The House of Windsor: The Royal Family

[Music] hello today i want to talk about the idea of the royal family it's the second in the series of videos on the modern monarchy i began by talking about george v royal revolution of 1917 in which he changed the name of the royal house transforming it in so doing from a german dynasty into an english family an english family that was called the house of windsor but much more happened in 1917 which is why i've called it a royal revolution as well as this change in the name of the dynasty there was a revolution in the system of honours you invented the order of the british empire well now we think of it as a bit fuddy-duddy then it was genuinely transformative it was big huge all the earlier orders were very small and exclusive this one was literally open to everybody of any social status was even open to women this altered the relationship of the monarchy with everybody with the subjects the first investiture i said was in ibrox park football stadium you can't get much more democratic or populist than that so you transform the honors system you rename the dynasty and then finally this is what's really important for what we're going to talk about today you alter the marriage customs of the royal house the king and the queen george and mary she was always called may announce their decision to the privy council that from that moment onwards princes and princesses of the royal house will be able to marry english men and english women it was the king observed in his diary in that round-school boyish solemn handwriting and historic day it also led of course to the only recorded joke by the german kaiser wilhelm ii who was george's first cousin and of course the great enemy britain was at war with germany which is the fundamental reason why this transformation occurred as well as of course the terrible revolution which had already happened in russia which involved another one of george's cousins star nicholas well when he heard the story that the house of sacks called bergota had suddenly become the house of windsor the kaiser who spoke fluent english and was well educated in things english cracked a really rather good joke he said well he much looked forward to the next performance of william shakespeare's the merry wives of saks koberg but here not simply to tell jokes i'm here to talk about the royal family some may think occasionally there's not too much difference between the two but let's be a little bit serious because everybody was what the new rules did of course was to enable a royal marriage to be seen differently you could even argue to require a royal marriage to be seen differently up to that point as i mentioned in my last talk the rules governing royal marriages in britain were very strict they were strict for two reasons one was the requirement ever since the glorious revolution which had driven the catholic house of steward or at least it had become catholic from the throne was the requirement that neither a future king nor indeed anybody else in the direct line of succession should marry a roman catholic so that excludes the great bulk of royal families of europe who are roman catholic and it limits you to a quite small choice of protestant dynasties in northern europe especially in germany but also in scandinavia which is why quite a few royal marriages take place with the danish royal house the mother of george v herself was danish queen alexandra so there is that rule which limits things in one direction but then there's another rule which is a product of the fact that the royal house of britain was of course a german house it was the house of hanover which had intermarried with victoria marrying the albert of sax called bergota it had become a joint german royal house but it followed as you would expect i suppose the rules of german royal houses the old english royal houses in the middle ages and the tudors had been pretty how can i put this omnivorous in whom they married look at the extraordinary range of social status of the wives of henry viii or king edward iv marrying the the daughter of a newly enobled peer who had been uh was the widow of a mere knight elizabeth woodville look at the marriages extraordinary series of marriages of edward iii so the english house had been pretty english houses had been pretty flexible not so the stewards the stuarts they're scottish they're very aware of their as it were nouveau riche position amongst the dynasties of europe and they're determined to marry upwards so they do indeed marry very groundly uh into primarily the french royal house but they do so at a very considerable cost because they marry catholics the germans have another rule which is a different one it is that a german member of a royal house or indeed of a noble family in order to be able to pass their status on to their children has to marry somebody of equivalent status so if you were a duke of sac school bergota you had to marry somebody who was a serene highness um and that is exactly what they did if you look at the marriage pattern of the english royal house from its arrival and at the beginning of the 18th century every time with every generation they marry back in germany now these are arranged marriages they can be romanticized to an extent but not very much and moreover very strikingly marriages royal marriages were usually pretty private affairs they're not what we think of they're not great occasions of public ceremony they normally take place in the chapel royal usually the rather small chapel royal at st james's now the new rules that princess and princesses of the royal house can marry english men and english women that transforms all that because of course now how are you going to marry well you're going to meet people in more or less the ordinary way