A Royal Pain for the Crown

By Paul Gray

When the time comes for British government leaders to recommend the next honors list to Queen Elizabeth II, they might consider bestowing titles of some sort on Mia Farrow and Woody Allen. After all, the noisy bust-up of the American film stars' 12-year relationship served the British monarchy handsomely by shoving off the front pages of frenzy-feeding tabloids the photographs of a topless Duchess of York, a.k.a. Fergie, cavorting poolside with her American boyfriend in the presence of her two royal daughters at a rented St.-Tropez villa.

But the salacious news about someone else, for a change, brought no lasting respite for the beleaguered House of Windsor. Up popped a transcript of an alleged telephone conversation between Diana, Princess of Wales, and a male friend on New Year's Eve 1989. He calls her "Squidgy" and repeats, "I love you, I love you." She mentions the "torture" of her marriage and agrees to a meeting with her phone partner "next Tuesday," under guise of a visit to her acupuncturist. True? Who cares, when 40,000 Britons paid $22 each on the first day to call a special phone line and listen to the tape? Three days after this bombshell, the Sun, Britain's raciest tabloid, announced it possessed another juicy phone transcript, this one of a conversation between Fergie and Prince Andrew in January 1990. During this call, the paper claimed, the duchess said she wanted to escape the marriage and go off to Argentina, where her mother lives after bolting from her father. Andrew and Fergie separated in March of this year.

These scandals capped a spring and summer of monarchical discontent. In April the palace announced that after two years of separation, Princess Anne would divorce Captain Mark Phillips, her husband of 18 years. June saw the publication of journalist Andrew Morton's best seller on Princess Diana, portraying in excruciating detail the travails of a young woman trapped in a cold and loveless marriage. Morton's accounts of her five suicide attempts and struggles with the eating disorder bulimia were shocking enough. Worse, by monarchists' reckonings, were the signs that Morton had enjoyed the cooperation of Diana's friends and relatives, who presumably would not have talked had the princess told them not to. More than a few interested observers surmised that the wife of the current heir -- Prince Charles -- and the mother of the heir presumptive -- Prince William -- was building a case in the court of public opinion for an eventual divorce.

Much of the world remains fascinated by the pomp and circumstances of the Windsors. But British subjects pay a considerable freight, estimated at as much as $140 million from the national budget per year, for the upkeep of an ever extending royal family. Many have begun to wonder whether the investment is worth it. What is this younger generation coming to? And aren't there rather a lot of them? And what are they good for, besides embarrassing themselves, titillating us commoners and boosting the circulation of tabloids? A Sunday Express poll conducted just after the Fergie topless pictures hit the newsstands found that 61% of respondents thought the summer's dirt had caused "lasting damage to the image of the Royal Family." Only 42% believed Britain would have a monarchy 50 years from now.

Is this really a constitutional crisis, as some are suggesting, comparable to the uproar surrounding Edward VIII's abdication in 1936? Or is it merely a sign that the relentless bottom feeders among British newspapers have gobbled out of control?

So far, the monarchy faces no immediate danger. Despite the misadventures of her children and in-laws, Queen Elizabeth is widely revered by her subjects. Few, no matter how republican in sympathies, are talking seriously about tossing Her Majesty out after 40 dedicated years on the throne. Enoch Powell, a former Conservative Party Cabinet minister and an authority on constitutional matters, argues that passing blips like the Fergie photographs cannot hurt the enduring power of the crown because Britain "is not governed by something called the royal family. It is governed by the single person of the sovereign."

Such defenses are technically correct, but they ignore an anomaly that has been introduced into British public life by none other than the House of Windsor itself. As reigning Kings lost their real power, they had to find other reasons for the monarchy's existence. Queen Victoria, who ascended the throne in 1837, settled on an answer that has come back to haunt her descendants. Along with Albert, her beloved prince consort, she buttressed her sovereignty with the admonition that the royal family would set by example the moral tone for the nation and the empire. Collective good conduct became a justification for authority and privilege. Duty, self-sacrifice, fidelity in service to the public weal and in Christian marriage were all to be embodied in word and deed by the monarch and her clan.

Victoria proved remarkably blameless in her public conduct, but it has been less and less easy for her descendants. There were problems with her eldest son as Prince of Wales and later as Edward VII -- a remarkable womanizer and rakehell by the standards of any era. But George V and George VI, Elizabeth's father, who assumed the crown after Edward VIII's abdication, were devoted family men who publicly upheld their roles as Defender of the Faith. The present Queen, in the 45th year of her marriage to Prince Philip, has never personally attracted a breath of scandal.

But she did open up, tentatively, some heretofore private aspects of royal life to TV cameras. Perhaps she assumed this powerful new medium would enhance her inherited institution and reinforce, with pictures, Victoria's concept of the monarchy as the nation's moral ideal.

Barring the electronic media entirely would probably not have worked, but giving them access has been a debacle. Buckingham Palace -- meaning the largely blue-blooded coterie of managers who run the affairs of the royal family -- has been stampeded in the TV and tabloid rush to invade every area of formerly forbidden turf. The palace guidelines approving appropriate press coverage of family pageants, such as Charles' investiture as Prince of Wales and the royal weddings, have failed to keep curiosity about other royal activities off limits. But a family that promotes its triumphant moments on TV cannot expect that the cameras will refrain from focusing on less attractive episodes.

What will happen when the Queen is gone? A genuine reconciliation between Charles and Diana leading to a long and visible happy-ever-after seems unlikely. The question then is whether society now deems a fairy-tale marriage essential to the monarchy's survival. In the meantime, the royal antics have sparked some heterodox ideas about the current state of the institution. An Independent newspaper editorial titled "Family values" called for restricting annual allocations from the civil list just to the Queen and the Prince of Wales. Pressure is also building on Queen Elizabeth II to reciprocate for the government's largesse by paying taxes, just like her subjects. The rest of the family would have to pay their own way.

Would tourists still flock to London to watch the lesser royals queue up at bus stops or elbow their way through soccer crowds? Would the British really relish a workaday monarchy like Denmark's? The problem with all solutions to the current problems of the royals is that their historically entrenched tradition is profoundly irrational. Early in Victoria's reign, Walter Bagehot wrote of the crown, "Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic." Sometime, probably not very far in the future, the British people will have to decide whether they want the magic or the daylight, since having both at one time is simply not working at all.

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London