The Monarchy - FULL SERIES (History Of The Queen 1952-1992)

[Music] as the band strikes up to welcome her majesty the queen to matlock derbyshire there's no sense that the british monarchy is in any kind of trouble [Music] her majesty is still cheered wherever she goes emphasizing the remarkable survival of the monarchy in britain while most other nations have either lost their kings and queens or made them insignificant this series looks at this extraordinary institution at a time when the very public problems in the private lives of the royal family have fueled a new debate about the monarchy's place in british society but whatever its difficulties today history shows that the monarchy has managed to survive greater crises in the past [Applause] if you go back to the 18th century and the royal brothers the prince regent himself couldn't go out in the streets of london without fear of causing a rat and being his stat and stoned it can put the present situation in some kind of perspective the prince regent who became king george iv brought the already declining reputation of the british monarchy to an all-time low through his greed extravagance and chaotic private life in 1821 his estranged wife queen caroline was physically barred from attending his coronation and on his death nine years later the times wrote there was never an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased king only on the accession of the young and respectable queen victoria did the image of the monarchy recover at all following her marriage to prince albert the carefully cultivated image of the queen surrounded by an adoring family greatly enhanced the popularity of the monarchy and for the first time the royal family established itself as a model for the growing middle class but royal popularity can't be taken for granted on the death of prince albert victoria was stricken with grief with nearly disastrous results [Music] the only time we've had a very powerful republican movement in england was in the last century when after the death of the prince consort in 1861 queen victoria virtually withdrew from public life and people hardly saw her at all and it was only when she came out of mourning and started playing a part in the public life of the country once again that that republican movement vanished so it's very important that the monarchy should be seen as a visible symbol in her old age victoria was to acquire a new symbolic importance as the patriotic focus of the nation and a mother figure of a great empire at the very end of her reign in the late 1880s and in the 1890s she was encouraged and persuaded to appear in public often as the focal point of grand pageants like the golden jubilee and the diamond jubilee and although she wasn't very enthusiastic about that this almost overnight created a whole new purpose for the monarchy and brought with it undreamed of and almost unprecedented popularity partly through these grand spectacles the monarchy was reinvented and recreated as a symbol of national unity of imperial identity and it became popular and acclaimed and venerated in a way that really had never been true before while victoria had hated public appearances her son and heir edward vii was more than willing to act the part of magnificent monarch and figurehead of the nation he had a love of dressing up and parading before his people and an elgar had a composer who could write music to stir feelings of pride and king and country [Music] this was the high point of the grand monarchy indeed much of the apparently ancient ceremony we associate with the monarchy was devised or revived in the reign of edward v in the first decade of this century [Music] [Applause] victoria had scarcity ever attended the state opening of parliament edward vii commissioned a new coach and turned it into the great occasion it is today the only opportunity apart from the coronation that the queen has to act the sovereign and wear the crown and full state regalia and it was edward who re-fronted buckian palace and laid out the mao to create the perfect setting for the royal spectaculars that remain the hallmark of the british monarchy today the most magnificent state pageant in which edward took part was his own funeral in 1911 which he had planned in detail himself for the first time in british history the monarch lay in state in westminster hall as a quarter of a million of his subjects filed past george v was now king he presided over edward's funeral the last great gathering of the family of european royalty of which the british monarchy with its german origins was an important branch but in the first world war these foreign connections threatened the popularity of the royal family so the king decided to change the family name from sax cobra gotha to something more british it was a great deal of xenophobia anti-german feeling and the king decided that he would later rest any suspicion that the royal family was german and it was lord stamfordum the king's private secretary who came up with windsor it was a brilliant suggestion i suppose the profile of windsor castle is the best known in the whole of the united kingdom this identified the king with something very old and very english and very lasting not everybody approved of the change there was one old austrian nobleman who said that monarchy rarely had deteriorated when it changed the name of a dynasty because of a mere war the great war was to see the old european order swept away george's uncle the kaiser of germany was deposed and his cousin tsar nicholas of russia executed by revolutionaries in fact the fall of the other great european monarchies greatly enhanced the position of the new house of windsor britain was the only nation which kept a kind of great power imperial monarchy almost by accident and so as the 20th century unfolded the british monarchy became an essential part of britain's sense of self-identity and self-esteem this unique institution unrivaled by any other nation in the world and almost until our own time the delight the pride in possessing this unique imperial monarchy has precluded any serious thought about reorganizing the monarchy let alone abolishing it [Applause] throughout the present reign the excitement surrounding royal weddings has provided an important boost for the popularity of the royal family but for hundreds of years they had taken place in private at the royal chapel at windsor it was george v who turned these family events into truly popular public spectacles the wedding of the duke and duchess of york later king george vi and queen elizabeth in 1923 was actually the first wedding of a royal prince to take place in westminster abbey since 1352. in 1932 george v extended the popular appeal of the monarchy still further with the first christmas radio broadcast heard by an audience of 20 million people worldwide through one of the marvels of modern science i am enabled this christmas day to speak to all my people the king bows and the ability to exercise control over the mass media was to prove essential to the survival of the monarchy at its most critical hour edward says she makes him happy in 1936 king edward viii created a constitutional crisis over his plans to marry the twice divorced mrs wallace simpson the story was all over the american press and newsroom that charms edward of england but the british press barons and newsreel owners agreed to the royal family's request not to report the story at all the british press was so tamed by the establishment and by the press proprietors that not a word of this reached the british public until everything was virtually settled and george vi and queen elizabeth were just about to take over the crisis was over everything was done today inconceivable but in those days i think the tame british press was a vital part of the british monarchy in his new queen king george vi had someone whose popular touch has proved vital in sustaining the monarchy for over 60 years the queen mother is really almost the best communicator of all the royal family and for some years now so she can be seen at her best and she's one of these people who really realizes that you have to look good for the people who turn out to see you and she very cleverly has in her car spotlights that shine directly onto her face she leans slightly forward in the car and then people get a perfect image of her his majesty king george vi as a new queen elizabeth willingly open the doors for the press and newsreels which in the aftermath of the abdication literally doubled the output of royal stories the emphasis was once again on the family that we bring them to you now in the most charming and natural pictures ever taken of our royal family [Music] london as every wartime queen elizabeth had no hesitation in calling in the cameras to ensure the royal family was seen sharing the suffering of the people and the knowledge that their king and queen are among them has greatly heartened the people after the war because of her father's ill health princess elizabeth increasingly assumed the public responsibilities of the monarchy one rain has ended a rain begins at london airport her own accession to the throne in 1952 was to set in motion the most dramatic transformation of the public face of the monarchy through the medium of television james's palace the coronation commission assembles for its first meeting but at first the establishment opposed the idea of broadcasting the coronation ceremony live on television it was the duke of norfolk who saw its potential such great occasions well the duke of norfolk was very very forward thinking and a lot of people thought he was rather stuffy but in fact that wasn't her at all and and he had this big responsibility of organizing the coronation and i think he felt that if it was televised live then it would be seen by the whole country and this could do nothing but good for the monarchy i mean there'd been this mystique about the monarchy but why shouldn't everyone see the coronation i think that was his attitude and for the first time in history through the medium of television the ancient and noble right of a coronation service will be witnessed by millions of her majesty subjects now the archbishop turns to the west side of the theater looking down the full length of the abbey wherefore all you who are come this day to do your homage and service are you willing to do the same [Applause] the queen herself was delighted with the television presentation the royal visitors went first to studio e the queen came to lime grove to see a recording we didn't have videotape in those days just a film tele recording and she enjoyed it so much that she knighted george barnes who was director of television at the time she knighted you on the spot in lime grove where she'd watched the recording [Music] peter dimick has little doubt why the royal family was so pleased [Music] well fairly soon after the coronation when i was talking to prince philip about television i said that i thought the coronation broadcast had ensured the future of the monarchy for at least 30 years and i think he agreed with me because he then took on a lot of projects himself and became very interested in television but the awe-inspiring effect of the coronation had begun to wear off by the 1960s on sunday her majesty was 37 and newsworthy as ever even when doing nothing in particular was described by itn as celebrating quietly her birthday with her family at windsor castle but how do you celebrate your own birthday noisy happy birthday to me happy birthday to me happy birthday dear morning happy birthday and in 1968 even prince philip admitted publicly that perhaps the monarchy was looking boring you know am i getting off from middle age and i dare say when we like really ancient there might be a bit more reverence again i don't know but i just thought we're entering probably the most the least interesting period of you know the kind of glamorous existence people began to get terribly bored with the monarchy and that's the one thing that monarchs can never allow to happen and i think you had at the end of the 60s the idea that the british monarchy was sort of vanishing away even the daily telegraph said the british monarchy will not be abolished in a revolution but it could fade away in one great collective yawn once again the monarchy was ready to respond authorizing the enormously successful film royal family we see this is strong enough the significant thing about that film was that no one had ever seen the royal family in a kind of natural way like any other family i mean they weren't like any other ordinary family of course but they were human beings at least like like the rest of us and and i think that caused a great identification with the royal family greater than had happened at any time before i think the key to the success of the modern monarchy is their ability to be both just like us and not like us to be both very extraordinary and quite ordinary but now even i think that ordinariness comes very much from them being a family but if you take the royal wedding of 1981 between charles and i that was also an extraordinary event it was a name typically a fairy tale romance and i think it's that constant tension between um ordinariness and extraordinaries that is so beguiling about the modern monarchy but it was perhaps this overwhelming success that sowed the seeds of the present difficulties setting in motion the evolution of the royal family from solid respectability into soap opera once you'd actually admitted that the royal family were ordinary human beings ordinary wants lusts hates problems difficulties and all the other things once you've admitted that um you couldn't go back and i think we've been lumbered or the royal family's been lumbered with us ever since i think it was sort of packed with the devil that they've agreed to even before her marriage diana spencer excited friendship behavior from the press and after the wedding the excitement surrounding her every action led in the summer of 1982 to the publication of an infamous photograph a pair of journalists crawled for several miles through tropical jungle to get their blurred shot of the pregnant princess james whitaker then of the daily star was the man responsible i don't think that the royal family i've never believed this have the right to say well done we've enjoyed you covering this official visit or that particular opening or that unveiling ceremony now please go away until we choose to have you back time and again the queen and the prince and princess of wales have called in the editors have tried to explain to them have asked them to to lay off to just cool it and and they've had no luck on any occasion you know the editors have been invited individually to have lunch with the prince and princess and they've gobbled up their organic vegetables and gone away and done exactly the same as they've been doing before i i don't know how you solve the problem james whittaker is of the view but while the palace may not like the press they do depend on it i can assure you that uh there's only one thing worse for the royals and the queen actually has been heard to say this one thing worse than being harassed and that is being ignored they dislike that more television too once