Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in Buckingham Palace in London on Jan. 12, 1954.-/Getty Images
Andrew O’Hagan is the author of the novel Caledonian Road.
In the Scotland where I grew up, life revolved around the television. At the end of each day, it was customary for the BBC to conclude its programming by displaying a portrait of the Queen while playing the national anthem, but we never got to hear it in our house, not once, because my Glaswegian father would spring out of his armchair and shut it down before the first note sounded. We were Irish Catholics living in a Protestant Scotland and the Queen was a symbol of religious disquiet. And my father, who was at the time both a valiant smoker and a seasoned drinker, would usually offer, during his sprint to the off switch, a bouquet of colourful expletives, just in case, by some miracle of audiovisual technology, the Queen was able to hear him.
The most challenging year was 1977, the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. We were called out of primary school to stand at the edge of a newly built motorway, little Union Jacks fluttering in our hands as Her Majesty’s motorcade passed by. My father was so disgusted by the whole celebration that he left the country. In his absence, our crimes against the family’s native republicanism grew worse. I was part of a cub scout group that was introduced to the Duke of Edinburgh, accompanying the Queen as they opened a new leisure centre, and the only thing I recall is that this ludicrously posh Englishman said the word “ears” when he meant to say “yes.” No, that’s not true: He asked us if we “cooked sausages on campfires and that sort of thing,” and I found myself also saying “ears” instead of “yes,” a budding fiction-maker’s instant homage to His Royal Highness, though we never had cooked sausages. It was my first great lesson in the rules of subjection: Don’t tell the Royals the truth. I just knew by instinct that the truth was not their friend and only fantasy could sustain them.
I think my father had given up on us by the end of that summer. He was encouraged for a moment by the arrival of the Sex Pistols and their wonderfully obnoxious single God Save the Queen (“She ain’t no human being”), but in the following years, topped by 1981 and the marriage of Charles and Diana, the nation became enthralled by the Windsors. It was a national soap opera in which somebody was guaranteed always to be behaving worse than oneself. “Poor Her,” my mother used to say of the Queen, “she doesn’t have it easy.”
“That’s exactly what she has, Mum,” the teenage me would say. “She has it easy. She has all the easiness in the world. She’s the Queen.”
“You’re not a mother. You don’t see what I see.”
The obsession only grew. Everybody in Britain came to have two families – their own, and the one we had extra strong feelings for, who lived in castles that we paid for. In the great race for affection, the Royals earned their share by duty.
The Diana thing divided the nation by making you choose whose side you were on. Were you a Charles person or a Diana person? It felt like a personality test. Did you like zipped-up, tight-lipped, poker-faced, old-fashioned English repression, or did you prefer the touchy-feely, disco-dancing, lip-gloss-wearing, multidisordered self-consciousness of the Princess of Wales? It was entertaining to note, even by the late 1980s, that The Firm found Diana to be both plainly hysterical and enragingly popular. Where the Crown had always been above things, Diana undermined the institution, and its mystery, by being slightly normal. The British Royal Family never really recovered. It was all a farce, really: The Queen, in the end, was much more deeply embedded with the mood of Britain (marooned in nostalgia), but for a short time it seemed as if the zeal for “feeling” unleashed by Princess Di might provide the basis for a populist revolution. (”Show Us You Care!” shouted the front page of the Daily Express the week after Diana died.)
I was living in London by then, and it was strange to walk its central streets amid mountains of decaying flowers that glinted in the sun in their cellophane wrappers. I remember how tempting it was to feel that the fairy-tale romance of royal specialness, the age-old yarn of commonwealth and kings and beautiful princesses, had met its final end in that Paris tunnel. “They should build a bonfire of all those dead flowers,” my father retorted on the phone, “and put the Duke of Edinburgh at the top. Then we can turn to what really matters in the world.”
But he couldn’t shut this one off. In Britain, and in Canada, in many places, we were too far gone in our addiction to their disastrous majesties. It’s interesting to see how Diana’s boys have essentially reproduced the “traditionalist v. iconoclast” problem that had characterized their parents, and, from a similar position of entrapment, also appear to hate each other. With the Royals, it seems that the worse they get, the more interested we are. It’s as if we require a living hub of dysfunction, not our own, to make what happens in our families seem all the more bearable. For us, as much as with William and Harry, our parents’ beliefs and prejudices can begin to show with the years, and I find myself constantly swinging between the idea that the Royal Family should be led immediately to the guillotine, and a wish for it never to end, the great and fascinating drama of their uselessness. My career as a writer occasionally brings me to the edges of their circle and my intrigue only grows. Why do we need them? What is it about the cruel absurdity of their roles that so fascinates us?