in the london social scene you will have courtship you will have engagement you will have well reporting gossip the whole thing looks in other words not like this very formal diplomatic relationship of royal houses coming together in an arranged marriage instead it looks well kind of like everybody else's marriage and we all know what goes with marriage it well it's love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage so you can present it and sometimes it was genuinely as a love affair now this is dramatic in its effects the first marriage that takes place after the alteration of the rules is that of george v's eldest daughter the princess royal princess mary and she marries as the king had intended and hoped she marries an english nobleman viacount lassos the marriage well it's new it's as new really as the monarchy of 1917 because where does it take place not in the chapel royal oh no not in the chapel royal it takes place with unprecedented pomp and circumstance in westminster abbey and it's reported lavishly by the new pretty well new popular press and certainly new in the fact that it was able to carry because of advances in photography and printing lavish illustrations so you have a royal wedding which is an occasion for grand public ceremony the ceremony of course is very much the kind of ceremony which had been pioneered under edward vii and continued by george v so it's we talked about love and marriage going together like a horse and carriage horses and carriages are very very prominent in it in other words it looks exactly like what we think of as a royal ceremony there are carriage processions there are troops in the street and there is a grand company assembled in the abbey the clergy are wearing their cops and the popular press reporting and the gossip and the stories around the bride and the stories around the groom and the stories about the truso and the shots of the house that they will go to which fortunately is hardwood house is a very splendid house look very good in the photographs but there's something even more striking what was princess mary described as what was the marriage described as but it's a term you're all familiar with even though you've probably never heard of princess mary she was called like diana the people's princess and the wedding was called the people's wedding now this i think takes us into some of the fundamental transformations that were wrought by the reinvention of the monarchy in 1917 that change of name they reach really deep into the nature of the monarchy because with this new pattern of royal marriages you were able to turn the monarchy not simply from what it had been which is a german dynasty you were able really to separate it off from the grandeur of the aristocracy you're able to present it as well what it says the people's princess the people's wedding the people's the monarchy of course right at the beginning of george v reign as i mentioned in that first talk had already been forced and had had to and had done so wisely to throw the aristocracy at least its political power to the wolves with the parliament act of of 1910-11 and that that deprives the aristocracy of its veto on taxes and leads the way open to the very heavy taxation that was necessary for the welfare state the beginnings of which 1945 as we often think in 1906 with the great liberal budget of lloyd george and winston churchill and whatever that point of course is a liberal so the fight you're inventing the monarchy as reinventing the monarchy is a popular monarchy what do we all have in common what does the king the queen their children have in common with the humblest family well it's exactly that it's the idea of family so it's a kind of dare i said it's the sort of pathetic fallacy that the monarchy is somehow now not there on a pinnacle of ceremony it's somehow like us it's one of us it's part of us so it's that in a sense pulling down of the monarchy to the level of everybody which is an essential part of democracy that paradox if you like of a popular even a democratic monarchy democratic order of chivalry like the order of the british empire the even more democratic um companionship of honor which was again as i said in that first talk created specifically for trade unionists and socialists one newspaper said after all of that we are all socialists now but we're all socialist monarchists now popular monarchists so this leveling but there's another side of the process which goes in entirely the opposite direction and elevates the monarchy in a remarkable way in fact i would argue that the monarchy of the 1920s and 30s and 40s and 50s and even the beginning of the 60s is treated with more formal reverence than probably at any time in its history certainly since the high middle ages possibly queen elizabeth the first or whatever but it's it's that sort of extraordinary shift now how does that happen well it happens again through the idea of family but this time viewed in a much more ideological and indeed religious sense and this takes us to another extraordinary story it is a separate story that's built on those changes of 1917. to set in a little bit wider context we have to understand that early 20th century england was engaged in a huge debate that's actually rather too polite a word over things like women's rights and above all issues which we all know about the question of should women have the votes should they be able to sit in parliament the whole business of the suffragettes but in some ways there's a bigger struggle going on which has much broader impact than the handful of women who would sit in parliament and and and assume a direct political role it's the whole question of marriage rights and divorce and up to this point divorce in england is quite extraordinarily difficult to