largely loyal now offers an image of royalty that is uncomfortably like the caricature of the early 19th century and it's claimed this only reflects a change in public attitudes i mean the amount of characters you could do the royal family and the the royal family 67 was pretty minimal and i think with splitting image we had to be very careful we didn't have the queen mem on the first year i mean i wanted the queen my mother and the producer said no way and i think that you do it with really the consent of the reader or the viewer um gradually you can do more there must be some truth in in the satire that you're doing a little bit of truth in the satire and i think that you can't just make things up because you think you will you have to go along with your audience more disturbing for the palace perhaps is the change in the stories of royalty that the public seems to want from mainstream news programs to put it at its most simple in the 80s i think they wanted to see basically happy pictures if possible funny but something which would take them out of themselves and put them in the role of these amazing dallas-like people touring the world at the very highest level um what they want now probably at the very lowest level is a confirmation of is the marriage on the rocks are they going to divorce this sort of basic 90s kind of knitty approach at the same time opinion polls show that popular enthusiasm for the monarchy has cooled over the decade that we've been studying the monarchy fairly closely we've seen a high level of support 77 percent drop down to around 56 55 over the last 10 years this means that while they still have the majority of the country behind them it's a declining share of the market the palace has tried to direct public attention away from royal gossip and to remind people of the monarchy's essentially serious purpose and of its greatest strength the queen herself in the latest official film elizabeth r the family once the strongest royal shoot was practically invisible i think the the point of focusing on the queen was and i've not been told this i kind of have to use it was that it was the job of the money key that wasn't really understood what's the monarchy for why do we have a monarchy people had seen in the earlier film the family is a family but but what's the job and i think it was the political constitutional role that people felt was um people in the palace um felt that was the one that wasn't really as well understood and explained the film was a great success attracting an audience of 18 million but three weeks after its first showing came the sudden announcement of the separation of the duke and duchess of york and worse was to follow in june the royal image was further damaged by allegations made about problems in the marriage of the prince and princess of wales the british monarchy has faced many crises since the beginning of the last century yet it has repeatedly managed to adapt itself and regain the hearts of the people but today's problems may be of a different order that element that has proved most important in winning public support the family and the great events that surround it can seemingly no longer be relied upon in the last decade or so we have seen all of that literally unravel before our very eyes nobody now believes that the monarchy is a happy family anymore and if you don't have a happy family and if weddings end up in the divorce court soon after why do you want grand weddings either so in a sense that whole basis of the 20th century british monarchy seems to be at risk at the present time and that has generated a newly intense amount of discussion about what kind of monarchy we have got and what kind of monarchy we ought to have and those questions are only going to become more insistent as the remainder of the 20th century unfolds as public support fades one problem that will increasingly beset the monarchy in the years ahead will be how to preserve its role as the focus of unity for the nation a representative of all the people at the same time as being the epitome of rank and privilege [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay the prince of wales jokes with a group of young people in an out of season holiday camp this is the haven camp in kstrom c norfolk in march this year the young people are all unemployed there are over 400 staying here on a week-long course organised by the princess trust to restore their confidence all right dean one of the points i wanted to develop their job hunting skills everyone indeed was maintaining good eye contact with me yep the prince has come here on a flying visit to meet some of the young people and to boost their morale well i just pray that this sort of experience and the sort of encouragement you may have received will enable you to face very often what may be a difficult future with a bit more confidence and a bit more hope and all i can say is look after yourselves and the very best of luck the contrast between the position of the prince and that of the youngsters he is addressing could not be more stark and it goes to the heart of a central problem for the monarchy today what sort of relationship should it the embodiment of class have to a society which is supposedly becoming increasingly classless on the one hand the monarchy stands for national unity above all class divisions and vested interests on the other the monarchy is the supreme embodiment of privilege of inherited wealth of hierarchy and of inequality and it's resolving that paradox that is one of the fundamental problems of the modern monarchy the monarchy itself has long been aware of this problem and prince charles is not the first member of his family to attempt to bridge the gap between crown and people before the war conscious that society was becoming more democratic his grandfather george vi set up the duke of york camps for the 14th year out of 15 his royal highness the duke of york spends the night at his camp we're under the industrial welfare movement 400 boys from the public schools and industrial centers are spending their holiday together in the comradeship of the open air one of those who attended the camp in 1936 was ron hopcroft then an apprentice with a gaslight and coke company in here we are suddenly mixing with boys from the colleges who are going to be our future bosses or masters and actually talking and mixing and playing with them and there's not much doubt that a better understanding between the two sections of society shall we say was achieved the camps even had their own theme song [Music] the duke of york enjoyed taking part in the sing-songs although he didn't share all aspects of camp life yes in the center of the layout of the camp there were two semi-marquis which were never used and when the jiggy orc came on the wednesday we suddenly realized that they were for him you see and of course when he went on the thursday afternoon we sneaked out later on ducked our heads under the camera to have a look in there much to our surprise there was a four poster bed with a canopy over the top of it with all the other washing basin and uh wardrobe et cetera et cetera i'm expecting a hotel it made us chuckle really when we then ready the paper next day that he enjoyed all the hardships of us other campers out there before the war few people voiced criticisms of the monarchy but by the time george vi daughter elizabeth came to the throne british society had changed dramatically refrigerators cookers and cupboards are all in the latest fashion clean and an increasing desire for greater social equality left the monarchy looking distinctly out of step this turned into a huge public issue in 1957. john edward poinder greg second baron northingham is in hot water this 33 year old peer often expresses views unpopular with his fellow tories but now he is under fire from inside and outside his own party in an article in his journal the national and english review he voices criticisms of the queen and her court which roused the wrath of much of the national press greg complained in his article that the queen was isolated from her subjects and out of touch with contemporary britain largely because she was surrounded by people who came exclusively from the upper classes the trouble about the court is it's all drawn from one small section of this country it should be drawn from every country of the commonwealth and from every section of the [Music] he described the queen's speaking manner as a pain in the neck and said her speeches conveyed the personality of a british schoolgirl i named this ship empress of britain may god speed her and all who sail in her greg's remarks arouse such hostility that he was even attacked in the street by an irate monarchist my husband and i that the queen was thought to be out of touch with the mainstream of british society was hardly surprising she and her sister margaret never went to school because their father couldn't conceive of them mixing with ordinary children so we find the princess elizabeth and her sister margaret accompanied by their governances enjoying a short trip up river starting from boater's lock it was not until she was 18 and allowed to join the volunteer army that the queen had any contact with contemporaries who are not of her class [Music] when the war ended a few weeks later she and margaret had a rare experience of rubbing shoulders with ordinary people on the evening of ve day my sister and i realized we couldn't see what the crowds were enjoying so we asked my parents if we could go out and see for ourselves i remember we were terrified of being recognized so i pulled my uniform cap well down over my eyes we cheered the king and queen on the balcony and then walked miles through the streets i think it was one of the most memorable nights of my life but this was only a brief encounter with the outside world by the 1950s the queen had returned to a life which was almost totally separate from that of her subjects but greg's criticisms proved to be a turning point one very leading member of the royal household uh arranged the wish meet within 48 hours of the thing starting great round of starting um and his first words to me when we met well this is the best thing that's happened to buckingham palace in my time i mean we were both strong molecules and we both felt that change was needed not um excessive change but but significant change to begin with the monarchy set about changing some of the social events which associated it with privilege and wealth the practice of presenting debutants to the queen upper class young girls coming out into society for the first time was abruptly terminated and it was also decided to make the traditional garden parties more democratic affairs in future a far wider cross-section of society would be invited today three garden parties are held at buckian palace every summer and over 8 000 people attend each one some of them will have been specially selected to meet the queen and there's always a chance of a chat with other members of the royal family too whilst it may not be a very close encounter with royalty there's no doubt that garden party invitations are highly appreciated well i think it's an honor you know to to go to the palace in the first place and the dress and the hats and the people it was just wonderful i actually wondered what it was like to be stared at by all the peasants you know in order to try and gain a greater insight into the lives of her subjects than the garden parties allow the queen has also introduced the practice of holding informal lunches joy pinder head teacher of starbank primary school in birmingham is one of those who have been invited to lunch at the palace the queen walked through the door preceded by her corgis and we were formally introduced she went down the line that had gathered and the duke followed her once he had passed i began to relax but almost immediately the queen was walking back to speak to pd james and i who pd james was another guest on that occasion what does that mean we talked about teaching children to write and the queen wanted to know whether children were still asked to write with their right hand and when i said they weren't she said how pleased she was about that because her father had been left-handed and made to write with his right hand and she did feel that um being forced to do so had added to his um stammer which was a nervous thing she also um talked about child rearing practices generally and while we were talking one of the corgis came and nipped her heels and she quickly looked around said did you see that did you see what did talk about biting the hand that feeds you but perhaps the most radical innovation of all has been the walkabout introduced by the queen in 1970 for the first time ever unselected members of the public could meet the monarch if they chose to gwen fitch was in derby in may well today i've found out that the queen's is going to walk from the recreation center by coming down a ramp and it's said that she will do a walkabout so hopefully with all the flowers that are along these barriers and my flowers she'll walk over and i've also managed uh to bring with me this time a photograph i took last year at sandringham gardens so i'm just hoping and i'll get that opportunity to hand them to her and tell her [Music] the far greater accessibility of the monarchy in recent times can be seen from surveys which show that one in 12 people have met a member of the royal family many of them on walkabouts like this one yes i wonder if you would accept this picture i took it a view of your gardens in sandringham about a year ago and i thought well you very rarely have the chance to see sandra you know some of you know that's what i thought and some players lovely to see you wonderful to see you very much [Music] that's wonderful can't believe it i made it wonderful um night spatula four one two three four one of the monarchy's most important formal roles in british society is the handing out of honours historically the sovereign granted all the honours today the vast majority are decided not by the queen but by the prime minister however the queen remains the symbolic fount of all honor and some of the orders including that of the garter are still in her personal gift the highest honours in the country uh the order of merit the garter the thistle the orders of chivalry those are awarded uh by the queen and she has a pervasive influence throughout that whole world of honours reward canton the retired miners leader from derbyshire was at the palace in may to receive an mbe for his services to the coal mining industry recipients of the lower orders wait while the country's future knights receive their instructions some the stool will be there if you want to receive the accolade the way that i recommend you go down stop behind it as i am here take the handrail in your right hand your left foot on the left side and just go down on the right knee so you stop and it's one two three very nice and easy and quite comfortable at last it's the turn of the mbes the lord chamberlain will read out your name please without laboring the point would you listen for it and would you act on it and using your surname as the queue continue along the red carpet until you're nice and