The royals - Kitty Kelley [107]
“If we can’t have our own Bavarian monarch back,” said a city official in Munich, “at least we can borrow someone else’s for a short while.”
“After all,” said his aide, “they are almost German, aren’t they?”
For Germans, the Queen’s presence meant that England had finally forgiven them. Her words underscored her healing mission, despite the grimace she made when she first saw the ugly barbed-wire spikes on the Berlin Wall. “The tragic period is over,” she said, her English being translated to German. “If we wish to preserve the best of our great heritage, we must make common cause…. In the last twenty years, the problems facing our two peoples have brought us closer together again. It is now our task to defend civilization in freedom and peace together.”
The crowds shouted, “Eee-liz-a-bet, Eee-liz-a-bet!” but the Queen did not smile or wave. In fact, she recoiled from the enthusiastic response. “I think she thought this was a bit too much of a good thing,” said British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart, “too reminiscent of ritual Nazi shouting. That was the only time I saw her perhaps at all put out.”
With more dignity than warmth, the Queen went to ten cities in eleven days and was widely praised. “For the thirty-nine-year-old British monarch, theoretically above politics,” said U.S. News & World Report, “it was a highly political performance.”
Criticism toward the Crown had become increasingly strident. In 1957, after Lord Altrincham criticized the Queen as “priggish” and “a pain in the neck,” he was slugged by a man on the street who considered his words blasphemous. A year later, when Malcolm Muggeridge, a leading British journalist, dismissed the Queen as “a nice, homely little woman” whose monarchy was “a transparent hoax,” he was banned from appearing on the BBC. Yet within ten years criticism of the Crown had become commonplace. Students in the sixties were apathetic toward the monarchy. To them the royal family seemed irrelevant, almost laughable. Movie houses had stopped playing the National Anthem because too many young people booed. The Oxford University Union debated the resolution: “The Monarchy should be sacked, Buckingham Palace given to the homeless, and the corgis put to productive work.”
The monarchy could still count on the establishment press—the Times and the Daily Telegraph— to pay homage. Both newspapers published the Court Circular,* which lists the activities of the royal family and is delivered to the papers by Palace messenger every day. One day in 1966, according to a Telegraph editor, that delivery was jeopardized because of what the Palace perceived as a gross lack of deference.
“We cannot go on supplying you with the Court Circular,” a Palace spokesman told the editor, “if you continue with your unjustifiable attacks on the Princess Margaret.”
“What attacks?” asked the editor, who was embarrassed by his newspaper’s subservience to the royal family.
“What attacks indeed?” said the Palace spokesman. “You know perfectly well that as a Princess of the Blood Royal, she is entitled to the word ‘the’ in front of her name.”
The omission was duly rectified.
During the same period, the Sunday Times commissioned a Cambridge don to write a small biography of the Queen for a feature entitled “The 1,000 Men and Women of the Century.” The biography referred to the Queen as belonging to the “regnum of mass consumption… like most carefully designed products, the Queen comes flavourless, harmless, beautifully packaged but a bit expensive…. Cluttered with amiable feudal eccentricities… the monarchy survives to restore its earliest function, to celebrate the rite of fantasy.”
The don’s contribution was immediately rejected. A more respectful editor rewrote the piece and referred to Her Majesty as “charming, witty and wise… with beautiful eyes and a peaches and cream complexion.”
Even the blinkered