The Enduring Usefulness of the British Monarchy

The British monarchy has filled many a column of print lately.  Documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the Queen attempted to use the state poverty fund to heat Buckingham Palace while the Royal Household complained about the inadequacy of the government’s £15 million grant for the upkeep of royal palaces.

Accused of having “contempt” for ordinary people by the anti-monarchy group Republic, campaigners have called for an independent review of the sovereign’s accounts.  As important as the news pertaining to the royal family’s appeals for financial help undoubtedly is, though, Gary Slapper believes the 2006 financial memorandum to be something of a constitutional watershed.

Writing in The Independent about the surrendering of financial autonomy, the Professor of Law at the Open University says this “makes clear and concrete that the ultimate power over the monarch and money is held by a minister from an elected government.”

Stories surrounding the public subsidies paid to the royals pale into insignificance, however, when compared with the news that deep cuts to Britain’s military capability could threaten relations with America if the former abandons its NATO pledge to devote 2 percent of its GDP on defense.  As the defence secretary points out in a leaked letter to the prime minister, slashing the budget by £4 billion “is likely to have grave political consequences.”

The “brutal,” as Dr. Liam Fox puts it, international reaction to such measures means that David Cameron will be indebted to an institution that costs only £40 million to run to help save the special relationship.  Since, as paradoxial as it may seem, more than two centuries after the Revolution against the Crown, the monarchy retains a hold over the Eagle.

As Frank Prochaska illustrates in The Eagle and The Crown: Americans and the British Monarchy, the royals have performed this role before, of bailing out politicians and spreading Anglo-American goodwill, so there is little reason why history cannot repeat itself when the Obamas visit the Old Country next year.  The Yale historian illuminates, to be sure, something Jonathan Dimbleby could not in over six hundred pages (The Prince of Wales: A Biography) or Nicholas Witchell in over ten years of reporting (as royal and diplomatic correspondent for BBC News):  the purpose of royalty.

Readers soon learn that the monarchy is Britain’s “trump card” in America.  To the Foreign Office, Kings and Queens, Princes and Princesses were all (and remain) subtle agents for the advancement of British policy.  “The King and Queen were not decisive pieces on the international chess board,” Prochaska pithily pens, “but they were influential pawns.”

In other words, notwithstanding the pageantry and pomp of monarchy losing much of its purchase on American sentiment today given the nation’s changing ethnic makeup, the royals can still provide some much-needed diplomatic cover for UK ministers.  What is more, such efforts would not be wasted on the man in the Oval Office.  Rest assured, however unsentimental the 44th President of the United States is purported to be, Barack Obama is not wholly immune to British blandishments.

You need only refer to what the commander in chief said to Gordon Brown last year:  “There’s one last thing I should mention that I love about Great Britain, and that is the Queen… because I think in the imagination of people throughout America, I think what the Queen stands for and her decency and her civility, what she represents, that’s very important.”  This remark may have been a closing one uttered on a flying visit but it offers a clue to why so many presidents have spoken about the special relationship, “even when”, Niall Ferguson writes in Colossus, “its fruits have been so hard to pick.”

Importantly for the Conservative-led government, Prochaska reminds Brits that Americans tend to abandon their critical tendencies when presented at court.  “After leaving a royal reception at Buckingham Palace during his time as Minister, Richard Rush said that the spectacle, ‘like old English buildings, and Shakespeare… carried the feelings with it, triumphing over criticism’.”

Granted, this quote is from the nineteenth century.  Yet while a visit to the Palace would not have the same effect on the 2012 presidential election as the 1860 royal tour was perceived by the press to have had on the election of Abraham Lincoln, Obama is no doubt aware that George W. Bush kick-started his successful reelection campaign by being pictured with the Queen during his state visit in 2003. 

Let us not forget, power is all that matters to a leader who increasingly appears to be a one-term president.  And while Queen Elizabeth’s influence does not compare with Queen Victoria’s (the latter, after all, was credited by Americans for the restraint shown by her government during the Civil War), she is a head of state who is above party politics and one that is respected the world over.

It is not only the duty of the Queen, however, to soften up American leaders.  Each member of the royal family is, in effect, an ambassador, and one that can be of great utility when it comes to Britain’s dealings with the United States.  Lloyd George is credited as the first prime minister to recognize their ambassadorial role, dispatching as he did Prince Edward on a series of tours to North America after World War I in an attempt to halt the disintegration of the British Empire.

It is Prince Charles’s trip to the Nixon White House, though, that Cameron should bear in mind if he is thinking of deploying the Prince of Wales stateside after his Strategic Defence and Security Review is released later this month.  Indeed, so successful was the 1970 visit in shoring up the foundations of the Anglo-American alliance that you wonder how the winner of the Booker of the Bookers Salman Rushdie can describe the monarchy and its traditions as “archaic… stupid… a British oddity” when the royals—“as benign instruments of foreign policy”—successfully work with the United States in the interests of defending freedom against the tide of religious fundamentalism.