central in front of the queen stop turn to face her ladies until curtsy gentlemen head bar nothing too theatrical and then move straight away forward the four or five faces that separate you from the days there is some kneeling but it's all there and now no not this time [Laughter] mr kenneth tune mr kenneth tune for services to the mining community in south derbyshire i think it's a wonderful opportunity for any person to be awarded an honour and come and be presented by the queen and look inside the palace itself that in itself must be marvelous it's been a wonderful experience with a wonderful day and it will rest in our minds for a very very long time [Music] fourteen investitures are held every year and over two thousand people annually receive decorations but who gets what the honors system reflects the class system basically it reinforces the class system if for example uh you're a politician on the conservative back benches who's had 15 undistinguished years you'll get a knighthood if you're a busy sister in an inner city hospital you probably won't get an award at all or if you do it'll be an award at the bottom rank of the honor system but criticisms of the honor system on the grounds of class are nothing new and the order of the british empire was introduced by king george v in 1917 specifically to make the honor system more democratic this was a wartime measure to recognize the war effort of every class of society before 1917 honors had been almost exclusively aristocratic and then suddenly you got the order of the british empire with its five classes and a medal as well and now this has grown to something like 250 000 recipients if you agree there should be an honest system at all then i think it's excellent that it shouldn't be confined just to the aristocracy the lowest rank of the obe is the bm the british empire medal and the the description of the bm really says all we need to know about the honor system it actually says that the bm is for those people who by rank don't qualify for a higher award what an absurd thing to say that uh we're giving you an honor but i'm afraid your rank in society doesn't qualify you for anything higher but the honor system itself is only a reflection critics argue of the class structure in society which they believe is underpinned by the very existence of the monarchy the effect of having uh a monarchy or a crown presiding over our society is to make us very hierarchical everybody's got their place god bless the squire and his relations and keep us in our proper stations if you're a plain mister there's a gentleman above you and a squire above and a squire is a knight above a knight as a baronet above a baron it is a baron of above a baroness of i can't above if i count as an earl above an earl is a marquis of other mark which is a duke of have a duke as a royal duke and then a royal duke bows and scrapes to the crown so it is a hierarchical society and while the public face of the monarchy has changed inside the royal household itself still exists the social distinctions of another era if queen victoria came back today she would see that basically the court is essentially the same as it was in her day the faces have changed but the names remain the same it's all the various earls of westmoreland and northumberland and dukes of norfolk and so on so the composition is very much what it's always been the same aristocratic families have served as courtiers for centuries one of these is the earlies the earl of ely is lord chamberlain the head of the royal household his wife virginia is a lady of the bed chamber his father the 12th earl was lord chamberlain to the queen mother for nearly three decades and his grandmother the countess of ely spent 50 years as lady in waiting to queen mary the professional staff in the palace also tend to be drawn almost exclusively from the upper classes the professional staff who basically run the monarchy are recruited from a fairly narrow social band and it's really by word of mouth the royal household are the oldest old boys network in the world you have to be invited to join by the queen and it's interesting that it's basically friends of a friend um sir robert fellowes who's presently the queen's private secretary is the brother-in-law to the princess of wales also relates to the duchess of york and his father was the land agent to the queen so it's all very tightly linked but not everyone who works for the royals is part of this inner circle there's a strict hierarchy within the palace which operates its very own class system we've definitely got a class distinction within the households of the royal family at the very top you could call it the aristocracy if you like of the royal household that is the members then you've got a sort of a middle class area which may well be described or is the officials and then of course you've got the downstairs area the working class if you like which is called the staff the three classes are completely separate they do not socialize in any way they don't eat together the lower orders have to address the upper ones are sir or madam the whole thing is very very class based very much like it was in victorian times but those familiar with court circles say the queen is oblivious to all such class distinctions i remember was talking to a particularly grand duke about this subject and he said what you must remember is that i may be a duke and you may not be a duke but in the eyes of the queen we are both subjects and i may be a slightly grander subject than you are but that makes very very little difference in deeds in the eyes of the queen we're all servants but even between members of the royal family themselves elaborate formalities are observed according to their respective stations some years ago when i was a butler to the very pleasant duke and duchess of kent we had a dinner just for princess margaret and lord snowden and it went on rather late until three o'clock in the morning and i was summoned to bring the car up and all the rest of it and when they arrived in the hall to say good night to each other there was a dashes of kent cursing to princess margaret there was lord snowden bowing his head to say good night to the duke of kent all at three o'clock in the morning there's only me there it really wasn't quite necessary but there again that was a training for them within their own family and these formalities continue today when prince edward wants to go see his father he'll have to make an appointment through his valet and when they meet together they will he will perform a neck bow to him similarly with prince charles when he wants to go see the queen he'll have to make an appointment and he always bows when when he meets her this is a very formal world and as princess sir diana found when she was courting prince charles she had to call him sir throughout their romance and even after the engagement she had to ask formally to be able to call him by his first name it is this strict adherence to hierarchy and its remoteness from ordinary life that has been blamed for the royal family's apparent inability to absorb commoners if you look at that family it is obviously a very difficult family to marry into lord snowden mark phillips fergie and as far as we can see diana all those marriages have come to grief why is it it becomes increasingly clear that the house of windsor treats the people who marry into it who are not born royal or in margaret thatcher's favorite phrase one of us it treats them as second-class citizens and it's no wonder that the marriage has come to grief but while in many respects it might be good for the monarchy to become less distant and more ordinary some of the queen's subjects would not welcome such a change if one is going to have a royal family it's got to be different there's no point of family which is not different if they're going to be different then they must to some extent stay remote and mysterious and leave you wondering a bit always what is going on behind those palace walls and given that i don't think that they can or should come down too far from their pedestal mix too much with the masses nevertheless during the queen's reign british society has changed and it's argued that the monarchy must reflect this both for its own sake and for the good of the country as a whole the main importance of the monarchy today is as a symbol so it's crucial we should get that symbolism right the chief problem of the monarchy is that it still embodies the privileged society we once were rather than the classless society we now aspire to be prince chester cathedral the setting for this year's royal maundy service one of the highlights of the royal calendar [Music] this is the day on which by tradition the sovereign distributes arms to the poor [Music] the purses used in the service are red and white like the tudor originals the red ones contain five pounds fifty in cash while the white ones contain the specially minted maundy coins [Music] the royal maundy service is one of the rare occasions on which the queen actually handles money and one of the few times when royalty is seen giving money away [Music] the subject of money has developed into one of the most contentious issues surrounding the british monarchy today a recent opinion poll carried out by mori showed that three-quarters of the population think that the royal family should not receive as much money as it does and almost half went further still saying that the royal family is an expensive luxury the country cannot afford so just what is the true cost of the british monarchy and how harmful our arguments about money likely to be for the house of windsor fulfill her duties as head of state the queen receives a payment from the government every january known as the civil list this is to cover the cost of staff salaries and other expenses involved in running the royal household the civil list was traditionally fixed at the beginning of a monarch's reign and had to last for the duration until 20 years ago it had never exceeded 500 000 pounds but in 1969 the duke of edinburgh complained on an american television program that the monarchy was in financial trouble we had a small yacht which you had to sell and i should probably have to give up polo for it soon and things like that inevitably if if nothing happens we shall either have to i don't know we may have to move into smaller premises who knows so in 1970 the conservative party doubled the civil list to just over one million pounds a year then in 1975 to keep up with inflation the wilson government index linked the civil list to go up every year in line with prices but the palace never liked this arrangement as it led to critical headlines every spring when the increase was announced so in 1990 almost unnoticed mrs thatcher agreed a new deal the queen's civil list would jump from 5 million pounds to nearly 8 million pounds a year and this would be fixed for the next 10 years it was a tremendous palace coup it's exactly what they wanted i mean the queen and her quarters have been lobbying downing street for several years for this because they were sick of this continual criticism which the crown faced every spring payments to the seven other members of the royal family on the civil list were also increased bringing the total to just under 10 million pounds but despite the widespread belief that this is all the monarchy costs the nation the true picture shows that the full cost is actually many times that amount the civil list used to pay for nearly all the costs of the monarchy but over this century particularly since the war a lot of charges have been transferred from the civil list and are now met by government departments this has been done very very quietly indeed an early example of this process came in 1953 when the ministry of defense took on the running of the royal yacht britannia together with the queen's flight britannia has a crew of 270 and is the second largest yacht in the world it costs over 9 million pounds a year to run when britannia was built parliament was told that the justification for the cost was that it could be used as a hospital ship in time of war in fact britannia has never gone to war in the falklands war in 1982 we were told it couldn't go to the south atlantic because it used the wrong type of fuel this was quite untrue because hms hermes the flagship used identically the same sort of fuel and fought there with no difficulty at all the queen's flight was recently upgraded at a cost of 40 million pounds it now consists of three bae-146 jets and two westland helicopters they have their own special air traffic control lanes known as purple airways to keep them well away from other traffic the cost to the taxpayer 6.7 million pounds a year then there's the royal train not a train as such but 12 different carriages that can be used in any combination the department of transport took over its running costs in 1960 today they amount to around 2.3 million pounds a year other costs which have been transferred from the civil list to various government departments include royal visits abroad and state visits to this country [Music] but the upkeep of the palaces and other royal residences is the biggest bill of all they cost the department of the environment 25 and a half million pounds a year the monarch has been i think fairly clever in passing these costs over to government departments the public the media tend to concentrate on the civil list which costs only about 10 million pounds a year much less is heard of all these other expenses met by government departments which come to at least 46 million pounds a year the result is that people think the monarchy doesn't cost that much but 56 million pounds still doesn't cover the total running cost of the british monarchy the royal family derive additional income from the duchess of lancaster and cornwall the duchy of lancaster consists of valuable land in central london including the site of the savoy hotel and 52 000 acres of farmland in the midlands and the north queen earns 3 million pounds a year from these lands this money is known as her privy purse and it goes towards personal expenses such as the upkeep of her private homes at sandringham balmoral her clothes and her charity subscriptions by tradition the revenues from the duchy of cornwall go to the heir to the throne and last year they topped three million pounds for the first time the high level of public concern about the cost of the monarchy is fueled by the fact that the queen is already believed to be the richest person in the country both forbes and fortune magazine usually recognized as reliable authorities on the very wealthy rank her fifth in the world and estimate her fortune at between five and seven billion pounds but such estimates are almost certainly too high you have to realize when talking about the queen's wealth that there's a difference between her wealth as head of state and her private fortune uh all these estimates that range from 5 billion to 7 billion are concerned with her role as head of state they include art treasures the crown estates royal stamp collections all the furniture buckingham palace everything's rolled into those figures and it's not really fair to say that those are hers to sell and dispose