get much of the time it actually requires a private act of parliament it was pretty well impossible there'd been pressure right from the middle of the 19th century for reform and the liberalization of the divorce laws but equally it's passionately fought a royal commission is set up at the beginning of the 20th century to look at the whole issue it's very much dominated by a group of oxford academics religious folk centered on all souls college so william hansen the warden is the chairman of the commission another member is another fellow of all souls an up-and-coming clergyman called cosmo gordon lang and what anson and langer determined to do is to preserve what they regarded as the authentic christian doctrine of marriage which is that it is as you swear or as people swear or used to swear in the marriage vows till death as depart for richer for poorer till death has departed in other words that it is effectively indissoluble this becomes a very broad struggle and cosmo gordon lang in particular enlists this new family monarchy in the struggle i've described in a little detail the first of the new royal marriages which takes place in westminster abbey the marriage of the people's princess princess mary and vicar muscles the next one is more important dynastically because it's that of the king's second son it's a man called albert we know him as the future george vi he was then called albert duke of york and he is very much he's got an elder brother he was known as david to his family we know him as the future edward edwards the eighth the uh very short-lived king and we'll see why he's short-lived in terms of king though not in terms of years why he's only king for less than a year actually um the two of them the two brothers are very much the hare and the tortoise edward is handsome devastatingly good looking a precocious womanizer um chips shannon um drools over him with with a sort of pederastic and and pedophile lost um the handsome and of course he is a premier he is very much a precocious womanizer but he's interested not in young women he's interested in rather older rather experienced women whereas his younger brother albert is shy he's gawky he's got the most terrible stammer he comes absolutely the bottom of his class at the dartmouth naval college um awkward lad um but he has grit and persistence and he has pretty normal sexual tastes unlike his brother and as part of this process of the king's sons and the king's daughters being encouraged to find spouses in the english aristocracy his eye lets on a young lady a very good birth elizabeth beau's lion and the future queen elizabeth the queen mother she is a bit of a star debutant and she is to be quite truthful not very interested in albert albert this thought is not terribly uh pre-possessing but he has grit and he has determination and she refuses him yes again she refuses him he asks again and i think it's third time lucky that she says yes so there is now another one of these weddings which george v and queen mary had planned between one of their children and in this case a british girl of good distinguished noble family scottish elder um again it takes place at westminster abbey the sermon is given by cosmo gordon lang who has now been rapidly promoted in the church and he is archbishop of york we've been used to quite a few marriage sermons and we there was a very extraordinary one at the marriage of almost as extraordinary as the marriage of megan and harry and there was um archbishop runce's uh even more extraordinary bearing in mind its nature at the wedding of charles and diana if you remember in which he described it as a fairy tale well it'd be difficult to think of a more extreme contrast and what archbishop cosmo gordon lang said to that young couple here is the man who is campaigning against divorce he takes the idea of a royal marriage and he transforms it into a kind of national marriage sacrament national marriage covenant if you like he looks at the couple and enunciates pronounces these extraordinary words no guff about you know you'll be happy no guff about isn't this a fairy tale isn't the bride beautiful instead he looks at them and says you cannot swear that your marriage will be happy you cannot swear that your marriage will be happy but he adds voice intensifying you can and will swear but it shall be noble now what on earth does that mean well it means that even god forbid if you are unhappy and you hate each other and you want to get divorced you won't you'll keep up appearances you will pretend you will be noble so what we've done we've elevated the monarchy as i said into a kind of ark of the covenant of marriage the royal family now doesn't just become any british family in marriage it becomes and is presented and presents itself as the ideal british family a kind of guarantor of a national morality in which the touchstone is very definitely no divorce it's difficult for us to realize just how impossible and socially damaging divorce was it leads to dismissal from jobs you are not admitted at court you're not admitted to the royal enclosure it has got you die a social death in other words it's a belief that also has a heresy divorce and a penalty for heresy that that's gordon lang and clearly albert and elizabeth turn out to be happily married they have two daughters our present queen and princess margaret they have as far as we can tell and i think this is genuinely the case an idyllically happy family life they talk of themselves as we four wonderful symbol of this moral monarchy together with the rather more stiffed back king and queen we'll forget for the moment that we'll have to rediscover the nardwell rapscallion good-looking womanizing prince of wales david so the church enlists the monarchy the church enlists the monarchy in this