exceptions, the great political parties in the country have now identified themselves with the national interest rather than with a partisan one. Even the exceptions change. As the status of the working class has changed for the better, the Labor Party has moved perceptibly away from its early position as a one-class party. The heirs of Keir Hardy--the Attlees, Morrisons, and Gaitskells--understand that Labor must appeal now to the whole people.

The national interest is something the whole people has always understood and accepted in the past. For the British are guided politically not by an ideology but by interest. This interest is a free world, free from the economic as well as the political standpoint. One factor in the decision to withdraw from India was the conviction that, in the end, withdrawal would serve British commercial interests. I do not suggest that this was the only factor. There were others, including the belief of the leaders of the Labor government that India could not and should not be kept within the Empire by force.

Similarly, Britain is ready to give way on the independence of other parts of the Empire when she thinks these areas are ready for independence as democracies, and when she believes that their emergence as independent democracies will benefit her own commercial interests. This mixture of realism and idealism is difficult for outsiders to grasp, especially when the British cling to a territory such as Cyprus for reasons that are largely connected with their commercial interests in that part of the world.

Yet although the British have acquired, and are now in the process of losing, a world-wide empire, they never suffered from a desire to remake the world as did the French of 1789, or the Russians of 1917, or the Germans of 1939. As a commercial people their basic interest was, and is, peace. The British will go to almost any lengths to prevent a war, as they did in 1938 and 1939. Once at war, however, they fight with cold ruthlessness.

The allegiance of the great political parties to the national interest is one reason why British politics and politicians are flexible and tolerant. Another is that politics are still touched by the shadowy influence of the Crown. Here is a higher, if weaker, authority than Prime Minister or cabinet. Does the presence of the sovereign at the peak of government draw some of the exaggeration and extremism from politics?