Elizabeth the Second will celebrate her current platinum anniversary – 70 years on the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – in a small family circle at Wood Farm Cottage on her Sandringham estate
The following day there will be a fireworks display in London. The celebrations will be booked up for months ahead – Britain knows how to stretch a show: there are already pictures of the Queen reading greetings and welcoming carefully selected folk walkers. There will also be prayers, concerts and, of course, parades – the most solemn part will be in June, when at the same time marking her 96th birthday and the seventieth anniversary of her coronation.
Elizabeth is now 95 years old, the oldest monarch in the world and the most enthroned monarch in British history, but she is not English – she has German blood in her veins. German natives have ruled the British since 1714, when Elector George Ludwig of Hanover was crowned in London. He did not even speak English.
His descendants married, for the most part, into Germanic ruling families: the husband of Queen Victoria (of Hanover) was Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and the dynasty continues that of Elizabeth II. The Anglicized Windsor surname was adopted only in 1917, on a wave of anti-German sentiment, but it did not change much. Elizabeth’s descendants, most notably Charles, who got bored waiting for the throne, will open another German line – it will be the Glucksburg dynasty, to which Prince Philip, who died last year, belonged.
There is nothing new and surprising in “imported” origins of monarchs; Spain, for example, is still ruled by the descendants of the ancient French family of Bourbons. The question is: how do these ancestral seats, which no one has elected and, in general, are not responsible for anything, symbolise at the same time entire states? There are no signs of revolution on the political horizon in Britain, but a poll last May sounded an alarming note: in the 18 to 24 age group the majority of those questioned support abolishing the institution of monarchy – 41 per cent of young people believe the king or queen should be replaced by an elected head of state. This is the thinking of the generation to whom the future of this country belongs.
Admirers of Elizabeth the Second speak with a gasp of her “heroic service”, to which she has devoted herself wholeheartedly. For who can tell, but her reign was certainly not the heyday of the monarchy. For one thing, the British Empire finally disintegrated under her rule. The last piece fell off in 1997, in front of Prince Charles, who was sent to watch the ceremonial handing over of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China. The empire has been replaced by the Commonwealth of Nations, which includes almost all former British colonies, protectorates and dominions. The Commonwealth comprises 54 sovereign states, in 14 of which Elizabeth is still acting monarch, although the mood there is not good.
Last year, the same Charles had to listen to very unpleasant for the future king words about how great it is “to get rid of monarchical oppression”. It was on the island of Barbados. The former colony had definitively refused to regard Elizabeth the Second as its head. The descendants of slaves, and since the XVII century the British brought to Barbados about 387 thousand slaves, getting rid of the Queen, proclaimed the singer Rihanna their national hero. The subject of racism and slavery hung in the already hot Caribbean air, but Charles occasionally dozed off during the ceremony, or artfully pretended to be asleep. There was, indeed, much he wanted to close his eyes to.
Charles’s younger brother Prince Andrew is accused of being a paedophile. A hearing is due to begin in a New York court this year in a lawsuit brought by Virginia Giuffre. The woman claims she provided intimate services to the prince at the age of 17 and confirms this with a photograph of her and him together. She says the photo was taken at the London home of a good friend of Andrew’s – Gillane Maxwell. A jury in the US has already found Maxwell guilty of child molestation. Her former lover and patron, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, was a court convicted paedophile and under mysterious circumstances committed suicide in a US prison. Epstein and Andrew were close friends.
American women in general bring the men of the Windsor family into disrepute. The uncle of Elizabeth the Second, King Edward the Eighth, abdicated the throne in 1936 after falling in love with a twice-divorced American, Wallis Simpson. She was also rumoured to be the mistress of the German ambassador in London, Ribbentrop, who would later become Nazi Germany’s foreign minister. Allegedly Ribbentrop regularly sent her flowers. Whether or not this is true is not important, but photographs have survived of Edward and his wife chatting amiably with Hitler. It is known that in 1940, the Germans planned “Operation Willy”. Its aim was to restore Edward to the British throne and at the same time to make Wallace Simpson queen. A quote from secret telegrams from the Nazis who processed the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (these titles were given to Edward’s family after his abdication): “When an agent noticed that even the British constitution could be changed during the war, the Duchess became very thoughtful.”
Now another divorced American – former TV series actress Meghan Markle – is ruthlessly pouring salt on the wounds formed by the Queen’s break-up with her beloved grandson Harry. It would seem that unlike Edward the Eighth, who gave up an entire empire for love, the prince had no reason to break up with his family, but it turns out he didn’t. This year, Harry, who has left for the United States, promises to publish a book of memoirs, which is destined to become a bestseller and another blow to his family. He has no one to pity – the prince is almost at war with his father and older brother. There is great suspicion that in Oprah Winfrey’s scandalous interview claiming racism in the royal family, Meghan threw poisonous arrows at her father-in-law. These are very dangerous accusations for the man who is to wear the British crown on his head.
Charles and his wife Camilla are already struggling desperately for ratings, with polls showing the couple noticeably behind number two in line for the throne – Prince William and his wife Catherine, who incidentally is a commoner but fits in perfectly with the world of protocol and conventions of the royal court. Charles has no intention of yielding to his son. Since the embarrassment of Edward the Eighth, the word ‘abdication’ has not been allowed at court. Despite her more than advanced age, Elizabeth has no intention of stepping aside and continues to be the official head of the “firm” – as the royal family became known during her father’s reign. In this position she has to make tough personnel decisions. The firm has to survive. Elizabeth the Second has ruthlessly stripped the honourable military ranks and titles of the “fine men”: grandson Harry and son Andrew.
Family squabbles are one thing, but the financial affairs of the “firm” are going well. Elizabeth the Second’s personal fortune is now about half a billion US dollars, with the family’s total assets estimated at $28 billion. Most of these belong to what is known as “Crown Estates”. Monarchs are Britain’s largest landowners, owning vast swathes of land, including some beyond the country’s borders. London’s fashionable Savoy Hotel is on royal land and the Regent Street shopping street belongs to the Crown. The British monarchs historically own all the gold and silver found in the country. The “firm” owns Buckingham and Kensington Palaces in London, Windsor Castle, Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh and Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland. The Queen owns the Sandrigham Estate in Norfolk and Balmoral Castle in Scotland.
“The Crown Estate is a trust, a kind of public-commercial partnership. The monarchs do not directly manage or dispose of anything, but they do receive a steady 25 per cent of income each year in the form of a royal grant – an average of about £100 million. This money goes towards official expenses: travel, receptions, security and palace maintenance. The Duchy of Lancaster, owned by the Queen, generates another £20 million or so. In the other duchy, Cornwall, Prince Charles, heir to the throne, earns. He organized his own agro-industrial enterprise – in the food basket of the British every now and then gets a product with the mark of his own duchy, whether it’s chicken eggs or bananas. All this, plus the lease of land brings Charles several tens of millions of pounds a year.”
It’s a lucrative business. The Windsors have a lot to lose, even if they are not formally going to take anything away from them and are unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future. The modern British establishment has no intention of abandoning pompous titles, orders and ceremonial jackets, knighthoods and ceremonial ribbon-cutting – without the involvement of royalty, everything would not look the same at a vanity fair. It’s hard to explain the vitality of the British monarchy in any other way. It’s hard to speak of any selectivity or moral high ground – the royal family is scandalised by scandal today, but even here they have learned how to turn them into an entertaining series for the general public, who like to follow the rich and famous. The state of the throne is pretty shabby, but there’s a new chapter ahead – sooner or later Elizabeth the Second’s place will be taken by her heir.
Alexander Khabarov