So Queen Elizabeth has reached 90. And I say, long live the Queen.
Admittedly, that wasn’t my original take on our monarch. I’ve always thought her something of a martinet.
There was that cold-hearted refusal to let her sister, Margaret, marry the love of her life — Group Captain Peter Townsend — because he’d been divorced.
Yet the man outclassed the entire parade of English kings since the days of Henry VIII. Not in itself a difficult task — was there ever a more feckless bunch of revolution-inspiring, colony-losing skirt-chasers? (The queens, notably, were another matter entirely.) Townsend, with his DSO and two DFCs, would have been a breath of fresh air.
There was Elizabeth’s somewhat tone-deaf insistence on presiding over a Bourbon-style imperial court in a country impoverished by two world wars.
No need to dwell on the way she and her family treated Diana. And what about her title — Elizabeth the Second. As any good Scottish nationalist will tell you, there was never an Elizabeth the First.
England’s virgin queen was just that — Queen of England, not Britain. (Indeed, she may not even have been a woman. There have even been rumours “she” was a man dressed up for the job by courtiers who were given care of the young Elizabeth, and botched the job so thoroughly the future queen expired.)
But most troubling of all, or so I believed, was the Queen’s clinging to the throne while her son’s sense of purpose and mission drained away before our eyes.
However, a few years ago, after Diana had died and Charles finally got some air time of his own, a different reality set in.
The Prince of Wales began to speak out on the issues of the day, and it became ever more clear that the guy was a few jewels short of a crown.
He came out in support of homeopathy, the medical equivalent of witchcraft. He suggested carrot juice might cure cancer.
He claimed genetically modified foods are a health threat. He criticized modern science for its “mechanistic” reliance on gathering evidence. Perhaps he found inspiration in ideas less weighted down with fact?
He wrote to the minister for the environment, demanding the latter call for a ban on the Patagonian toothfish trade.
And eventually, Charles descended into Whisky Tango Foxtrot country (figure it out), prompting the head of a major British university to observe: “The best hope for the monarchy is that Prince Charles dies before the Queen.” Indeed.
Of course there’s always the hope, if the succession does pass to him, that Charles will decline in favour of his eldest son, William, who seems relatively sensible. And let’s just note that, should this actually happen, he had better be styled William the Sixth.
The last British king of that name was William IV. But there was also, in the mists of the past, a Scottish William. So Willie VI it is. Fair, after all, is fair.
But does anyone see this happening? The man has spent his entire life awaiting this one golden moment.
Some have speculated that in such an eventuality, he would cut out the social commentary and settle down peaceably with his one-time mistress Camilla, herself the great-granddaughter of another royal mistress, Alice Keppel.
But I don’t buy it. There are too many bats in the family attic to hope for an outbreak of common sense.
One of the endearing quirks of British history was the bestowing of caustic nicknames on the country’s monarchs. Thus Ethelred the Unready, John Softsword, Edward the Confessor, William the Bastard and the like.
So in preparation for the day our Prince of Wales takes the throne, I have my own epithet at hand: Charles the Grate.