of [Music] but although these national treasures can't be considered to be part of the queen's personal wealth she does have extensive assets of her own her estate at sandringham in norfolk is her personal property and is valued at around 75 million pounds balmoral castle and grounds would probably fetch another 40 million she also has stables at west hillsey in berkshire racehorse is worth several million and her personal jewelry collection has been valued at around 40 million but it's extremely hard to ascertain the full extent of the queen's personal fortune because of the secrecy surrounding it [Music] historian james raspberger for example has tried to find out how much the queen inherited from her father king george vi everyone's will is public property and copies of all wills come here to somerset house where they can be inspected by anyone the only exceptions are wills of the royal family until the death of queen victoria royal wills were available for inspection now the public cannot see them they are locked away upstairs in a safe and no one is allowed to see them at all and so the royal fortune remains a secret and it's the same story with the queen's investments if you want to know the details of people's shareholders in british companies you come here to company's house in london where they're all available for public inspection but with one exception the queens when the companies act of 1976 was passed a special clause was inserted which gave the queen the right not to disclose her shareholdings for public viewing and thus we see another example of how the secrecy surrounding the queen's wealth prevents the public from knowing about it in 1971 a house of common select committee was set up specifically to examine the royal finances but even they couldn't get to the bottom of the matter although the very high-powered powerful committee with the chancellor exchequer in the chair and harold wilson the next prime minister one of the members of it and privy councillors all kinds of high-powered people the monarchy virtually some rich knows that is it to hell with you when not telling you anything the most the queen would say through her spokesman lord cobalt was that estimates which at that time put her wealth between 50 and 100 million pounds were grossly exaggerated using this statement as a starting point it's possible to estimate the queen's worth today let's assume she had 30 million pounds 20 years ago if you look at the way the stock markets have performed in in the last 20 25 years you'll be talking about a figure at least 500 million pounds for an equity portfolio today add in her personal estates her personal art treasures her jewelry her racehorses you're talking about a figure probably around one billion pounds on this estimate the queen is by no means the richest person in the country she actually ranks 16th on the list nevertheless hers is a huge fortune and it's been built up surprisingly recently when queen victoria came to the throne she inherited a massive debt of 50 000 pounds equivalent in today's prices to 2.5 million in the early years of queen victoria's reign the monarchy was looked down on by many of the richest members of the aristocracy because by comparison it was actually very poor there were inherited debts from the hanoverians and when victoria married albert she simply married a poor and rather obscure german princely so the monarchy in the 1830s 40s and 50s was hard up and in the light of that undeniable fact the exponential growth of the royal fortune over the last 100 years is not just remarkable it's quite unprecedented it was prince albert who laid the foundations of the royal fortune he pursued household economies with relentless efficiency at windsor for example he allowed no visitor however august and however spacious his bedroom to have more than two candles to light his chamber his economies paid off income from the duchess of lancaster and cornwall increased considerably in 1852 the royal couple were able to buy balmoral with the savings they had made the purchase of sandringham followed soon after but it was after albert's death that the growth of the royal fortune really took off during the 1860s and 1870s after albert had died victoria stopped appearing in public stopped doing the kind of public ceremonial functions associated with the monarchy she was paid a considerable civil list in part to finance those public appearances which she was now no longer making and it was widely believed that as a result of that she saved the money and put it towards her own private fortune thereby making in fact a personal wealth out of public funds but the single most important factor in the creation of a great royal fortune has been the monarch's gradual exemption from all forms of tax the queen doesn't pay any tax at all this really is the key to the whole fortune her tax position she pays no income tax no capital gains tax no death duties no inheritance taxes of one sort or another and that means that her equity portfolio say worth 500 million pounds at a conservative estimate today will grow at 50 million pounds a year without too much trouble this tax-free status is relatively recent both queen victoria and her son edward vii pay their tax like everyone else but when george v came to the throne in 1910 income tax on the civil list was ended then in the 1930s the king made a secret deal with the chancellor to stop paying tax on his duchy of lancaster revenue [Music] and george vi made another secret arrangement in the 1950s to relieve him from paying taxes on his private income so in 40 years the sovereign went from paying all taxes to paying none [Music] this story of royal tax exemption has only recently been uncovered by historian philip hall i was very shocked to learn that monarchs lobbied very very hard to get out of paying tax that in fact they used to pay tax in the last century and in the beginning of this century and if you look at the correspondence between buckingham palace and government and the treasury it shows that they really were pleading all the time that they were hard up they couldn't meet their expenses and that this terrible tax burden had to be taken away from them otherwise there would be sort of financial catastrophe the subject of tax generates more criticism of the monarchy than anything else opinion polls show that 80 percent of people believe that as a matter of principle the queen should pay it and yet she seems unwilling to do so perhaps this is because like previous generations the royal family still feels insecure about money for years prince philip used to do the football coupons in the hope that he would win the jackpot he used to help go around telling people at least i'll have some money the queen on one occasion was going to windsor castle uh she passed by greengross shop in her rolls royce and saw the price of apples she said to the chauffeur tell chef to take them off the menu they're far too expensive i mean they they've got this very strange ambivalent attitude to money of course they don't carry it so they don't really um have have much of an idea of what its value is or what its worth is but the monarch's tax status is turning into a political issue last year the liberal democrat mp simon hughes introduced a bill to make the queen pay tax on her personal fortune there was some support on the tourist side there was much more support on the opposition benches my plan now in the new parliament in a new session is to introduce a similar bill again and i hope that if i can manage to introduce it more early in a session in this session then it will get further and we'll really be able to see how many people back it and how many people do next year alone it's estimated that the queen will save around 20 million pounds in tax when this is added to the civil list and the 46 million pounds spent by government departments it brings the total cost of the monarchy to nearly 80 million pounds a year to its supporters this is entirely justifiable there's some arguments uh for a republic and there are some arguments uh for a grand monarchy but for a mean parsimonious cheese pairing candle and monarchy there are no arguments whatsoever in fact britain spends at least 10 times as much on its monarchy as any other country in europe the spanish royal family for example with whom charles and diana have spent holidays is modest by comparison king juan carlos has no private income and pays tax like his subjects each year the government gives him a single allowance which has to pay for the entire cost of royalty last year this allowance was just four and a half million pounds however the british monarchy has a much higher international profile than its spanish equivalent and it's widely believed that it acts as a tourist attraction and revenue earner last year seven and a half million foreigners came to britain for a holiday and they spent over three billion pounds here the monik is a tremendous asset to tourism and there's no doubt about it that this glamour this show business the pageantry the tradition uh is is a huge draw in fact in the advertising we do in america which is still our most important market we call ourselves the world capital of pageantry and you know nobody argues with that because what we've got here with the royal family is unique uh other people may have minor royals and they may bicycle down the road but we we have the monarchy show it's our last stronghold of romantic extravagance and i think more more than worthwhile the the worth the expenditure [Music] but it's difficult to gather concrete evidence to support this view while it's certainly true that visitors flock to buckingham palace and the changing of the guard once they're here there's nothing to indicate that the monarchy influences their decision to come to britain in the first place [Music] the london tourist board carries out periodic surveys to find out what attracts tourists to london in 1975 just one percent mentioned royalty or the queen and when they repeated the question in 1990 no one mentioned it at all and there are some who say that just as many tourists would come to britain even if we didn't have a monarchy certainly we get a lot of tourists but we don't need a living monarchy to promote tourism other countries have tourists for instance france where they go to see the palace of versailles and they haven't got living royalty the attraction is history and i think when tourists come here they're invested in the long history that britain has and they would still come for that reason even if we didn't have any living royalty but even if the royal family does attract foreign revenue the public still expects to see them working hard the princess royal carries out the greatest number of engagements 688 last year prince charles managed 460 and the princess of wales 397. but several engagements can be carried out on one day and when this is taken into account the figures look less impressive they show that prince charles had 18 weeks with no engagements last year prince edward 24 and princess margaret 35 weeks and so the grumbles about money and the monarchy continue and even their supporters agree there's a lot they could do to allay the criticisms i think the the criticism that's been levelled at the queen about about not paying tax on her private income actually is quite justified i think it is extraordinary that this situation should have developed and i think that it is wrong and i think the queen should be advised to voluntarily surrender some of her private income to the tax man well i don't think the time has come at this moment for a change but i can clearly see the disadvantages uh that accrue to the queen from criticism that she doesn't pay tax on her private income and uh it may well be uh that in the medium term it will be seen that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages it's also suggested that there could be advantages in reducing the number of paid royals there's plenty they could do to stop the criticism of the monarchy and i think the most immediate one they should do is to reduce cut in half really the number of people who are on the civil list i think those that shouldn't be on it include the queen's sister princess margaret i don't think people want prince andrew and he's got a naval career and people certainly don't want prince edward on it taxpayers don't want to pay for people like the joke and duchess of york or prince edward they don't want it it irritates them and they have got to be sensitive to this irritation but in the short term at least changes in the financing of the monarchy appear unlikely i see no movement at all inside buckingham palace to change the way that things are done effectively that means that the running saw about the queen not paying tax about their various fiscal privileges will continue and that i believe is is a kind of canker that eats at the very heart and the soul of the british monarchy and undermines its popularity and the respect which people hold it [Applause] [Music] the annual state opening of parliament is a magnificent royal event but it's not just a glittering show beyond the diamonds and gold red velvet and ermine the entire ritual symbolizes the role of the monarch at the apex of the british political system a system of government that has not changed in its fundamentals for hundreds of years the monarchy is absolutely central to the political system the united kingdom and this means for example we're largely the last onseon regime state the last truly medieval outfit in full working order anywhere in the advanced world most of our institutions were formed in the middle ages and you could argue that the genetic code the dna of any institution is formed obviously when it comes into being and you get mutations around the edges thereafter but it's still recognizably the same and as we're ancient and settled we've been on this particular political patch for a very long time with roughly the same borders with very few breaks of any kind that we are still on medieval dna most people today tend to assume that despite the trappings the political role of the monarchy is wholly symbolic long since stripped of any real significance in fact the monarchy continues to have a great impact on the character of british politics and the queen herself still plays the pivotal role in the political system parliament itself has its origins in the court of the english kings of the middle ages [Music] and sitting today in the former royal palace of westminster it is still a fundamentally royal institution [Music] madam speaker the queen requires the attendance of this honorable house [Music] immediately in the house of peers the symbol of the sovereign's authority the mace rests on the table between her majesty's government and her majesty's opposition and all bills must receive royal assent before they become law but while the same institutions still exist what has changed since the middle ages is the balance of power the british prime minister is the strongest chief executive anywhere in the western world because he's largely taken the absolute powers of the monarchy unto himself or herself it's quite wrong to think they shifted to parliament the line is always that sovereignty is the queen in