Simon Schama: Dynastic lessons from the familiar Windsor flourish

A century ago, in 1911, a betting man would not have put much money on the endurance of dynastic autocracies. The most venerable of them all, the Manchu empire in China, had just fallen to revolution and been succeeded by the prosaic republican nationalism of Sun Yat-sen. In Vienna, it was a commonplace of the cafés that once Emperor Franz Josef, under the weight of all those epaulettes, had finally fallen into the tomb of his ancestors the Austro-Hungarian monarchy would follow.

Even the king-emperor of Windsor was feeling the heat. George V had no sooner been crowned in Westminster Abbey than he was more or less ordered by the Liberal government to use his prerogative to create enough new peers to swamp the House of Lords’ resistance to its own reform. If ever there was a moment when the British monarchy resigned itself to a mostly ornamental role, this was it.

George V, a stickler for tradition but given to middle-class hobbies such as stamp-collecting, doubtless held his nose as he agreed to the adulteration of the peerage, should it be necessary. But he agreed to do the deed for the higher interests of political order.

Once the first world war had swept away the great autocrats in Berlin and Petrograd, survival for the European monarchies meant morphing from ruling to reigning; from the exercise of power to incarnations of historical memory. Paradoxically, the age of assembly-line slaughter in Flanders and of mass-produced entertainment and goods turned out to generate a craving for more, not less, mystique. The coronations and burials grew ever more elaborate. Royal weddings, unseen in Westminster since the 14th century, became a feature of the calendar. The impresarios of pomp and circumstance had a second coming. Summon the earl marshal! Apply the gilt to the carriage; polish up the cuirasses.

The managers of monarchical longevity had another trick up their sleeve...