Copyright newstatesman
It began with a soldierly bellowed command. An Englishman’s hoarse scream. Then, silence. A cannon fired half a mile away. The noise scattered black rooks from the trees, sending them corkscrewing overhead. Windsor Great Park, the Long Walk, 19 September 2022. Look, people said to each other all along that last route, look. Look: the procession glinted in the far distance. The Household Cavalry in outline, a cloud of scarlet and polished steel, surrounding the state hearse taking Queen Elizabeth II towards St George’s Chapel. Most of what the country had left behind long ago had lived on, for a time, in her. Now she was gone. Castle gates opened. The hearse, the coffin, the Crown, crawling forwards. Eight billion eyeballs, watching on television, followed the Queen towards her vault, there to be taken to the cheerful English Heaven she and few others still believed in. An era was passing with her. Somewhere behind the Crown in that final procession was her flesh and blood legacy. He had been stripped of his military uniform but not his titles, and accused of rank criminality that he denied – and denies still. This was the man who is defining the new era we now find ourselves in. The cameras didn’t linger, but they couldn’t ignore either. Prince Andrew, Duke of York. Looking back, it’s hard not to be impressed by Andrew, world exclusive star interviewee of the June 2000 issue of Tatler. His sit-down chats with its then editor, Geordie Greig, took place over several days in several different palaces and carried 12 whole pages in the society bible. Greig’s subject had just turned 40. He was “fitter and slimmer” than he used to be, dressed down in a black turtleneck and chinos, “more Pierce Brosnan, less Nick Faldo”, nothing like the “box-suited, blonde-dating, cack-humoured oaf” of tabloid lore. He was running a fundraising campaign for the NSPCC against child abuse like a “military operation” and sharking around the globe, “spotted with Ghislaine Maxwell in the front row at Ralph Lauren’s show in New York”. Somehow, Greig noted, Prince Andrew – “strong-minded”, “unconventional”, “articulate”, “forceful”, “wholly connected to Blair’s modern Britain” – also found enough time between fashion shows to be “the model of a family man”. Greig is a reasonable person. But, like so many subjects at so many different times in history, interaction with a representative of the Crown appears to have compromised his ability to see straight. Nobody with any sense of reality in June 2000 believed that Andrew was anything like the man presented. They thought he was cavalier in his personal relations, profligate in his financial dealings, immensely entitled, stupid and cruel. Such truths were not meant for the pages of Tatler, however. This is how false consciousness works. Faced with the reality of monarchy, people simply do what they always do: they become blind. The truth is that an estimated £13m of public money helped to fund the decades-long Caligulan lifestyle of a prince who cavorted with, among others, a convicted paedophile, a Libyan arms smuggler and a Kazakh oil baron. This truth was obscured, denied or ignored – that is, until Andrew’s world began to collapse in 2011. Since his 2019 Newsnight interview, the prince has been in continuous freefall. He may yet pull down the House of Windsor with him. Though he vigorously denies the latest allegations of sexual impropriety against him, made in Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, Andrew nevertheless issued a terse 103-word statement, printed under a royal coat of arms, on 17 October. It explained he would “no longer use my title” of Duke of York or the other “honours” bestowed on him. The use of “my” suggests Andrew does not understand the dark depths of the well the Windsors find themselves in. Nor do his relatives, it seems. The King and Prince William have not seen the need to issue their own statements about the allegations against Andrew. They have instead been classically mute in the old Windsor way. Neither of them has spoken about the allegations against Andrew publicly. Charles’s lackeys feed journalists lines about his frustration with the former duke or, more extraordinarily given the reverence he publicly holds his mother in, blame Andrew’s conduct on the indulgence of the late Queen Elizabeth. (Being dead, she cannot answer back. The King’s silence is less explicable.) Rather than taking responsibility for the damage their family has done to Britain’s reputation and clarifying exactly what steps will be taken to ensure that the Windsors never produce and protect another Andrew, open explanation is left to others. Proxy pseudo-authorities such as Jennie Bond, the former BBC royal correspondent, who was rolled out on ITV’s Loose Women on 22 October to inform a no doubt grateful public that William is “hopping mad with black sheep Uncle Andrew”. Silent Charles and “hopping mad” William’s plan – or the plan of their private secretaries, Clive Alderton and Ian Patrick, respectively – appears to be to isolate Andrew. Force him and Fergie from the 30-bedroom mansion in Windsor. Find him a smaller mansionette. Would a five-bed be acceptable to the public? Would the mob care if he still had a valet? Or pack him off to a palace in Abu Dhabi like the disgraced Spanish king, Juan Carlos? Let him fade into exile, then obscurity. Forget the allegation that a key member of the head of