parliament most of the powers that matter stopped halfway between the palace and westminster in number 10 downing street either exercised by individual secretaries of state or by the prime minister all the ones that matter peace war recognizing countries unrecognizing countries our royal prerogatives but they're carried out for the queen by the prime minister so those powers are royal powers but they're put into commission with civilians properly elected civilians i have to say but still the basis of that power is royal and while the queen no longer has the absolute powers of her forebears she still plays a central role in the system and retains two of the most important powers in the political life of the country the power to dissolve parliament and the power to appoint the prime minister in march this year the privy council of senior cabinet ministers assembled at buckingham palace following the prime minister's decision to call a general election the queen's power to dissolve parliament is the most important surviving power under the provocative the queen of course exercises it on the advice of her ministers and has just agreed to the prime minister's request for a dissolution the proclamation the terms of the proclamation are actually approved in a meeting of the privy council and at that meeting the queen signs the proclamation itself and this is the document which the queen has just signed i will take this to the crown office in the house of lords where the great seal is kept uh where the where this document will be sealed and that will have the effect forthwith of dissolving parliament and while the queen has never forced a dissolution or refused one it remains an important power suppose you had a government which refused to go to the country after its five years were up could the queen dismiss it quite possibly she could suppose you had a government which wanted a dissolution at a time of national emergency perhaps at a time when you had a threat to the currency could the queen refuse the solution at that time possibly again she could in emergency circumstances the sovereign could exercise quite considerable influence the queen's other more sensitive prerogative power is that of appointing the prime minister most of the time this is the formality of appointing the captain of the winning team but when she does have to exercise her powers she risks being drawn into a political controversy in november in 1963 harold mcmillan the prime minister had to retire because of ill health very graciously the queen came to the hospital to consult with mr mcmillan on the appointment of his successor as the conservative party didn't hold leadership elections then the queen had to make the choice herself rob butler was the strongest candidate but on macmillan's advice the queen chose an outsider lord hume [Music] lord hume accepted her majesty's invitation he was now on his way to number 10 as prime minister an office few people until recently ever thought would be his now alec douglas hume was a very controversial choice there were three other candidates including r.a butler who many thought should have been chosen however it wasn't for the queen to intervene in the internal processes of the conservative party it wasn't for her to question the way these processes had worked out had she done so that would have been controversial and possibly even unconstitutional nevertheless the palace was caused some embarrassment and mercifully for the queen and i'm sure to her great relief the conservatives made sure that she was never so embarrassed to gain because that was the last time any of their leaders emerged they've resorted to for them a novel device called votes to choose their leaders subsequently but the queen still faces the risk of involvement in a dangerous political controversy if there is no clear result in a general election following the general election in february 1974 although the tory prime minister ted heath had fewer mps than the labour party he did not resign and spent four days trying to organize a coalition with the liberals well we obviously talked about the situation which has arisen as a result and the queen has been attacked for the role she played the queen said to terry the conservative prime minister if you can form a government i'm prepared to accept it so despite the fact that that tory government had been defeated by the people at a general election the queen was quite prepared to give the tories another run it was only because the liberals couldn't get their act together with the tories that harold wilson then was able to form a minority labour government now that is real power so don't let anybody tell me that the queen doesn't have political power she does but this account of the queen's role is disputed the queen remained entirely passive in 1974 there was no question of calling anyone to the palace edward heath remained prime minister and until he resigned there was no vacancy but the queen made no decisions herself she allowed the politicians to sort things out and then just registered the decision and that on the whole is how the monarchy works in the modern constitutional system of britain but it's clear that situations like this put the queen in a difficult position in march this year all the poles pointed to another hung parliament and so procedures for protecting the queen were put into operation the files were retrieved from the last time this had happened in february 1974 all the precedents were brought into place and the three party political leaders were called in for little private chats and told how they must conduct themselves now essentially this fixing was done by three people none of whom has ever been elected to anything they're called the golden triangle for short and they are the queen's principal private secretary sir robert fellowes the prime minister's principal private secretary andrew turnbull and the cabinet secretary sir robin butler we've won tonight a magnificent victory a victory that many people so it was all ready to go and i think to their considerable relief however they didn't actually have to try it this time to try and do the fixing because there's always the nagging worry at the back of their minds that it will go wrong because there are so many possible combinations it only has to go wrong once and the monarch is seen to be politicized legislation will be introduced the queen's unique position in the constitution places her above the law and gives her the right to influence acts of parliament that may affect her to improve further the law every time a piece of legislation is proposed to go through parliament it is looked at by people on behalf of the queen to make sure that the crown's historic interests are not altered queen's staff the household are very zealous in her service they're very anxious to protect her interests and sometimes they put up a very tough battle with the government department about some provision in a bill which they feel is not appropriate in relation to the queen for example while the royal household used to be subject to the laws on racial discrimination it was made exempt under the 1976 race relations act it would have happened because the palace would have made some objection about being subjected to the procedures laid down by the race relations act industrial tribunals and the activities of the race relations commission and so on but why is the queen exempt from the laws that bind everyone else in the country well the courts of the queen's courts and the queen the sovereign the crown is the is the source and symbol of justice in in our system since that is the formal position it seems right that that legislation should not be passed which would have the effect as a way of creating a possibility of the crime being taken to court action will be taken to combat crime the monarch's position in britain's unwritten constitution is further protected by the rule which prevents mps from examining such matters as royal employment practices or the queen's finances in the united kingdom and we can't ask questions either on a weekly basis as we do to the prime minister or through a select committee that was tried and the household said we are not going to answer there was no way of making them answer on behalf of the crown if the monarchy can be criticized in the house of commons if the personality of the monarch can be attacked then inevitably that would call sooner or later for the monarch to be able to reply to those attacks and one then gets the argi bhaji going on and inevitably sooner or later a spokesman for the monarch saying um this and a spokesman for the other side saying that i don't think that would be at all useful in our constitutional life um some things work and work well and i see no good reason for changing what has worked extremely successfully so the monarch does have a substantial formal role and powers in the british constitution but equally important is the queen's informal influence on her prime ministers it has always been sir winston's habit when prime minister to have an audience of the queen on tuesday night at buckingham palace when the queen and the prime minister are in london they meet every tuesday evening for a consultation on government policy and it's there that a wise sovereign can exercise a very considerable degree of influence after all the present queen has known nine prime ministers from winston churchill to john major the trouble is we can't really estimate how much influence the sovereign exerts because of necessity this influence must remain secret it's part of the essence of constitutional monarchy that the sovereign's political views must remain absolutely private so it's not until the archives are opened in perhaps 30 or 50 years time that we will know what influence the present queen has exerted i've worked for a succession of prime ministers who have enormously valued the what they get from their weekly audience with the queen in terms of very penetrating and shrewd questioning and expressions of judgment and view harold wilson was one prime minister who laid particular stress on the importance of his relationship with his sovereign it is perfectly clear that wilson attached or might almost say inordinate importance to his relationship with the queen he really valued tremendously the hour he spent once a week with a private audience with her he would spend a long time preparing for it he would emerge from it in the state of euphoria he had always had this feeling that people were getting at him and that they had designs on his position and here was somebody with whom he legitimately discuss all the great matters of state but who could not possibly be after his job and so i think the queen from that point of view did represent somebody very special to him there is also of course a republican tradition in the labour party some reasons to attack spain queen elizabeth but not here according to law but in general the monarchy's relationship with the labour party has been remarkably amiable and we have true allegiance to our majesty queenless but her ears and successes according to love so help me god the labour party has come from an origin which it was seen back in the 20s the beginning of the century to be a potentially subversive organization and in those days therefore needed to establish beyond any doubt whatever that it was uh uh not a subversive organization and an easy way to do that is to is to show how monarchist you are one minister in harold wilson's cabinet had had decidedly republican sympathies when she joined the party as i grew more experienced in the political world i realized of course that this country is not a republican country it's monochristian rather mild sense but still very sentimentally monarchist and therefore it was political suicide to fight on a republican platform so i accepted the monarchy and [Music] i have i have to admit that i came to admire the adaptability of the queen and her entourage prince philip accompanied her and mrs barbara castle minister of transport was there to see the great new road link put into operation whatever they thought of a labour government never passed their lips or even their eyes they they just treated us so we were on the friend of the family who dropped in you know this government this government of principle since the 1970s the royal relationship with the conservatives the natural party of queen and country has been rather more difficult there are those who say our nation no longer has a stomach for the fight i think i know our people and i know they do royal family does not want anybody on the right all the left to rock the boat as long as we all know our place and all do our allotted roles in society within the consensus of that has grown up the royal family is delighted and the kind of anti-consensus radical right policies that mrs thatcher was introducing to make this a much more vibrant dynamic market economy were just as anathema to the royal family as left-wing policies because it produced the minor strike and instead of the usual british compromise and sell out and give the minus what they want attitude mrs thatcher said no we're going to fight the miners the first cavalry charge came a few minutes later in the climate of confrontation of the 1984 cold strike it was to the queen that the wives of striking miners turned we were getting battered to death on the picket lines by the police now we'd heard in the press at the time that thatcher and the queen didn't get on and a lot of miners wives were royalists so they said i know let's write to the queen let's tell her how we feel and we thought well at least we have one thing in common with the queen she doesn't like thatcher and we don't like thatcher so we'll ask if she can help so we got this petition together a group of women against big closures and we came we wrote and they said we could bring the petition to the queen and we really had a lot of faith in that petition although we were some of us weren't rilers we just had the image of the queen being the mother of the nation and as we were mothers in struggle we thought maybe she would at least try to understand what we were trying to do we knew that politically she wouldn't have any power as such to help us but that she would probably pass the petitions on to government ministers and at least maybe if they could ignore letters directly from us then they couldn't ignore the letter once it had been passed from the queen though the palace did pass the petition onto the government it is impossible to know whether the queen really had any sympathy for the striking minors because she is constitutionally forbidden from involving herself in such political disputes however two years later the sunday times caused a storm when it alleged that the queen was secretly campaigning against the government's policies its story claimed that the queen feared that mrs thatcher was damaging the fabric of british society and that her policy on south africa might destroy the commonwealth we knew that the queen and other members of the royal family were worried and disliked the direction that the thatcher government was going in a whole host of areas we knew that because we were being briefed by members of the royal family and their