process of if you like national moralization and if you look at the how royal events of this period are memorialized and commemorated there's an extraordinary window uh in canterbury cathedral after a few miles from where i'm speaking uh part of the window it's it's it's the the the the north transept and part of it there's a great window which is put in by uh edward iv which shows all his children arrayed very 15th century very very formally and then there is a wall painting which shows a royal visit to the cathedral of the 1930s either late 1920s and 1930s and do you know what the representation of the 1920s or 30s is more hierarchic more formal more almost byzantine in the pomp and circumstance of monarchy than even the 15th century stained glass these are royal playing cards invested with meaning marching solemnly and across the wall so the church and the monarchy are in this alliance and presenting a very particular vision of englishness and the moralized england there's another agent and church being very ancient of course there's another agent of this process which is at least as effective and is very new it is the fledgling bbc the fledgling bbc and run by lord wreath and sir john wreath the first director general sees itself as another vehicle of national improvement and the imposition of a national morality and it too latches on this idea of a family monarchy and it presents it with as much vigor as the bbc always does when it gets its teeth into a moral crusade but of course it's done through new media to begin with essentially radio television comes in just before but in a very very primitive sort of way just before the second world war it's essentially done through radio and through royal broadcasts and through particularly the christmas broadcast because george v though he was a very stiff and formal man proves to be well really a bit of a dab hand at broadcasting he's particularly good talking children he comes across as a kind of not so much father of his people as grandfather of his people a bit of a crusty crusty old gentleman but with a heart of gold and speaking warmly to his people and particularly to the children and the christmas broadcast begins you know that long long history continues to the present of a kind of national act of communion and that word incidentally is actually used at the time of george v um silver jubilee celebrations in 1935 the formal celebrations um uh in in the abbey and the prime minister stanley baldwin when he emerges from the cathedral he writes about it and he actually uses that word it was he said this is the service of celebrities the service of celebration for 25 years on the throne he said it was rather like holy communion this is a church which is byzantine byzantinizing the monarch they are a sort of justinian and theodora but with rather better morals and by the way the dress comes into it very definitely lange belonged to the high anglo catholic branch of the church of england so he goes along with the wearing of copes and the enormous great gold semi-circular thing cloak that hangs from the shoulder and makes that marvelous pattern but he also for his own installation enthronement rather as archbishop of york pioneers the use of the mitre so you get this intense ceremony ceremonialization let me get that word right ceremonialization of clerical dress which goes along that alongside that of um royal dress the the the splendors of the coronations and so on all of this knitting together in a kind of concept obviously the king or queen is consecrated but but it's it's it takes on a more a more vigorous palpable nature expressed above all through this idea of the sanctity of the royal family as a symbol of the great british family but there is of course a problem isn't there the prince of wales conspicuously unmarried and conspicuously going out with married women then well it's another married woman but he meets somebody different he meets wallace simpson mrs simpson twice divorced remarried american divorcee in london and he falls passionately and absolutely in love his father is dead he is now king and what's he going to do he is he is absolutely determined to marry mrs simpson the prime minister stanley baldwin who had experienced the holy communion of george v and silver jubilee celebrations and himself is a man of the most conventional public and private morality takes the dimmest possible view he is of course absolutely convinced that it is legally impossible for a king to marry a divorced woman because divorce is an absolutely shocking thing and he writes a private note to the lord chancellor when the king makes absolutely clear that he is determined to marry mrs simpson he writes a private note to the lord chancellor in which he said of course this is completely impossible isn't it it's absolutely illegal i just got to tell him so don't i unfortunately the law chancellor has to reply will i am terribly sorry but there is absolutely no law against it the only law governing the royal marriage is that members of the royal family have to marry only marry the king's consent while the king could consent to his own marriage and they cannot marry a roman catholic and mrs simpson whatever else she was was not a roman catholic so what happens well clearly lange clearly a vast part of the establishment clearly lang's cole close friend another one of these figures surrounding all cells college jeffrey dawson the editor of the times clearly somebody wasn't part of the english establishment but was part of the uber establishment that's to say uh sir john reath the director general of the bbc all of these guardians of the flame of the family monarchy of course are determined that if edward persists in marrying mrs simpson he will forfeit the throne the evidence is unclear i used to