state’s family stands accused of ordering his taxpayer-funded police protection officer to dig up dirt about Giuffre. Do not ask questions about the £500,000 Andrew paid for a “PR expert” who sought to discredit Giuffre by enlisting the services of an internet troll. Blame the rot on the apple, not the orchard it fell from. Clip it from the branch. Heal. Several majestic assumptions are at work here. That awkward questions about how the royal family is funded and housed will fade away, despite Keir Starmer’s recent call for “proper scrutiny” into Crown properties. That the public will forget that the previous government refused to disclose documents that might have revealed partial truths about Andrew’s activities. That nobody will listen when the prince’s biographer Andrew Lownie says he unsuccessfully submitted hundreds of freedom of information requests about Andrew’s time as a trade envoy to the Foreign Office over a four-year period while he wrote his book. “Obstructions were placed in front of Andrew,” Lownie told me on 27 October. “Ambassadors were told not to talk to me. Interviews with major magazines were pulled just before my book went to press. A PR firm was set up – with whose money we don’t know – to undermine me.” Lownie has been on a book tour in front of audiences in what he calls “Middle England”. The “crusty colonels” out in the shires are not happy with the firm. “The Windsors are in dangerous territory,” he says. Maybe the most hopeful assumption of all is that, in an era defined by splenetic anti-system politics, a wounded monarchy can continue to calmly buttress and awesomely represent a failing, discredited status quo. But the most damning assumption is that the country is so stupid, so sycophantic and so passive that it won’t mind that Andrew has received no real punishment since Giuffre’s memoir appeared. Then again, if you were the monarch or his handlers, you would have a lifetime of evidence to back up that assumption. We have been bowing and scraping for the past 365 years. What must we look like to the Crown? The Windsors’ attitude towards inquiries into their activities is well documented. Brief the tabloids. Cut deals with broadcasters. Otherwise, bully, threaten, obstruct, deny, redact. “Everyone is saying there is a right to know everything,” Charles moped to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994. “I don’t agree. There isn’t a right to know at all.” What we do know about the Windsors is bewildering. We are told that the King has the pure soul of an artist; that he is a romantic aesthete who worries about flower meadows and rare pig breeds, who forages for his own mushrooms, who was correct about climate change long before public or establishment opinion recognised the onrushing apocalypse. Yet we also know, thanks to the Sunday Times, that the Windsor’s corporation tax-exempt duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster have been active in selling the rights to dig and drill in protected landscapes to mining companies. Which is it, then? Does Charles love every tree and hedgerow in these ancient lands, or does he want to profit from despoiling them? A recent biography informs us that the present Queen is “an ordinary person who’s gone through the same things we all have” such as marrying a Prince of Wales, and who, in the 1990s, became an international hate figure. It could happen to any of us, I suppose. Camilla is a long-standing campaigner against sexual abuse, but the Palace will not say whether she has read Giuffre’s book or even “expressed an interest in its contents”, reports the Sunday Times. We are told that her predecessor, Queen Elizabeth II, was a simple woman – almost a peasant, really – a rustic country hausfrau who loved her dogs and her horses and her Tupperware, yet continued to give Andrew an annual allowance of £1m long after his relationship with Epstein was public knowledge. Maybe that’s what any mother would have done in her position. Maybe it’s not. William, the heir to the throne, is perhaps the most underexamined of all. We are briefed that like Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI, Elizabeth II and Charles III before him, he will be a fresh, positive, modern influence who will delouse the archaic fabric of monarchy. He cries in commoner’s kitchens about mental health and is praised for his empathy. He watches Aston Villa and may even be able to name their second-choice goalkeeper. He even made sure his press secretary went to a comprehensive, not a public school. We know from the royal super-biographer Robert Hardman that William is unable to name a favourite author, but that this “box-set guy” does love “Batman-related” superhero movies. In some respects William might simply reflect what the average British bloke is like today. But average isn’t the expectation of the Crown, and he differs a great deal from Charles and his grandmother. Thanks to Valentine Low, another long-time royal observer, we learn that: “William is not a great reader: he prefers an oral briefing.” In Power and the Palace, Low reports that William will be the first monarch in several generations not to have read Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution. Read between the lines. What are they telling you? In Prince Harry’s Spare, William is a frowning, balding, swearing, feuding, violent Abel, who obsesses over keeping his brother’s charities out of Africa, as if these