surrogates themselves we weren't alone in that huge chunks of the british press were being briefed in that way the difference was that i was not prepared to play the game into a lower whispering campaign like that against the government to take root without revealing the source the queen's private secretary took the unprecedented step of writing to the times in his own name to deny the story though he did say that the queen had the right even the duty to advise the government [Music] so it is clear that far from having a purely ceremonial role in the british political system the queen has both formal power and informal influence and indeed rather than decline the political role of the monarch may actually increase in the years ahead [Music] there's a good possibility that we'll have proportional representation in britain within say the next decade now pr would very considerably affect the role of the monarchy because after all it would mean that almost every parliament would be a hung parliament as a result the queen would be actively involved in appointing the prime minister not just occasionally but after every election if that were to become her normal level of political involvement fresh impetus might be given to the campaign to do away with all royal prerogative powers first of all we have to remove the royal prerogative and ensure that the powers of the prime minister and government are laid down in a proper constitution and made really accountable to parliament and secondly we have to remove the monarch from the political sphere so that her role becomes a purely ceremonial and not a political one instead of the monarch having the power to decide who should be prime minister it should be a matter for a vote in parliament itself and that the speaker should if necessary decide who should be called on to be prime minister [Music] this is what the queen has seen happen to her distant relative the king of sweden now a purely ceremonial figure whose political powers have been transferred to the speaker of the parliament opinion is divided over whether such a reduction in the queen's political role would benefit the constitution well somebody has to take the responsibility and the important thing is to have somebody who is impartial and an hereditary monarch is much more likely to be impartial than an elected official because an elected official however lofty is always going to be looking back over his shoulder at the people who elected him so i think it's the guarantee of impartiality and fairness which commends a hereditary monarch in this situation i think you're in very great difficulties if people say well election is a bad thing because if you can't trust the people to elect a president why should you trust them to elect a member of parliament why should you trust parliament to elect a prime minister and i think the argument about democracy and voting producing bad results is itself funnily enough a product of the whole anti-democratic culture we live in that somehow be better for somebody who was above politics so we couldn't remove having the job and with the loss of its political role the prestige and significance of the monarchy might never be the same again i think if the queen lost any constitutional role and was just a kind of decorative function uh i think the monarchy would still go on but i think it would be much less of a force in uniting the country i think it would be like the nobility the dukes and elves you know they're there and they decorate uh the countryside and they have palaces and all the rest of it but they don't really matter to us because they don't have any particular functioning government the greatest pressure for the kind of constitutional change that might affect the monarchy comes from outside westminster from scotland and from europe [Music] the royal palace of hollyrood house edinburgh every year the queen spends a week in official residence here and holds a garden party for 8 000 guests in the grounds whilst in scotland her guard of honour is provided by the royal company of archers amateur soldiers drawn from the scottish gentry the queen's presence in scotland is a very significant part of her role for the queen is the head of a united kingdom of diverse nations each with their own culture the monarchy in many ways has been the cement that binds the union together i think there's been a problem in britain about creating a national british identity given the power of english national identity and that the monarchy has played a crucial role in maintaining the union by presenting itself as a mirror in which the other parts of the united kingdom can see themselves reflected so that even although they may feel alienated from the british state the english state as a state they can feel themselves committed and loyal to the monarch who is not an english monarch but is a reflection of their local identity [Music] it's not simply that the the monarchy helps the union the union also helps the monarchy it's a stronger monarchy a more important one it is perceived overseas as more significant because of the strongly welded structure of the united kingdom and i think this is particularly true in the 1990s when in the rest of europe national identity crises are the norm rather than something unusual this role in welding the union together has never been clearer than in the investiture of the prince of wales in 1969 at a time of growing welsh nationalism the first english prince of wales was created by edward the first in 1301 after a violent conquest in 1969 the approach was more subtle before his investiture prince charles spent a term at the university of wales in aberystwyth edward millward taught him welsh he believes the prince fully understood the underlying purpose of the investiture i'm sure that he knew that the impetus for his visit to aberystwyth and for the investiture came from the political establishment in london in an effort to slow down the growth if not to stop the growth of of welsh nationalism and to strengthen the hold of the monarchy and to strengthen the union as between wales and england as well i think he had a very strong sentimental hold on the welsh people and the monarchy itself it seems to me has a sentimental hold on the welsh people and but a very sentimental people and the investiture itself was a good piece of theater wasn't it it was a good piece of constitutional theater and that went down rather well so i suppose his stay in adversity the fact that he was making commitment towards the language and then the investiture increased the emotional hold on the welsh people yet while prince charles may be prince of wales and still wear the welsh leak on his lapel in the north of his kingdom he and his family take on a different guise in scotland the monarchy demonstrates its scottishness by its dedication to that badge of highland identity the kilt in so doing they are following a tradition established only at the beginning of the last century as a way of controlling the rebellious scots in 1822 at a time of great political turmoil the basically german king george iv was persuaded to visit scotland there hadn't been a monarch visiting scotland since 1651 and the years up to 1820 were years of political strikes industrialization urbanization it was a very nervous establishment there had been what the government said was an interaction in 1820 called the radical war at the time so what the government needed to do was to give some alternative identity to give some other focus of loyalty which really didn't exist the king became that focus not least because he agreed to wear a kilt the dress of the rebellious highlanders what we have to do is to envisage george iv he weighs 20 or 22 stone so this is a very very large kilt he has around him but it's in the royal stuart tartan which is very surprising because after all he is the grand nephew of cumberland butcher cumberland who had butchered the highland troops at culloden in 1746. [Music] underneath it all he's got a pair of flesh-coloured tights perhaps the largest type scotland had ever seen up to this point and it was truly a sensation edinburgh probably was a city with about a hundred thousand people at the time it was estimated three hundred thousand came to see this uh 21 day visit he gave permission to walter scott to dig out the scottish crown jewels the honors of scotland from their hiding place in edinburgh castle and they were duly presented to him during his visit it was an affirmation of the scottishness as well as the britishness of the monarchy and it set a pattern which was followed by queen victoria and all subsequent monarchs it was victoria and albert who consolidated the royal relationship with scotland buying balmoral and making it into a royal family home they embrace this highland culture with all the enthusiasm of new converts they decked out balmoral each room in it usually red stuart tartan on the floor hunting tartan on the walls and the curtains a whiter dress stewart tartan for curtains lord rosebury one of those politicians who had to go the whole way up to d side 600 miles by train complained that the drawing room there was the ugliest room in the world every wall every surface was decked out in tartan designed by the queen and albert it is argued that in fact the monarchy helps to disguise the unequal relationships between the partners in the union by providing a scottish version of the monarch as head of state scotland's role within the union is maintained as that of an equal partner rather than a subservient state no matter how subservient the economics of the politics are because the state is reflected in the monarch then it is equal at that highest level of the state and so what i think it's produced is an unrebellious identity within the union and that monarchy has been crucial to maintaining that status quo of the relationship of scotland to the union throughout the past 200 years but there have been moments when the monarchy has failed to keep up the appearance of treating scotland equally after her coronation in 1953 the queen journeyed north to receive the honours of scotland in a ceremony at st giles cathedral for quite a while before we heard the cheering her carriage came nearer and nearer and then you see she came to the door and they had the horses settling down and presumably she was getting out of her coach and and then the door flung open and then she came and that was as far as i was concerned was an anti-climax i was in my sunday best i was in as good sick dream as she was it was very disappointing and this was the queen making her first visit to scotland and she became to this special service instant giles and we expected her to come in rightly or wrongly which i expected her to come in her coronation robes and i was shocked when she appeared in this simple i don't know what a bluey grey blue coat and she looked so ordinary i still think that she might have honored the occasion as well as we did the ancient crown of scotland to many people the most jarring note was struck by the fact that the queen was carrying a handbag the duke of hamilton and brandon as hoda of the eldum of angus receives the crown from the queen the duke is reputed to have said now this is only hearsay that when he's bent knelt down to hand her the honor of scotland on a salva or whatever it was her handbag swung out and nearly hit him but on the face so that that was the story that went around it was a good story i think it was probably true in the official painting commemorating the ceremony the handbag is conspicuous by its absence [Music] the majesty the queen has further endeared herself to all her scottish subjects the irritation over this incident reflected a wider feeling that the monarchy basically saw itself as english and it wasn't the first time such a thing had happened in the queen's short reign of heavy memory become queen elizabeth ii nobody paused to think that there never had been an elizabeth the first in scotland and offered to have an elizabeth ii was historical nonsense it seemed insensitive towards scottish history and it seemed completely to ignore the fact that the two kingdoms were not only equal partners but that in 1603 a scottish stuart king had traveled south to take over his english inheritance it wasn't that england had conquered scotland but this seemed to be treating it like a colony many people felt upset and hyper sensitive about that as a result post boxes bearing the new royal inscription e2r were attacked the symbolic blowing up of pillar boxes which had er-2 on them was a way of scots insisting that not that they were against the monarchy but that the monarchy ought to properly represent their scottishness within the union rather than identifying itself as an english institution and today the e to our inscription is tactfully omitted from post boxes and royal mail vans in scotland and the royal family is now much more conscious of the need to present itself as scottish kinlak anderson are the principal kiltmakers to the royal family these are the tartans here which are applicable to the royal family as at the present time this is the tartan which prince andrew wears as the duke of inverness navy was put into it to bring out their association with the the royal navy so that is why that is navy in that one a lot of people think that prince charles is prince of wales who's also in scotland he's also the lord of the isles and as such he wears the lord the isles tartan in the special dies that was created for him so that is the the lord of the isles titan and it's one of his favorites and of course we come back to the most exclusive titan this is the royal tartan the balmoral titan this is the most exclusive tartan it was designed by prince albert for queen victoria in 1853 it depicts the granite hills of aberdeenshire and even to this day it's only the sovereign that can give permission for this to be worn [Music] but while the royal family has been largely successful in pulling off the trick of presenting itself as a focus of the union in wales and scotland there is one part of the kingdom where the position of the monarchy is intensely controversial northern ireland the british monarchy is protestant by law and in northern ireland this means something very serious the monarchy is vitally important to the protestants of northern ireland because they have a historic right and claim to the monarchy in two regards first of all they are british folk and the royal line came through ulster historically and in the ancient past and secondly it's the monarchy they fought for to establish a protestant throne in britain a monarch king william iii william of orange established the protestant ascendancy once and for all and he has become one of its most important symbols and the present queen still has a central position in the rituals of the protestant orange order when you take your vows to become an orange man as part of the principle to become an one that you respect and show loyalty to the the queen constitution as far as the country is concerned also at the beginning of our meeting as part of our ritual we always say god bless the queen and we say prayers for the queen and the members of the royal family at the conclusion of all of our meetings or any sermons