Forgotten Soon Enough?

The Liberal Democrats are the third largest party in the House of Commons, and they lead more councils than the Conservatives, so they obviously do not need the publicity. Rather, the media blackout of them is a failure to subject them to proper scrutiny. It continued even during the five years of the Coalition. All in all, a dereliction of responsibility.

Country Whigs, Patriot Whigs, Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, Alderman Alfred Roberts's daughter, the founders and funders of the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Orange Bookers, and Liz Truss, have successively taken over the largely bovine Tory machine so completely that almost all Conservatives now assume "free" market economics and a foreign policy of military interventionism to be "traditional Tory values" that their party had always held. Nothing could be further from the case. More indirectly, the strands of Liberalism that accrued to the Labour Party and then seceded to the SDP have provided key, if mostly unseen, players around every Conservative Leader since John Major. Not for nothing do the ostensibly Tory papers call the King "Charles" but Earl Spencer, whose name is also Charles and who publishes under it, "Earl Spencer".

Only one Earl Spencer, the seventh, sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative. Both of his successors sat as Crossbenchers, and all of his predecessors were Liberals and before that Whigs. The first Earl Spencer was created only in 1765, but he was a member of the Whig oligarchy, of which the Spencer dynasty was a pillar. The first Baron Spencer was created in 1603, when he was already the richest man in England. He had been born in 1570 at Althorp, which the Spencers had owned since 1508 and where they had lived since 1486.

The old aristocratic families do look down on the Royals as jumped up, but they are really only nouveaux to this country, sufficient though that is for the purpose. They can call themselves whatever they please, but in point of fact the late Queen Elizabeth was the last British monarch of Prince Albert's House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. That House still occupies the Throne of Belgium, making it the last reigning branch of the House of Wettin, of which the earliest traceable member, Theodoric I, died in 976. Queen Victoria's House of Hanover, its accession in Britain five generations earlier having been largely engineered by the Spencers, was a branch of the House of Welf, and Welf I died around 825, having been, in 819, of such standing that his daughter Judith had married the Frankish Emperor Louis the Pious. Stick that in your 1486.

But these things are patrilineal, so the King is an Oldenburg. Prince Philip's House was, and therefore his son's is, the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, the senior surviving branch of the 925-year-old House of Oldenburg. Charles III can hold his own with any of them, even if he does still have to call himself Windsor for a reason that it is within his power to change. "Mountbatten" is his paternal grandmother's maiden name anglicised to a form that she herself never bore. There has never been a Principality of Battenberg, and the name indicates descent from a morganatic marriage. Leave the former Prince Andrew in that Hessian gap and move on. "The House of Windsor and Edinburgh" could be useful in this reign or the next. Meanwhile, the last great battle with Whiggery demands to be fought, with every member of the Privy Council and of either House of Parliament invited to declare which Charles he or she believed.