Conservatism- some thoughts arising from the death of HRH, the Duke of Edinburgh
A term like conservatism now connotes what has become, amongst so-called conservatives and liberals, the mutually destructive circular firing squad that is now the political environment in Washington DC.
However, the death of HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, puts me in mind of the kind of effective conservatism to which he was adjunct. This will be defined in the context of the following few paragraphs.
We’ve perhaps overdosed on repeated watchings of ‘The Crown’ on Netflix and think we know all there is to know about the royal family, and consider them sticks in the mud wearing clothing styles of several decades ago, personally stifled and forced to live lives of equal part structure and stricture, yielding thereby existences of unusual torment. Think of the bird in a gilded cage as the old song has it.
For TV watching non-royals like you and me, it may all seem that way, but one has to bear in mind that the British royal family is an enduring institution that- save the disastrous republican experience of the Commonwealth for a few years in the middle of the 17th century- has existed for over a thousand years. In a time when we think nothing of upgrading our home based on a change in family circumstance- or trying to cash in on newly acquired equity resulting from an overheated housing market- Windsor Castle has been the home of the royal family since it was built in the 11th century. If one were to think of Windsor Castle as an expression of monarchy within the built environment, ‘enduring’ would be something of an understatement- ‘eternal’ might be nearer the mark.
But of course, individual monarchs, or their consorts, long lived they might be, do not live for 10 centuries, but it is a tenure of which they’re aware- or should I say never not aware. Recent history extends not just to Prince Harry and his mother’s attempts to kick over the traces, but also to that of the undoubted black sheep of the family, Edward VIII that was, whose romantic modernity, while looked upon with some degree of public favor, was considered a near disaster by the larger family and its courtiers. And the why of this? The last time a monarch exhibited popular, man of the people behavior was a century prior, in the person of the Prince Regent, George IV that was, whose exploits, initially popular, eventually brought himself and the institution of the monarchy into such disrepute with his subjects it took the long reign of his niece Victoria to repair the damage.
I’d be on safe ground to assert that the reign of George IV, the bicentenary of whose accession we celebrated last year, is considered recent history by the house of Windsor. I don’t think I’d be going out too far on a limb to suggest that the reign of Charles I two centuries even earlier might also be considered of recent advent, with that king’s excesses resulting in civil war and his ultimate beheading hard lessons to ignore. And easy lessons to remember.
Well, let’s downplay regicide, and acknowledge that after the experiment with the Commonwealth and accession of Charles II there was a shift in power that resulted in a constitutional monarchy that has existed in structure and monarchical function pretty much unchanged until the present day. I’d call 380 years and counting a pretty good run and evidence of lessons well learned.
And it is at this point we should then have a notion of what I called effective conservatism, an understanding- call it in the contemporary phrase an institutional memory, and a memory of centuries’
old standing, of what works in the conjoined roles of head of state and a symbol of nationality. And, conversely, what it is those who are the monarch’s subjects want. Not what the subjects will tolerate- because the lessons of Charles I told the monarchy absolutism would not be tolerated, and the lesson of Edward VIII said emphatically that the monarch’s private life can never be paramount to public responsibility.
As long as I’ve been aware of Prince Philip, as often as I’ve seen him in the company of Queen Elizabeth II, I’ve never seen him not walk several paces behind her, I’ve never seen him try in any endeavor to upstage her. On his own, he did indeed have shall we say a rebarbative personality, and although it would be fun to, I’ll refrain from repeating the numerous times his public comments were, shall we say, not in the best taste. Perhaps, though, his comments that might have best been left unsaid were not that numerous, as I suspect that, in only a few minutes, we could all repeat basically the same anecdotes. In comparing to myself, whose foot has from time to time had to be extracted from my own mouth, in a public career that lasted nearly threequarters of a century, one might say Prince Philip didn’t do too bad. However, very many of his off the cuff remarks were truly egregious and often profoundly racist. They do harken to an earlier day, reminiscent and of a piece with Kipling’s notion of a white man’s burden. All of this is hard to hear now, but not so hard for very many people of Prince Philip’s generation, now very few in number, who fail to realize that the British Empire is long gone, but replaced with an inclusive Commonwealth of Nations appropriate for the modern age.
The generation has changed, and this change could in the history books of the future be marked by the death of Prince Philip. But I do think those same books will note Queen Elizabeth as head of state, and Prince Philip as her consort as fulfilling their roles in a way that brought comfort to their subjects not just in the UK but throughout the Commonwealth of Nations. If I can draw an inexact and sort of clumsy parallel drawn from the history of my own life, my parents, though they might, and did, battle the two of them and have profound disagreements, come the morning, they were both still there. This then begs the question about what effect divorce has on the royal family, and I suspect on larger reflection, the answer would generally be, played out on a national stage the answer would be it could hardly be better than it is when played out within a traditional nuclear family. Thank goodness the royal family has the upcoming and very stable example of Prince William to overshadow the mistakes made on the domestic front by his father Prince Charles. But returning to his own father the imperfect consort- that Prince Philip’s offensive gaffes may have betrayed an allegiance to an earlier age from which the world has, thankfully, moved away, it is perversely this glimpse of flawed humanity that at least partly functions in the present age to bind the monarchy to its subjects, both in the United Kingdom and throughout the commonwealth. Flawed, but flaws that contribute just enough humanity to temper an otherwise remote symbol- and sufficiently human to be endearing.
This is where I get to, then, when considering effective conservatism, with the British royal family as the exemplar. Endurance and comfortability, a comforting realization in an age lacking in certainty that, come what may, they’ll still be there. Conservative, indeed, in the sense of slow to change, but always mindful of change and the need to, but at a pace well-considered that might seem as gradual as the exfoliation of the stonework of Windsor Castle. But then, that’s perhaps as it should be, as Windsor Castle remains of a piece with the Windsor royal dynasty.