were territories that belonged to him the way they once belonged to Victoria. William emerges as furious and bossy, with an ultimate mission: the lifelong endurance test his grandmother called “duty”, a task he is prepared to sacrifice his brother for. “The monarchy, always, at all costs, had to be protected.” What exactly is being protected at this stage? None of the arguments for paying to feed and water the Windsors make much sense any more. The Windsors provide stability. The Windsors provide pageantry. The Windsors, being “above” politics, never meddle in its process. The Windsors are an amorphous but vital part of our national identity, like the word “decency” and our unsettling tendency to prefer animals to foreigners. Taken together, these arguments amount not to a sturdy ballast for constitutional monarchy, but to Windsorism, an increasingly senile belief system. It was George V who rechristened the firm after their castle in 1917, under pressure from a public mourning the deaths of 18 children killed by German bombs in east London, a public beginning to find the German origins of our royals suspicious. “Windsor” was homely and national, easy to imagine printed on a biscuit tin in a way that “Saxe-Coburg and Gotha” was not. This was change, but change made so that everything could stay the same. That is the essence of Windsorism. Not quite reactionary but definitely conservative. Distrustful of any reform beyond cosmetic tinkering, seeking after peace and stability. “In the Crown we possessed a symbol of patriotism, a focus of unison, an emblem of continuity in a rapidly dissolving world,” wrote Harold Nicolson in his George V (1952). That is a classically Windsorist passage. Why? Because the Windsors are presented as a consolation prize for the elite (“we”), of which Nicolson was a member, a way for them to keep a grip on the nation’s imagination during an era of decline. The “rapidly dissolving world” is the old world of the Victorians and empire. Britain’s horizons were shrinking – often due to choices made by men such as Nicolson. But they could still retain a link to that glory even as it passed, by maintaining a human breeding farm on a variety of estates in the home islands. Windsorism had much in common with the personality of the late Queen and flourished during the last decades of her reign. Elizabeth II preferred “a sort of consensus politics rather than a polarised one”, Martin Charteris, Elizabeth II’s longest-serving assistant private secretary told the constitutional scholar (and dedicated Windsorist) Peter Hennessy. “If you are in the Queen’s position, you are the titular, the symbolic head of the country, and the less squabbling that goes on in the country, obviously the more convenient and comfortable you feel.” This might have been a noble ambition in the immediate aftermath of a global war. “There was a satisfaction,” Nicolson wrote, “in feeling that the sovereign stood above all class animosities, all political ambitions, all sectional interests.” An understandable desire for peace may explain why Windsorism lasted as long as it has. We see that desire hitting a wall under Starmer, a knight of the realm leading Labour into government for the first time in 14 years, but part of an unbroken line of Windsorist prime ministers stretching from John Major to Rishi Sunak. Windsorism relies on the moral authority of the Palace being greater than that of parliament. Charles has pushed Windsorism further than his mother. In a fractious and polarised multicultural society, Windsorists believe that only the Crown unifies. The monarch, Hardman wrote in his insider biography Charles III, can “play the role of referee, promoting togetherness amid disunity”. Charles is analogous to Franz Joseph I, the Habsburg emperor whose sheer longevity prevented, for a time, his realm’s rot becoming fatal. When the emperor died in 1916, his empire soon vanished. He was powerless to prevent its collapse, because, like our own King, he was never really the one holding it together. “He saw the sun going down on his empire,” Joseph Roth wrote of the Franz Joseph in The Radetzky March. “But he said nothing. He knew he would die before it set.” Britain today is a divided, downwardly mobile and irreligious place. Its monarchy is both important and irrelevant, silly and serious, trivial and profound; beyond real criticism from a supine media. Its members are idiosyncratic men and women who are forced by Windsorism, with increasing difficulty, into trying to represent the nation in its most characteristic form so that the rest of us can take an atavistic tribal pride in them. They are simultaneously a living alibi for not having to think too hard about how we are governed and, for Windsorists, the tense invisible thread stitching the nation together: the holders of ancient wisdom, the vessels of the people’s unspoken concerns. The United Kingdom. His Majesty’s Government. His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Stamps and bunting and bank notes. Decency and duty. Coronations and weddings. The more things change the more Britain stays the same, argue the Windsorists, the Crown being a cross-generational link between the past, the present and the future. England, argued the Windsorist philosopher Roger Scruton in England: An Elegy, was the “land construed as a person”; monarchs, the “light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere”. Royalty is