of any king at all we always sing the national anthem which is godzilla the queen this it's argued narrows the monarchy's appeal in the province the problem for the monarchy has been is that it has if you like been commandeered by one side it has been appropriated by the protestant side the loyalist side and the more extreme people on the loyal side have used the monarchy as a symbol against the catholics so what has happened is that the monarchy here isn't seen as a straight and neutral thing it is seen by many catholics as an anti-catholic institution in practice in northern ireland it actually divides people rather than unites people in fact a very close relative of mine working in the shipyard he had a picture of the royal family put on his locker it wasn't put there to as it were give him some sort of uplift it was put there in order to assert the fact that he was a catholic and that he should be subjugated to the crown and subjugated to unionist authority and to the unionist political culture however in 1985 it's believed the monarchy played an important role in defusing protestant anger at the anglo-irish agreement that you are negotiating the affairs and picture of northern ireland with a foreign government when protestant protests against the agreement failed to have any effect unionist politicians launched a petition the time had come we have to appeal to the queen and that we did and we delivered uh many hundreds of thousands of signatures i think it was over five hundred thousand of my memory served me well at two buckingham palace and the world saw that here was a people who hadn't lost faith in the queen certainly lost faith in the queen's ministers but not on the queen herself and you know if we handed that cement at that time ulster could have gone into a civil war the leg of which ireland had never witnessed before but there was something held us together and that was the fact that we had appealed to the queen others take the view that british politicians used this devotion to the monarchy to keep the protestant community in check it certainly seems to be the case that ministers regard royalty as a weapon if you like in their armory for example when the anglo-ish agreement was signed back in 1985 protestants felt very harassed protestants felt very worried about their british identity and they thought that sovereignty was being eroded as one of the arguments to counter that what happened was that we suddenly had a great flood of royals visiting northern ireland every couple of months and the message there was clear from that it was to say your sovereignty isn't threatened and here we are showing you the royals to make this point and to try and reassure unionists that everything was all right [Applause] and there is little doubt that the queen herself does believe that the kingdom should remain united [Music] she made her views on this unusually plain in a speech in 1977 in response to a rising tide of nationalism in scotland and in wales i can readily understand these aspirations but i cannot forget that i was crowned queen of the united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland the united kingdom has remained intact but in recent years there's been a resurgence of nationalism in the last election almost three-quarters of scots voted for some kind of political autonomy and this desire for some sort of independence might appear to exclude the monarchy [Music] while the official national anthem may be god save the queen it has been replaced in wales with land of my fathers and more recently in scotland my flower of scotland [Music] i think the important thing about flower of scotland is that it was the song which focused a renaissance scottish nationalism in the 70s and 80s and it was a nationalism which was in its undercurrent aggressively anti-english and was recollecting wars between the two countries and focus this in terms of the defeat of the english monarch princess anne caused some surprise when as patron of the scottish rugby football union she was seen happily singing along with this [Applause] [Music] and now ironically we have members of the royal family arriving in scotland to sing this song and therefore in a sense to assert the requirement that they themselves be sent back home but by singing the song they actually make it safe and make it safe for monarchy to participate in this and make that kind of scottishness safe within the british union again i think it was an astute thing to do i think it was a popular thing to do and perhaps it suggests that they are already thinking about the ways in which they have to adjust their image and their identification in the light of changes likely to take place [Music] opinion polls suggest that almost half of all scots want to be rid of the monarchy but even scotland's most radical party the scottish nationalists plan to retain the queen if ever they achieve their aim of full independence however the sovereign's role in scotland would be reformed what we're trying to do is not to separate scotland socially from england what we're trying to do is have political independence so we're not governed by remote control from london and as a sort of symbol of the the social union and the shared and common history i think the monarchy has a place in independent scotland but i think the vestiges the remaining political role of the monarchy should go and we should have a modern constitutional monarchy where a symbolic and a very very important role as the head of state is fulfilled but not that political role which i think is highly questionable in some areas and even those who simply propose a devolved scottish parliament foresee the end of a political role for the queen north of the border although the monarch would be invited to open the parliament she would not have the kind of role that she plays vis-a-vis westminster uh it would be a fixed-term parliament so she would not have the power to dissolve the parliament it uh there would be no question of a queen speech there would be a state of the nation addressed by the prime minister nor would there be the the weekly uh consultations with the prime minister all of these things i think would not be relevant in the scottish context it is left with a purely decorative role and unless the monarchy decides that it will develop a different kind of role i think it will be difficult to adjust to a situation where you have a weakened british state it is the rise of europe that is giving countries like scotland the feeling that they can break away from the old union in favor of a wider one and it is not only the weakening of the union which threatens to diminish the nation and the sovereign that embodies it it is also possible that the shift of power to europe could have a similar effect in may the queen visited the european parliament in strasbourg for the first time for many years mrs thatcher fearful of a loss of sovereignty had refused to allow such visits to take place in the event the queen appeared to be enthusiastically european of europeans today to reconciliation and democracy one of the more intriguing factors is that the monarchy is one of the most european institutions we have the european monarchies are very much intermarried and therefore our own royal family has dutch blood german blood uh danish blood greek blood i think it's important to recognize that europe itself as an institution is not trying to threaten the monarchy it isn't saying you cannot have a monarchy it will inevitably change its role but i suspect the monarchy recognizes this and indeed will play a part in smoothing that transition process euro skeptics regret royal enthusiasm for europe i was surprised that what appeared to be the queen's enthusiasm for the eec i would find it very strange to find a british queen the head of a nation appearing to be enthusiastic about something which will make the nation and perhaps herself rather irrelevant i think it's not a question of choice it's a question of fact if you have a real nation with real power and real authority you need to have a presentational head that might be a queen or might be a president but if the nation fades away then the purpose of the monarchy simply fades away too the monarch's chief purpose is to act the part of non-political head of state but how can she stand as a figurehead above the party fray and is her constitutional role simply fading away next week we examine the impact of the monarchy on the political life of the country [Music] on some david's day last year prince william undertook his first official duties on a visit to cardiff with his parents prince william is second in line to the throne and might be expected to succeed his father as king of great britain and northern ireland sometime perhaps in the third decade of the next century but is his throne secure i asked me a year ago and i said yes very secure i'm not so certain now it depends what happens over the next five years as to whether they get their act together more whether they explain things to people better whether they start behaving in a different manner i would like to rethink and re-answer the question in five years while the queen's popularity remains fairly constant after her there could be could be trouble i mean a primordia deluge in this case translates to after me it's a they're all a bit of a shower faith and truth will bear unto you the whole range of factors have made the monarchy seem much less impregnable than when the queen came to the throne the enormous changes in britain since then have meant that questions have increasingly arisen about the monarchy's position in a classless society about its lifestyle and about its finances all these problems have come to a head with the public unravelling of the royal family throughout the century the image of the british monarchy has been centered on its appeal as an idealized family no one could fail to have noticed that in the queen's 40th anniversary year all this has been shattered the marriage of the duke and duchess of york has broken up in full public view and even more seriously the prince and princess of wales have appeared to be in a state of civil war there's scarcely anything that could be more damaging the monarchy is about the family these days the royal family is the phrase and it's no coincidence it's the phrase that we use for the monarchy these days it's not a political or a constitutional institution very much more the sort of image of the royal family in the 1950s and 1960s which the queen managed to create i mean she really turned it in from being a royal family to being a kind of respectable upper middle class family uh that people could identify with i think if it now becomes a collection of single-parent mothers of children from broken homes of hooray henry's and sloane rangers then i think that just undermines the purpose of having it why why have it to see the worst aspects of family life the other problem is not just the breakup but is the manner of the breakup uh i mean the tabloids could not have made up the stories that surrounded the breakup indeed tabloids don't need to make up stories about the royal family anymore because what the royal family does is more ludicrous and bizarre than anything the tabloids could ever make up the result is that while the older generation remains popular and respected there's a growing belief that the royal family's problems have gone so far that the long-term survival of the monarchy in britain cannot be guaranteed i personally believe that monarchy is going to end with the death of the queen and i think the youth of this country who will be voters and the and the majority of voters will say uh goodbye thank you and goodbye i don't think that if there was a referendum on the death of the queen if that was in 20 years time the referendum would be anything but a yes vote to the end of the monarchy this belief has echoed in opinion polls two years ago a mori poll showed that three-quarters of the population thought the british monarchy would still be in existence in 50 years time by june this year the figure had fallen dramatically today only 46 of the country believed that britain will still be a monarchy in the middle of the next century and more seriously only half the country think that britain would be worse off without a monarchy this is a pretty gloomy prognosis for the sovereign so is abolition a real possibility how do you get rid of a monarch it's not easy last time they had to execute the monarch well that's inconceivable just think of trying to get a bill through the house of commons any house of commons to abolish the monarchy and set up a republic there'd be room for no other legislation it would dominate the issue for about two years people's nerves would crack absurd things would be said on both sides the whole political system would be paralyzed no prime minister in his right mind is going to allow or let alone introduce a bill to turn the united kingdom into a republic the idea that the british monarchy is in any way in danger is quite illusory and utterly absurd and i'm saying this at the moment when the tabloid press is inflamed to the point of fever by the travails the personal travels of one or two members of the family but just ask these people if you think there's going to be an end to the british monarchy in your lifetime how's it going to be done and who's going to do it and the question evaporates so the continued existence of the monarchy is probably not in question but what maybe is its position as a respected and significant institution i have no doubt that the monarchy is going to survive but there is a real danger that it might survive on terms which would render it trivial and increasingly absurd that the once great house of windsor would become instead a kind of monaco monarchy which was just about scandal and frivolity and irrelevance and there is a real danger that that is what might happen to avoid this possibility it is necessary for the monarchy to reposition itself to win respect the younger members have to temper their behavior so they become less interesting to the newspapers the lifestyle of the monarchy has to become more low-key the people who advise it need to be more in tune with the times and the monarchy has to convince the population that it really has a useful and serious role to play in the life of the country the starting point for any scheme to rescue the royal reputation has to be with its finances much of the anger over the fergie scandal was focused on the belief that the royals were living it up at the public expense whilst the rest of the country is having to adapt to reduced circumstances the monarchy is still seen to be living in a kind of 19th century opulence if they weren't living at public expense rows like the recent morton row would be very different as long as they live at public expense the british people has a right to probe into things that some people think they shouldn't probe into they are they have to be held accountable for their behavior moral behavior as well as public behavior uh if that dimension is removed the insatiable prying into their private lives might uh be much more controllable than it is now public opinion seems to be that the time has come for a more modest monarchy