In February, 2012, I was asked to attend a series of events to mark the bicentennial of Charles Dickens’s birth. I was present at his former home in Doughty Street when Charles and Camilla, at that time the Prince and Princess of Wales, visited to mark the anniversary. The actress Gillian Anderson read from Great Expectations. We weren’t sure what to expect, but after the event, Gillian and I were bundled into a Range Rover behind the one containing Charles and Camilla. In a blur of blue lights and squawks, we were sped across London to Westminster Abbey. When we got there, we had, hilariously, to shake hands with all the bishops, and for a millisecond we got a full sense of majestic absurdity, following the future king down the aisle to the upstanding hordes at Poets’ Corner. Later, at a reception at Buckingham Palace, I bumped into my old frenemy, the Duke of Edinburgh.
“We met once before,” I said.
“Rilly?” (That’s not a typo.)
“I was nine years old. You came to the town near where I lived in Ayrshire. Your wife was opening a leisure centre.”
“My wife?”
A gleam of hostility showed in his rheumy eye.
“Ears,” I said, an old memory ringing in my, well, ears. I forced it out of myself. “Her Majesty.”
“Mmmmm. Ayrshire. Grubby little place, no?” he said.
That should have put me off for life. Fathers are sometimes correct. But, if anything, the fascination only grew after that encounter. Like many a tabloid reader, I couldn’t get enough of the miasma of foul-ups and abominable decisions. All of it, over the years – Harry going to a party wearing a Nazi costume, Princess Margaret outsnobbing every human on the planet, “Prince Michael of Kent Accused of Selling Kremlin Access,” and the man who is eighth in line to the throne, Prince Andrew, hanging out with sex traffickers and rapists – made me think they were the Western world’s premier hot messes. As the 21st century blossomed, the family who were billed as true-bred natural sovereigns suddenly appeared to be the commonest people in existence, radiating that mix of celebrity and criminality that is now the spirit of the age. And like characters in the best stories, you could simultaneously feel opposite things about them, both touchingly happy and deeply sad. Prince Harry, a furious child in a permanent state of abandonment, has grown to become an international spectacle, constantly fighting for his “rights” amidst all the lies of the world, whilst mounting an impossible bid for control. You can pity him for that, whilst also feeling alarmed by the amount of naked aggression he and his wife exhibit, her more passively. Harry Mountbatten-Windsor is a machine of complaints, an engine of oversharing, grandstanding, victimhood and mindful pretentiousness, yet in some ways he’s the most human Royal since his mother.
The Queen had appeared to float above it all. When I met her, I didn’t bow but I gave her my best smile. I took her little white-gloved hand in mine and she scanned me for a millisecond, her face a mask of duty and boredom, as she performed her famous little manoeuvre, shaking the hand firmly whilst pushing me away with a little core strength. So this was her: the woman whose face appeared on the stamps of all the letters I’d ever sent; the woman who beamed from the TV set in my childhood and was banished into the dark by my father. I got a whiff of her perfume and moved along the line. “A novelist!” the Duke of Edinburgh shouted, delighted with himself, it seemed, perhaps with his capacity for forgetting and his talent for social unease. He said the word “novelist” as if it were the most exotic and useless thing one could possibly be, which is how it must have seemed to him, the idea of spending your life making things up when you don’t really have to. Philip and his wife were trapped in fictional roles they couldn’t tamper with, and only she, Queen Elizabeth, had the weird passion to make her condition into a sort of martyrdom.
The next time I saw the Queen, when I attended (as a plus-one) a Royal Windsor Polo show, I was already deep into a novel about the secrets of the British establishment, and lunch in the royal enclosure already felt very much to me like an imagined scene waiting to happen. (It was, and it’s in my new novel.) The Queen was dressed in one of those deep fuchsia pink numbers with a matching hat. She was 90, and seemed like a person bleached of personality, a woman stifled into a silence that other people called dignity. Even the presence of horses (her first love) didn’t seem to help her overcome the repetitious emptiness of all this. She stood next to a Japanese pop star called Yoshiki and – in what newspapers would later call an “unintentional breach of protocol” – the man’s silk scarf unfurled from his neck and seemed to wrap itself briefly around the Queen’s as she made her way down the steps.
My dad would have felt vindicated by all the recent royal shenanigans. For my own part, my greatest regret is that he died before the real teasing could begin. When one meets a king or queen, there’s always somebody there taking a photograph. I have them now, and enjoy the notion of papering my father’s kitchen with them. I like imagining how gleefully he would have torn them down. My mother was different. She knew I’d met the Queen that time at Buckingham Palace and she asked for one of the pictures. She told me she liked my suit and tie and the way Queen Elizabeth smiled back at me.
But what she really liked, I think, was the reminder that the richest and most famous woman in the world hadn’t any more of a free pass to easy times and fantasy outcomes than she had. In the past hundred years, it has been the Royal Family’s unconscious gift to the people, in Canada as much as in the United Kingdom, to allow us to gawp at them in their gilded zoo, allowing us to feel, via the peculiar art of spectatorship, that our lives are actually more livable than those that are lost in that enchanted world of smoke and mirrors. In our living rooms, with the TV off and the royal portrait gone for the night, we get to assert our own presence and dwell with those things that constitute an ordinary family.