no longer quite so royal in the way Scruton imagined. Forty years of scandal and betrayal have seen to that. “Monarchy is, I do believe, the system mankind has so far evolved which comes nearest to ensuring stable government,” Charles said in 1981. How stable is Britain now? The social peace and emollience the Crown is supposed to bring to our democracy have disappeared. After the 7 October attacks in 2023, the King made a typically Windsorist speech at Mansion House. While his words did not address the atrocities directly, Charles made an implicit plea to his subjects to respect each other across demographic and religious lines. He talked hopefully about Britain as a “community of communities” and called, rightly and blandly, for civility and tolerance in public life. The Windsorist constitutional scholar Vernon Bogdanor interpreted the speech as Charles saying: “The politicians represent what divides us and he represents what unites us.” Bogdanor’s top-down argument, anti-democratic and anti-political, could only be made from a position of utter complacency. Politics, the art of finding majoritarian solutions to our deepest problems without violence, is what the country needs. Politics is not a squalid exercise in “division”. We need more politics, not less. Two years on, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Charles’s careful words were ignored by the public. In the 2020s, Britain cannot be wooed back into civility and tolerance by a rich old man with a medal on his chest. At some subconscious level, our political class know and fear this. Like Nicolson, they know the country is in decline and they don’t know what to do about it. That is why so many of them have affected such deep, deferential, clingy Windsorism in recent years. Hardman’s biography of Charles is full of politicians meekly deferring to the monarch, or of the King making unanswered political interventions against them. The King did nothing to correct the idea that he despised the Rwanda asylum scheme; he wore a Greek-flag tie to criticise the government over the Elgin marbles controversy; at a state banquet in France he appeared to use his speech to attack Liz Truss. The point is not whether these policies or the politicians behind them were right or wrong. The point is that Charles felt he could interfere in politics. He always has done, perhaps most famously when he lobbied New Labour about the fox-hunting ban. (Tony Blair, coincidentally, later called the ban “one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret”.) His mother and great-grandfather, despite a popular legend of apoliticality, were much the same. George V eased the National Government into being in 1931, helping to smash the Labour Party for the best part of a generation in the process. Elizabeth II’s influence was decisive in keeping Rab Butler out of Downing Street in October 1963, in favour of the far more agreeably one-of-us Alec Douglas-Home. “She loved Alec,” an aide recalled later. “He was an old friend. They talked about dogs and shooting together.” On such commonalities with the monarch were prime ministers made 35 years after Britain became a full democracy with the Representation of the People Act in 1928. The idea that Elizabeth was some sort of cuddly grandmother who looked down on politics from an exalted sphere is simply not true. She had her own interests. She pursued them. They were not always synonymous with the national interest. We need only think of her protection of Prince Andrew to understand this. In the spring of 1979, the Shah was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi escaped, and bounced from country to country trying to find a safe harbour. Jim Callaghan and his foreign secretary, David Owen, believed it would be a mistake for Britain to be that. The Queen, according to Low, “is said to have expressed the view that Britain should show loyalty to the Shah”. The autocratic Pahlavi, who ran one of Earth’s most feared secret police forces, was nevertheless, like “Sir Alec”, one of us. The right sort of chap. Margaret Thatcher, soon to win that year’s general election, supported her. Once she became prime minister, however, Thatcher was convinced by the Foreign Office that granting asylum to Pahlavi would endanger the lives of embassy staff in Tehran. He eventually ended up in the US. What conclusion can we draw from this? A harsh interpretation would be that the Queen cared more about giving succour to the exiled Shah than the safety of her civil servants abroad. “It was said she believed that states must recognise personal as well as national obligations,” wrote William Shawcross in The Shah’s Last Ride (1988). She was angered by the way Thatcher changed her mind. “Once you give your word,” the Queen allegedly said at a dinner party, “that’s it.” From then on, relations between Thatcher and Elizabeth were never cloudless. They were particularly fraught over the Commonwealth, an area of policy in which the Queen frequently pursued her own interest. (A suggestion for why the Windsors liked the Commonwealth more than Thatcher was provided by Rupert Murdoch: “It’s something that makes them feel different from other royal families.”) In 1986, the Sunday Times, heavily briefed by Buckingham Palace’s press secretary Michael Shea, reported on its front page a rift between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher over the Commonwealth and the miners’ strike: “Queen