a more poll in june showed that three quarters of the population now think the royal family should not receive as much money as it does two reforms in particular have been widely canvassed first that the queen should pay tax on her private income and second that the monarchy should be less of a family affair and more of a streamlined working institution with fewer members receiving public money through the civil list last month at the height of the royal marriage scandals it was rumored that the queen had finally instructed her solicitors to make the arrangements for her to pay tax but both the palace and the indian revenue have denied the story and some royal critics believe the queen will fight this every inch of the way for the last 40 years of the queen's reign she has resisted every endeavor of politicians prime ministers to disclose any detail of her private fortune which has led to all kinds of speculation about it i see no move on her part to start paying tax after 40 years any impetus for her to pay tax and the british public overwhelmingly wanted to start paying income tax would have to come from the prime minister have to come from the from the privy councillors have to come essentially from the great and the good in the land the civil list was fixed for 10 years in 1990 but now even the monarchy's strongest supporters concede that it will almost certainly be cut back i think it might be one of the developments in the future that those who play a leading part in these events are very carefully selected and chosen you might have a two-tier royal family if such a distinction would be recognized by the media and the press those who are undertaking public duties and are there on the civil list and those who rarely declare that they are private individuals and are treated in the same way as every other citizen to some extent the royal family is already showing a lower public profile in an earlier age lady helen windsor the daughter of the duke and duchess of kent might have been expected to have had a very grand and public wedding in fact lady helen was married in the relative privacy of st george's chapel windsor the first royal wedding to have taken place there since 1919. [Music] lady helen is part of a trend of non-royal royals that includes most notably the children of princess anne and of princess margaret i think there's a mood inside the royal family certainly amongst the junior members of the royal family that they know they are no longer prepared to tolerate the kinds of pressures the kinds of intrusions into their lives that they have to them to do at the moment so there is a mood and we've seen it with the duchess of york whatever people think about her she wasn't so bad as to to be uh crucified in the way that she was now she's left the royal family other members of the royal family the junior ones who could have been part of the the function of it just go their own way these days they don't want to get caught up in that kind of uh malaise which seems to be affecting the royal family and by the time we get through to say not the year 2020 you will be back to prince charles princess diana if they're still together uh prince william and prince harry that's happening inevitably if these trends continue the monarchy of the future might look strikingly different by the middle of the next century it could be a much more limited outfit with less confusion between its public ceremonial and private family sides and with a clearer distinction between private residences like balmoral and official ones like buckingham palace and windsor castle [Music] and the trappings of an opulent lifestyle may be trimmed back too i doubt that they'll have a royal yacht certainly not as expensive of one as now i doubt that they'll have lots of aircraft and trains and so on and so forth and i doubt that they will have the special status they probably won't be the head of the commonwealth they probably won't be the head of state of many other countries if any around the world so it'll be a very much streamlined more european monarchy doing a day-to-day job if all this were to come about the british monarchy could look something like the dutch while queen elizabeth and queen beatrix both play the role of ceremonial head of state their styles are actually markedly different queen beatrix gets barely a tenth of the public money received by the house of windsor and popular respect for the dutch monarchy has been achieved by a low-key and modest lifestyle and a greater emphasis on informality than on grand ceremony i think the main difference for example is if you look at the birthdays of the queen you have your troop in the collar it's terribly formal the people come to the queen they see the queen from behind crash barriers our queen when she has her official birthday she goes to the people this last birthday she went to rotterdam in the new vehicle not in rolls-royce not a little helicopter she went in the royal bus it is luxurious bus but still it's a bus and while the british royal family goes to great lengths to avoid being seen eating or drinking queen beatrix quite happily accepted a drink from a stall holder the dutch royal family has found that presenting a less idealized and more candid public image has fostered a happier and more positive relationship with the press and has minimized its intrusions on an official state visit with her husband at the time her husband was ill he was suffering from depressions and when there was an official reception i was introduced to the queen and i just asked her how her husband was and she just answered she didn't say oh you grotty little heck go away she just said well he's getting better but every morning we look very carefully at the schedule and we see what he can do and what he can't and at the moment he can't really cope with meetings with with lots of people with large gatherings so those are the gatherings he will not attend and the result of that was that there was no gossip in the dutch papers there was no sort of backwards rumors or whatever all there was is that of course all the dutch babes next day opened with what the queen said about her husband's illness but the queen was in control we could quote a queen directly and you never ever see that in a british paper it's full of gossip [Applause] [Music] but it's unlikely that prince charles would take the british monarchy all the way down this informal path abandoning the trooping of the colour for a low-key european style i think prince charles is aware that the pageantry the pomp and ceremony of monarchy is absolutely essential to it it's it's been there for hundreds of years he's a great historian he loves history he loves tradition and i can't in a million years imagine he would change any of it but while prince charles may not tamper with the formal and ceremonial traditions of the british monarchy the palace may decide that putting a greater emphasis on working royals giving value for money is the best way to regain public support the monarchy is seen by the british public as a pretty serious thing sometimes more serious than the media particularly the tabloids would let you think about it just look at the way the public attitudes to princess anne have totally turned themselves around over the last decade 10 15 years ago she was the among the least popular of the royals now she's up at the top of the pops she's done that by serious attention to save the children and other good works and by not being seen as frivolous even through her marital difficulties that are now apparently more or less behind her hardly ruffled a feather in the country this transformation into a low-profile hard-working royal has made princess anne the second most popular member of the royal family after the princess of wales through her support for unglamorous groups like alcoholics and aids sufferers princess diana has herself achieved a change of image from elegant clothed source to compassionate healer of the sick princess diana's popularity is remarkably stable even her supposedly tacit support for the biography by andrew morton tape recordings of her private conversations and allegations about assignations with men friends have done nothing to dent her appeal so perhaps more worrying for the future prestige of the monarchy is the image of her husband the prince of wales particularly in the event of the nightmare scenario a divorce prince charles has spent most of his adult life in search of a role in an attempt to answer the question what am i for he has become a high-profile campaigner on matters such as housing architecture agriculture and the environment his supporters say this has made him a popular and relevant figure i think the general public admire and respect what prince charles is doing and i think they are delighted that at last there is somebody who is representing their views and saying what they think you won't hear that from the leaders of industry you won't hear it from the the top echelons you will only hear that from the people at grassroots because the prince i believe has really touched a chord with those people i think he will be a brilliant king i think he knows what people need and want and how he does it living as he does in this rarefied atmosphere is is quite a feat but i think that there is a positive campaign to make people believe that he's a pathetic creature and that the monarchy will die with him that he has no um no followers in britain other observers are skeptical about the prince as a credible working royal prince charles does try to do something but i also have to say that his concentration span of trying to help these people is not very long unless he gets an instant report back of success he tends to lose interest he's quite selfish in the way he runs his official engagements which he undertakes in the summer for example he has his polo fixture list he might play 40 or 50 times in a two and a half month period so that's most days and that list is slang down in front of his private secretary and he the private secretaries and the planning people are told work round that list one of prince charles's problems is that in his search for a relevant role he comes dangerously close to politics it is almost incredible that in shakespeare's land one child in seven leaves primary school functionally illiterate but we must i i believe accept that in some cases community care on its own is not the answer that the environment is full of uncertainty it makes no sense to test it to destruction and if the prince continues to trespass into politics he may lose the support that sustains the monarchy's very existence it's all very well for the prince to express his opinion on something and i hope he does that a lot but to then get involved for campaigning for something quite specific and to be writing to government ministers i think that is uh an abuse of royal power and actually people won't like that either because at the end of the day the political process has to be democratic and i think ministers will begin to resent it as well and i think that again the seeds of the destruction of the royal family are involved if it is seen to become a lobbyist group but no amount of relevance on the part of the prince will be able to compensate for the damage done by a continuing rift with the princess of wales [Music] diana is an immensely popular figure for him to have treated her as badly as most people believe he did uh begins to chip away at all the reasons why charles is popular uh speeches about the rainforests pale into complete insignificance as indeed does community architecture alongside two timing the most popular woman in the land and apparently being the only man in the land not in love with her this may all be rather low-grade and emotional stuff but it's very very potent in the context of the monarchy and if charles begins to lose his popularity he'll begin to lose his plausibility and his chances of being a popular and a successful monarch will be disproportionately damaged the thought of the marriage ending in divorce has given rise to speculation that it would cause a grave constitutional crisis but such talk is dismissed by constitutional experts the church of england accepts the fact of divorce it deplores it but accepts it there are however penalties attached to divorce prince of wales as a future head of the established church would not be able to remarry in church other than that however there will be no constitutional consequences on the other hand one can't deny that the effect on public perceptions of the royal family would be pretty considerable because it would be the third divorce amongst the queen's children and it would be a very serious situation for the royal family and for that reason i don't believe a divorce will occur the spectacular and public end to britain's royal fairy tale has been a grave humiliation for the house of windsor but the change in public attitudes that has resulted may actually be a change for the better for years people have lived by various cozy ideas surrounding the monarchy over the last few months the myths have been exploded and people are having to come to terms with the reality of monarchy with the reality of the royal family raw sometimes in tooth and claw and in many respects people having to absorb that as we speak if we look at it with less rose tinted spectacles and see that it is a group of people doing a very difficult difficult job the very trying circumstances to accept their faults and to not to try and make them perfect not to put them on pedestals not to make them icons i think that their lives will be that much easier and that much happier and that we as a society will be that much healthier for this to be achieved the monarchy 2 has to be prepared to view itself in a less idealized and more realistic way but there are a few signs that this is happening there are really two different and very contradictory versions of the monarchy on offer at the moment on the one side there is the monarchy's view of itself as as magical admirable splendid in some sense embodying the greatness and identity of the nation on the other side we have as it were the tabloid or journalistic view of a family at war with itself very unhappy in firm of purpose not paying its taxes and so on and this gap between these two versions of the monarchy is just getting wider and wider and whether it can be indefinitely bridged it's impossible to say the monarchy has to bridge this credibility gap if it is to survive as a respected institution of british life today it has a historic opportunity to reinvent itself and to introduce the necessary financial and other reforms and to see itself in a new and more practical light if it doesn't and decides to try and weather the storm it runs the risk that by the time prince william ascends to the throne it will be little more than a colorful irrelevance [Music] you

Channel: Our History

Views: 614,305

Keywords: our history, documentary, world history documentary, documentary channel, award winning, life stories, best documentaries, daily life, real world, point of view, story, full documentary, history, historical, history documentary

Id: OHCJwg7PSa8

Length: 141min 42sec (8502 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2022