think bearing in mind my interest in lang and his extraordinary tormented he's clearly a suppressed homosexual and as to an extent i think is his wreath himself these are tortured men uh using a particularly enforced public morality as part of their own reconciliation with themselves i thought that because of these intensely close relationships between lang and between wreath and between dawson that there would be evidence of conspiracy he was absolutely denied by lang himself and as far as i can see having sifted the papers reasonably thoroughly there is no direct evidence in other words edward i suppose didn't really need enemies didn't re really need a conspiracy to get rid of him because he was his own worst enemy some people did support him and the most famous of course is sir winston churchill churchill was a passionate king's man he even disputes with the woman who would become queen with with elizabeth berslan with the duchess of york he says you know isn't all this this this dispute about a possible abdication isn't it going to risk you know a split in the dynasties in the middle ages and the duchess of york in her very shrewd fashion says oh mr churchill that was a long time ago churchill then goes on and points out she is called duchess of york was there not a risk that it will renew the wars of the roses to which the duchess of york replies oh mr churchill that was a very long time ago and silences even mr churchill but that doesn't solve the question edward is determined edward is determined to marry mrs simpson the prime minister is determined that he shouldn't he outplays him he lines up the dominion prime ministers against him and finally edward has to choose his throne or the woman that he wants as his wife and he chooses the woman that he wants as his wife he's edward has had a very very bad press the self-indulgence is irresponsibility he is flavors of nazism and whatever i'm always a little skeptical about the latter i mean after all i think before his abdication it was no more striking than many other members of the ruling class and it is worth recalling that it's churchill churchill of all people the great anti-appeaser um who is passionately in favor of edward vii and actually once uh uh uh and wants a king's party so what what is that to be said for this man well he wanted a modern monarchy he all the sorts of things that prince charles is talking about now he wanted a slim to down monarchy he wanted a monarchy in which and now of course unthinkable because of questions of security he could simply walk in the street with an equity he did just holding an umbrella the king just walked he wanted a monarchy that was cast off this pseudo-baroque ritual of the period of his grandfather of edward vii um i supposed to he would have rejected had to have rejected the whole idea of the moral monarchy which of course carries the monarchy to this extraordinary period of quasi-religious triumph but as we've seen and we will see when i continue uh this this video in my next engagement with the royal family when we talk about the reign of the present queen it's turned into a kind of sorceress apprentice it the whole notion of the family monarchy set a series of ideals which the queen's children as the children of the 50s and 60s couldn't live up to and it was shipwrecked edward would as it were have solved that problem but all of this is just speculation he goes and he goes pretty quickly he is allowed finally um after he's agreed his abdication he's allowed to address the notion he delivers a fine speech much of it written by churchill and he goes the end of that speech this is the extraordinary thing wreath himself supervises the king of the microphone wreath's original intention had been to introduce him as not the x-king but simply edward windsor in other words to strip him of everything this was the man who would fail the test of duty this was the man who'd failed the test of morality this was the man who had broken the covenant of the monarchy he was a bit like charles stewart when he's on trial or louis v uh louis the um 17th let's get that right and a bit like charles stewart when he is on trial or uh like louis xvi when he too is on trial and charles the first was referred to as charles stewart louis xvi was referred to as the dewey cafe you strip them of their identity as a king and reduce them to a mere mortal well wreath wanted to do that but at least his brother now king now george vi won't let that happen george vi is a stickler for title a stickler for um rank and distinction his only contribution to dress his brother had been a great innovator in dresser very stylish dresser and in fact in many ways he invents how men dress now with suits with turnips and smart ties and soft collared shirts and all that kind of thing george vi only contribution was a special set of evening trousers that were pinched in at the left knee so that you could visibly wear the order of the guard or the actual data of the data over your evening trousers it did not catch off so he's very much a stickler for form and he insists that at least he told ruth he must be addressed properly he may no longer be king no longer king emperor but he was born a royal highness and that's what he will be a dukedom the dukedom of windsor is created for him that is the first half of this story the crashing of the idea of the family monarchy in the abdication but it's instant revival with the family of george vi the we for those who are capable of following those normal but so difficult rules of a marriage that even if it can't be happy you swear it shall be noble [Music] you

Channel: David Starkey Talks

Views: 66,343

Keywords: David Starkey, History

Id: _AIqu1iNv-I

Length: 41min 6sec (2466 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021