dismayed by ‘uncaring’ Thatcher”. The story claimed to be based on an “unprecedented disclosure of the Monarch’s political views”. A week later a follow-up story explained the Queen’s pursuit of her own foreign policy: she was “able to take a wider view of international problems than any national leader”. The then editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, would later claim the story was part of a “whispering campaign” against the prime minister from within a Palace that was determined to undermine her government”. Thatcher – who was so scared of the Queen that she twice fainted in her presence, often turned up 30 minutes early for their appointments and usually needed a whiskey immediately after – wanted to go on the attack, but knew she was at a disadvantage. The prime minister told her adviser, Charles Powell: “Those little old ladies will say, ‘Mrs Thatcher is upsetting the Queen.’ I’ll lose votes.” Britain’s most radical postwar leader after Clement Attlee was cowed by Elizabeth. As the later Tory chancellor Ken Clarke, a rare non-Windsorist in the front line of British politics, put it: “Most politicians are so in awe of the royal family that expressions of displeasure from the Palace about issues bearing directly on the family can usually produce quite significant policy shifts.” Such an atmosphere of secrecy and deference is what produces a prince like Andrew and a country like the one we live in today. It makes no difference whether politicians are blue or red. Charles is “above” them; they are beneath him. That is all our constitution is. Our political class clutches the royal boot and kisses feet. (Low reports the celebrated scholar of public law John Griffith remarking that “the British Constitution is what happens”.) The Windsorist justification runs that this keeps our politicians humble, honest. “The greatest power of the monarchy is politicians knowing their place,” simpered the former deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden earlier this year. “Politicians come and go. The sovereign embodies the continuity of the British state.” The former deputy cabinet secretary, Helen MacNamara, admitted to Low that the civil service was scared of the Palace. “It was definitely my experience working as a civil servant that the thought of upsetting the Palace was not a happy one. So you pre-emptively think about it, and ministers would pre-emptively think about it, and ministers would pre-emptively think about what the impact would be of decisions that they were making.” The public believes our head of state is as harmless as a brand of shortbread biscuit, while the most senior civil servants in the realm worry about what the Palace might do to them should they make the firm unhappy. Before Prince Andrew, it may have made sense for politicians and civil servants like Dowden and MacNamara to hide behind the Crown and its halo. This is, of course, what the Crown expects. “There isn’t any power. But there can be influence. The influence is in direct proportion to the respect people have for you,” Charles said in 1981. In his first three speeches after his mother died, Charles mentioned his duty to uphold and protect the constitution. It sounded like blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Windsorist blather, but the new King was sending an important message to parliament and the civil service. He was giving them something to “pre-emptively think about”. Post-Boris Johnson and the prorogation crisis of August 2019, the Crown would be less amenable to manoeuvre by politicians. We know how William felt about Johnson’s prorogation. In 2021 his friends briefed the Sunday Times that he would have handled it differently to his grandmother. When he became King there would be more “private, robust, challenging of advice”. Convention says that advice is meant to be followed, not challenged. William does not seem to understand this. What if, say, another high-risk constitutional manoeuvre were made by another populist or, perhaps, simply a radical prime minister is overwhelmingly supported by the public but opposed by a majority of Windsorist MPs, judges and senior civil servants, backed by a future King William V? We can imagine the royal response, like his ancestor Charles I’s in 1641: “Nolumus leges angliae mutari.” We are unwilling to change the laws of England. What lies at the root of Windsorism – what gives it its emotional force, prolongs its life, maintains its hold over the British – is human sacrifice. Windsorism, ultimately, is cruel. It asks that babies become tea towels and brides become commemorative chinaware. As the second half of the 20th century wore on, the Windsors offered their children and grandchildren to the public and the tabloids as fodder and punchlines. They were not revered by us any more, unless you believe that dancing bears are revered. They were entertainment and chip paper. “I’m not very good at being a performing monkey,” said the Prince of Wales in 1994. But he was. His divorce, which he compared privately to a Greek tragedy, rivalled EastEnders not Sophocles as entertainment for a rapacious public. The pattern repeated itself with Harry and Meghan. Further sacrifice will be made of William and Kate’s children. The Windsorists will call this sacrifice duty and moo that it provides a link with the past. Those who survive Windsorism are, like Zara Tindall, those who abandon it. “In their