What’s in a name? At the age of 97, Lady Pamela Hicks died today, the oldest living descendant of Queen Victoria, and until her marriage Lady Pamela Mountbatten. She named her daughter India, which is just delicious. Alas, though, her demise was not the main Mountbatten story. There are those with a right to criticise Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, but they do not include Margaret Hodge, whose feud with Jeremy Corbyn goes back to her time as Leader of Islington Council, when, much to his disgust, she presided over what amounted to a network of child brothels purporting to be care homes. One may as well take lectures from Ghislaine Maxwell, who may as well be a Peer of the Realm, a Privy Counsellor, and a Dame of the British Empire.
On balance, I would not abolish the monarchy. You would not have hereditary surgeons or hereditary pilots, but nor would you elect them. The arguments for the monarchy are rubbish in their own terms, but so are the arguments for a republic, meaning that the case for change has not been made. Which republic is classless, and free of corruption? France? Germany? Italy? India? Ireland? The United States? Where? A Presidential Election would be a choice between the next Bullingdon Club member in line and someone who had casually given a trifling £50,000 to the most recently successful candidate for the Leadership of the Labour Party. No one else would even make it onto the ballot paper, and I would not want either of those as my Head of State.
Nor would I abolish the Royal Prerogative. Rather, I want it to be exercised by a Prime Minister who aspired to strengthen families and communities through economic equality and international peace. But the monarchy, and with it the exercise of the Royal Prerogative by persons who most certainly did not share those aspirations, does not depend on the support of people like me. It depends on the support of people who, as long as the monarchy were simply there, have been prepared to overlook the fact that hardly anything that they really wanted ever happened, while all sorts of things that they did not want did happen, no matter who was in government.
Yet the threat to the monarchy was always going to come from the Right, although I had always assumed that that would be because it was blindingly incompatible with Thatcherite meritocracy. As it is, though, note what those Raising the Colours, no beneficiaries of Thatcherism unless one reasonably counted lifelong and intergenerational benefit dependency, were saying online about the King, and note what they were not saying, for God to save him or for him to live long, either there or on the streets. Of course Queen Elizabeth II was a Remainer, just as of course the King is a Green at least in a nonpartisan sense; he and his asylum-seeking father practically invented it. Like Green Parties from the Bundestag to the House of Commons, the King is a supporter of the war in Ukraine. So much for the Battenberg line, through which he is a great-great-nephew of Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna.
Already revering Oliver Cromwell, Restore Britain has recruited Laurence Fox, whose Reclaim Party wanted the monarchy to die with the then Queen. Reform UK gave Fox a free run at Uxbridge and South Ruislip, in return for the same at Mid Bedfordshire. Richard Tice has repeatedly called for Nigel Farage to become Britain’s elected Head of State. The political neutrality of the monarchy is like the impartiality of the BBC. When, exactly, has there ever been any such thing? The same may be said of the Police, about whom the clue is in the name. Like having a monarchy or having the BBC, having the Police is inherently political. If they no longer automatically express your prejudices, then your prejudices are no longer hegemonic. If they never have done, then they never were. Of those three examples, it is the monarchy that never has embodied the presuppositions of its strongest supporters. It still keeps sweet a lot of people who need to be kept sweet. But I am entirely at a loss as to why it has that effect on them.
Either Elizabeth II or her equally revered father signed off on every nationalisation, every aspect of the Welfare State, every retreat from Empire, every loosening of Commonwealth ties, every social liberalisation, every constitutional change, and every European Union treaty. Charles III signed off on decriminalised abortion up to birth, and he would have signed off on assisted suicide and on gender self-identification, as he may yet. They have had assisted suicide in Canada for years. If those monarchs could not have done otherwise, then why bother having a monarchy? What is it for? I support public ownership and the Welfare State in principle, even if the practice has often fallen short. The same may be said of decolonisation, as a matter of historical interest. I find some social liberalisations and some constitutional changes a cause for joy, and others a cause for horror. I abhor the EU, and the weakening of the Commonwealth. But this is not about me.
Is it the job of a monarch, if not to acquire territory and subjects, then at least to hold them? If so, then George VI was by far the worst ever British monarch, and quite possibly the worst monarch that the world has ever seen, with his daughter in second place. And is it the job of a British monarch to maintain a Protestant society and culture in the United Kingdom? If so, then no predecessor ever began to approach the abject failure of Elizabeth II, a failure so complete that no successor will ever be able to equal it. And for all her undoubted personal piety, I am utterly baffled by the cult of that Queen among Evangelical Protestants and among those who cleaved to a more-or-less 1950s vision of Anglicanism, Presbyterianism or Methodism. What did she ever do for them? What has the monarchy ever done for them?
During the last reign, Britain became history’s most secular country, and the White British became history’s most secular ethnic group, a trend that has been even more marked among those with Protestant backgrounds than it has been among us Catholics. The next monarch is not a regular churchgoer, meaning that the one after that is not being brought up as one. “We have no King but King Jesus,” proclaimed the Covenanters of 1638, and another King Charles’s prayer with the Pope has at least implicitly caused the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster to hoist again the Blue Banner, “For Christ’s Crown and Covenant”, from Kyle Paisley’s ministerial charge in old Puritan East Anglia.
