Terry Prone: Irish people revel in the contradictions in our attitude to the British royals
The late Princess Diana of Britain shakes hands with a leprosy patient at Sitanala Leprosy Hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia. File Picture: Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty
YOU know that statement, “I’m not a racist, but…”?
How about this for a variation describing hundreds of thousands of Irish people: “I’m not a royalist, but…”? Or “I’m not a monarchist, but…”
The phrase typically serves as an advance apology for paying attention to every jot and tittle of coverage following the death of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, obsessing over the relative positions in Westminster Abbey during the upcoming royal funeral, or taking a view of King Charles’ capacity.
It’s not new, this ambivalence. My grandmother used to describe the IRA as “our lads” and drop a few bob into the collection boxes on the ground outside the GPO where “our lads” sold their newspapers.
My mother would try to convey to passersby (who had less than no interest in what this sweet little old lady did with her loose change) that she wasn’t with her, but that’s a difficult one to sell when you’re linking said little old lady by the arm that isn’t throwing the coins.
Yet, at Christmas, as well as listening to the Pope’s message, my grandmother would sit down and listen to the queen’s broadcast. Not sure she fully understood it, because the queen had a preserved-in-aspic-since-the-19th-century way of pronouncing words that provoked constant double-takes in her listeners. The point is; she listened. Reverently. Nana was indubitably not a royalist, but…
That contradiction was evident, too, at home.
My father, a rabid socialist, would now and again let loose about the royal family owning half of Scotland, being party to the worst excesses of colonialism, and personifying all that was bad in the (capitalist) system. My mother went along with this while at the same time pointing out that nobody does pomp and circumstance with military uniforms and brass bands like the British on occasions generated by royalty dying. Or near-royalty such as Churchill dying.
They were just egging to break out the protocols along with the trombones. As an argument for the continuation of the monarchy, it was tangential but meritorious.
I remember my mother, who would sneer at any suggestion that she was a royalist, quoting what the doctors had said about Elizabeth’s father, George V, delivered on BBC radio by Stuart Hibberd: “The king’s life is moving peacefully to its close.”
She did add that what this actually meant was that they’d hit him with a megadose of morphine that was going to make him comfortable, while also speeding up the shuffling off of his mortal coil.
Last week, the royal medics in Balmoral did the 21st century version of this, announcing that the queen was “under medical supervision,” while her family rushed to be beside her. Everybody, particularly Joe Duffy, knew the minute they heard it that she had already snuffed it at that point.
We mock the Americans as suckers for the royalty thing, and it must be admitted that they’re bigger into it than we are, with countless glossy magazines at the checkouts in Walmart, Winn-Dixie, and Walgreens offering the latest on Kate Midleton or Prince Andrew or retrospectives on Princess Diana. Barnes & Noble bookshops carry massive coffee table picture books of royal weddings, breakups, mistresses, and tragedies.
It was the Americans who fell for the girl they believed to be Anastasia, the daughter of the Russian tsar who had escaped from the mass murder at Ekaterinburg.
They feted the young woman, financed her, married her (well, one doctor did) and made a movie about her, starring Ingrid Bergman. It was only years after her death that DNA analysis proved Anastasia wasn’t her name and she wasn’t royal at all. She was a despairing servant girl who had jumped into the Danube to do away with herself and, in the hospital after she was fished out, had been identified by some visiting member of the aristocracy as resembling the arch-duchess.
The girl became an imposter without much active participation in the imposture: She hardly spoke, made no claims, and barely knew which way was up, especially in the early days after her failed suicide attempt. That attempt was used by her growing cohort of supporters to explain away the fact that she spoke little Russian and seemed to have only sporadic memories of court life.
They would point out that she had to have been traumatised by the massacre of her family and subsequent escape from the death house, so it was no wonder she wasn’t the full rouble any more.
But she was still royal, they believed, and that factor drew crowds wherever she went. She lacked lucidity, charm, looks, education, or humour — but her assumed lineage protected her right up to and beyond her death in a filthy bed shared with a couple of dozen adopted feral cats.
Such was the mystique of royalty.
That mystique attached itself to Queen Elizabeth as soon as she appeared on black and white television and in black and white photographs in newspapers, smiling despite a crown weighing five pounds and robes that required a small army of ladies-in-waiting to manage. It is a mystique that is much more than fame, not unrelated to history tourism.
People visiting Pompeii or Athens have a need to relate to the continuum of humanity. Similarly, the popularity of TV programmes tracing the ancestry of even B-list celebrities speaks to the thrill of spotting the same forehead or eyes as possessed by the contemporary celebrity in oil paintings or sepia photographs of a long-dead relative.
The other link is with cults.
The market for stories of children brought up in cults never diminishes. Readers want accounts of those indoctrinated as toddlers with beliefs and values outside the norm, habituated to rituals foreign to the rest of us. Something of that informs our unwilled response to royalty.
Not to mention willful self-deception: The constant theme running through, for example, the apotheosising of the late Princess Diana was that she was “just like us”, that she was, in Tony Blair’s tacky phrase, “the people’s princess”.
She, of course, wasn’t the least bit like the garage-flower brigade who came out to mourn her in the festival of mawkishness consequent upon her sudden death.
Diana was rich, beautiful, instantly identifiable worldwide. Nobody she couldn’t reach within minutes. Or dance with — remember John Travolta? There was no cause she couldn’t make people care about — witness the impact on the perception of leprosy delivered by photographs of her with sufferers from the oldest disease known to humanity.
Many famous beautiful women serve as charity ambassadors. None has ever had the impact of Diana, and her impact depended on membership of The Firm, just as Meghan’s does today.
That said, one has to wonder if the 10-day mourning period imposed on Britain in the wake of the queen’s death can avoid becoming a tiresome national duty enlivened by too few ceremonial events.
There’s a limit to how many Ripley’s Believe It Or Not details we can take about the royals in one 10-day dose.
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