minds royal was synonymous with non-person,” Prince Harry writes of journalists. “Centuries ago royal men and women were considered divine; now they were insects. What fun, to pluck their wings.” This is his gloss on King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport…” Alternating extremes of spite and adulation are what our royals are required to weather as they are sacrificed. This is not stability. It’s dangerous. Cromwell remarked to Thomas Fairfax when they were riding through cheering crowds that the same people would have turned out as happily to see him hanged. So it is for the Windsors. Shortly after he bought the News of the World in 1969, Rupert Murdoch had a conversation with his mother, Elisabeth. She fretted that the paper was too tawdry and coarse, even for her son. He told her not to worry. The life of the average Brit was so miserable that they needed proper diversions – gruesome murders, priapic vicars, royal divorces – to keep them sane. Murdoch was right: the proof was in the circulation figures of his newspapers. In the 1980s and 1990s, Murdoch’s tabloids trashed the Windsors and played them off against each other. The public lapped it up. In 1996, Murdoch, himself a republican, was asked if Britain should lose the Windsors. He observed that Britain didn’t have the “self-confidence” to live without the monarchy. Republicanism is an almost buried tradition in Britain. The successors of Oliver Cromwell talk in the soporific language of accountants and lawyers and NGO managers. They grouse about costings and rationality. They talk dimly about the need for “grown up conversations” about the Crown, about “accountability” and “rationality” in ways that thrill sixth-form debating societies and bore everybody else. They lack self-confidence. If republicanism returns, it must talk in the frank, sturdy, moral language of the 17th and 18th centuries. It must condemn corruption and demand redress. It must fight the irrationality of the hereditary principle with its own forms of irrationality. “What is called splendour of the throne is no other than the corruption of the state,” wrote Tom Paine in 1791. “It is made up of a band of parasites, living in luxurious indolence, out of public taxes.” Those two lines are worth more than anything put to paper by a republican in Britain for 70 years. They also, given our experience with Prince Andrew, remain true. The Crown is not a politically neutral, ceremonial creche designed to produce toothy celebrity symbols for the gaiety of the nation. It is a political actor. It has its own interests. It has protected the reputation of Andrew at all costs for the best part of 15 years, despite this being an insane and disgusting course of action. Successive governments and MPs of all parties have helped the Crown do so. Lords and judges are appointed in Charles’s name, police officers swear an oath to him. Charles cannot be sued. He has access to more official documents than any minister. He sits on a reserve of gold, diamonds and jewels that would make Smaug weep. Parliamentary convention dictates that Crown consent is sought whenever a proposed piece of legislation will affect Charles’s prerogatives or interests, including hereditary revenues and personal property. What I am describing is pure power. I could go on listing and documenting that power for several pages. There is no British equivalent to Japan’s Imperial Household Law, which defines the emperor’s ceremonial and symbolic role. Instead we have the Crown. We have power that exceeds symbolism. And, looking at the Windsors’ activities with Prince Andrew, the abuse of that power. We have the splendour of the throne and the corruption of the state. It may be that this power is beginning to fade. It will soon be questioned in parliament, a highly unusual moment, pregnant with possibility. The world is rapidly dissolving and so are the Windsors. The family itself is thinning out, with fewer and fewer of them to go around. The King is an aged, ill man who will be succeeded by a middle-aged man, who, in turn, will be followed by George, by then long past his youth. The future of the House of Windsor will be a conveyor belt of cloistered and confused men attempting to force consensus on an ungovernable country. William should stop the rot and acknowledge the truth when his father dies. The mystique is gone. Charles III should be the last King of England. He is the last Windsor who really believes in any of the hocus-pocus of his house. William doubts that God exists. How can he go through with a coronation in Westminster Abbey without acknowledging that God has put him there, on the throne? Abolition would be contested and vicious. Or, the monarchy could end very beautifully. There are inalterable facts in our lives and the lives of nations. As Charles’s favourite poet wrote centuries ago: “All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity…” The old statesman’s body in a casket on the Royal Train. Crowds would gather along the route as they did for Elizabeth, to watch its journey as dusk falls, to hear its pistons hiss through the meadows, the Crown and the King being carried sadly back to the old chapel in Windsor, home again to the green heart of England, the royal throne of kings royal no more. A final human sacrifice. There would be no more kings. But there would be no more princes either. [Further reading: The wonderful world of Prince Andrew]