This has implications for the Windrush debate, and with eight Commonwealth Realms in or on the Caribbean, a fat lot of good being the Queen’s loyal subject did anyone there; Barbados, proportionately the most Anglican country in the world and known as “Little England” on account of the length and depth of the ties, became a republic in 2021. It also has implications for aspects of the debate around Brexit. If you wanted to preserve and restore a Christian culture in this country, then you would welcome mass immigration from the Caribbean, from Africa, from Latin America, and from Eastern Europe.
And speaking of immigration, the Royal Family would agree with NHS England that cousin marriage, not least where one party was an immigrant, had “benefits” that included “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages”. Queen Victoria and the immigrant Prince Albert were first cousins. By descent from that marriage, the King’s parents were third cousins, while they were also second cousins once removed through a different line, and Prince Philip was not only an immigrant, but an asylum-seeker who took refuge in Britain because he had relatives here, one of whom he married. Britain intervened militarily in his native land to restore his family to the Throne. Talk about bringing their troubles to our door.
Cousin marriage was the most uncompromisingly Protestant thing about the public life of the late Queen. It is unconditionally legal in 18 of the United States plus the District of Columbia, and conditionally legal in a further six. Proponents of a ban on it here should ask themselves why there was not one already. There did used to be. Until the Reformation, the Late Roman ban on marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity had obtained, extended to affinity because in marriage, “the two shall become one flesh”. Catholic Canon Law has therefore always banned cousin marriage, at one time to the seventh degree, although with possibilities of dispensation since the ban was not in the Bible. Such dispensations did the Hapsburgs no good.
The legality of marriages between first cousins is a product of the Reformation. Its prevalence until the First World War, and as recently as that, was a badge of Protestant honour, since Henry VIII had legalised it when he had wanted to marry Catherine Howard, who was Anne Boleyn’s first cousin, and since although William and Mary never had children, the intention had been that they would, and they were first cousins whose marriage would not ordinarily have been possible in the Catholic Church. Does the Orange Order now wish to ban a marriage such as William of Orange’s? Would the four stripes of Northern Irish Unionist in the House of Commons vote for that ban?
This seems to be a Two Cultures thing. Although Charles and Emma Darwin were first cousins who had 10 children, and although Albert and Elsa Einstein were both maternal first cousins and paternal second cousins such that her maiden name was Einstein, the mere thought of this practice is profoundly shocking to scientists. But to people formed by the study of literature and history, then, while that is where it belongs, that is where you will find it routinely. Mainstream British society was educated out of it, and not very long ago, so that can obviously be done. South Asians are hardly unreceptive to education. Between 1979 and 1981, the makers and viewers of To the Manor Born took it as read that Audrey fforbes-Hamilton’s late husband had been her cousin. Although Coronation Street does not, both Emmerdale and EastEnders still feature such arrangements between white characters whose families were supposed to have lived in Emmerdale or Walford since time out of mind, and that seems to raise no eyebrows.
Anglo-Saxons and Scotch-Irish still regularly marry their first cousins in several of the parts of the United States that were most likely to vote for Donald Trump, and they did so as a matter of course into the very recent past. But if the argument is that this was something that certain other ethnic groups did, then it is probably better to treat it as a health education matter rather than a criminal one. After all, that was what worked with everyone else. Nineteenth-century novels are full of marriages between first cousins as the most normal thing in the world, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were first cousins. By descent from that marriage, the King’s parents were third cousins, while they were also second cousins once removed through a different line. But the King is a last hurrah of that sort of thing. His mother was one of the least inbred monarchs ever, and his son and grandson are not at all inbred. Educate people, and it will mostly or entirely die out. That worked with everyone else. Even the Royal Family.
Yet since the intention would apparently be to prevent genetic defects, which is not the only reason to oppose cousin marriage, then it would be pointless without the criminalisation of sex between first cousins. So be it, but that seems highly unlikely, since we have already raised the age of marriage to two years above the age of consent, a literally preposterous arrangement. It is now legally impossible to do the decent thing, but not to do the indecent thing. Pity poor Imam Ashraf Osmani of Northampton, who in January was handed a suspended sentence of 15 weeks’ imprisonment for having performed a nikah, which has no legal status whatever, so that two 16-year-olds could have a perfectly lawful sexual relationship without sinning. The second time as farce.
Something similar applies to polygamy. As you could marry your cousin my nikah, with no legal standing, and the two of you could then have children perfectly legally as you could have done anyway, so you can take three more wives alongside your legal one by nikah, with no legal standing, and have children with all of them. Or you could take all four wives by nikah alone. In fact, any man can have children with four different women simultaneously if they will let him. Doing so with two, often in arrangements that lasted decades, has never been especially uncommon, and nor has sending the bill to the DWP or its predecessors. Whatever else that may be, it is certainly not un-British.
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