Can We Finally Tell the Truth About Britain's Vile 'Queen Mother'?

It must be exhausting to be a monarchist, forever finding ways to pretend a family of cold, talentless snobs are better than the rest of us. They have to make gold out of mud. The system of monarchy -- selecting a head of state solely because of the womb they passed through, and surrounding them with sycophants from the moment they emerge -- produces warped and dim people, and demands we scrape before them. What's a poor monarchist to do? They can only lavish a thick cream of adjectives -- 'dignity,' 'charm,' 'majesty' -- over the Windsor family in the hope that some of us are fooled.

This process corrupts even the most intelligent monarchists. A strange case study is the new authorized thousand-plus page biography of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon , The Queen Mother, by William Shawcross. He is a smart man: his study of the secret bombing of Cambodia by Henry Kissinger is extraordinary. Yet as a monarchist he has an impossible task. He has to present a cruel, bigoted snob who fleeced millions from the British taxpayer as a heroine fit to rule over us. His mind turns to mush. Before the real Bowes-Lyon is lost in a frenzy of royalist rimming, we should remember who she really was: more Imelda Marcos than the good fairy Glinda.

By the time she died, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was treating the British Treasury -- our tax-money -- as her personal piggy bank, with her bills running way beyond the millions she was allotted every year. Even the ultra-Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont complained that "she far exceeds her Civil List and the Treasury gets very het up about it." She used the money to pay for eighty-three full-time staffers, including four footmen, two pages, three chauffeurs (what do they do, split her into three parts for transportation?), a private secretary, an orderly, a housekeeper, five housemaids... the list goes on and on. She even insisted that it was a legitimate use of public funds to maintain a full-time 'Ascot office', whose job is to do nothing but keep a register of members of the Royal Enclosure and send them entry vouchers.

She presented this spending -- enough to open and run a new hospital that would save thousands of lives every year -- as an act of selfless patriotism. Michael Mann, the former Dean of Windsor who knew her very well, explained: "She feels that Britain is Great Britain and that, therefore, ours must be no banana court. To lower standards [i.e., her spending on champagne, caviar and limos] is to denigrate the country and, insofar as high standards require big spending, so be it." When single mothers take 0.1 percent of this sum from the state, the same newspapers that laud Elizabeth as "the best of British" savage them as "scroungers." If they refused to pay tax -- as Elizabeth did -- they would have been put in prison.

What did she do to earn these vast sums? Her parents were 'Lord' and 'Lady' Strathmore, and from birth she was waited on by a gaggle of servants including a butler, two footmen, five housemaids, a cook and numerous room maids. She grew up with four palaces at her disposal -- but it wasn't enough. She was obsessed with "bloodlines," which she believed determined a person's worth, and wanted to marry into what she regarded as "the best" -- the Windsor family.

At first she tried to woo Edward Windsor, but when he wasn't interested, she settled for his stammering, highly strung younger brother, George. When Edward became King, she plotted to force his abdication so George could ascend and she could become 'Queen.' His "crime" was to fall in love with a divorcee -- and one with such poor bloodlines! Once Edward was successfully toppled, Elizabeth insisted he and his wife Wallace be driven into exile and blanked by royal circles. (The couple had plenty of real flaws, but Elizabeth was blind to them: it was the American-ness and the ambition and the divorce that she loathed.)

This was her way with any relatives who displeased her by showing vulnerability. When her cousins became mentally ill, they were locked in asylums and never seen again. Elizabeth's entry in Who's Who falsely announced they were dead. This icy ruthlessness startled people who met her. In 1939, French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier said she was "an excessively ambitious young woman who would be ready to sacrifice every other country in the world so that she might remain Queen."

The most striking aspect of Shawcross' biography is that once she had contrived to marry, Elizabeth really didn't do anything else for the rest of her life except spend, spend, spend -- our money. He has to pad out whole decades. She didn't even raise her own children: she would see them for an hour a day, and get them to chant: "We are not supposed to be normal. We are not supposed to be normal."

But to be fair, she did do one more thing. In her spare time, she supported far right politics. She was a passionate defender of appeasing Adolf Hitler, lobbying behind the scenes to garner support for Neville Chamberlain. The reasons are plain: even fifty years later, she bragged to Woodrow Wyatt that she had "reservations about Jews." Once the war began, she was rebranded as a symbol of Britain's heroic resistance to the Nazis -- but what did she actually do? Unlike everyone else, she didn't live on rations, but was fattened by pheasants and venison on the royal estates. She didn't stay in bombed-out London anything like as much as the myth suggests: she spent much of the war in Windsor, Norfolk and Scotland, far from the Nazi planes, surrounded by battalions of servants.

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon kept up her support for far-right politics throughout her life. She did everything she could to bolster the torturing of white minority tyrannies in Rhodesia and South Africa, because -- as the journalist Paul Callan, who knew her, put it -- "She is not fond of black folk." Our beaming Queen Mum was Alf Garnett in a tiara.

She believed Britain's class system reflected a natural hierarchy -- and the people below her creamy upper tier were inferior. She told Woodrow Wyatt, "I hate that classlessness. It is so unreal." At first, she was appalled by the idea of her eldest daughter marrying Phillip Mountbatten, because his "bloodlines" weren't good enough: his family had fallen from power, so they weren't "really" royal. When Diana Spencer started hugging AIDS victims and lepers, Elizabeth was disgusted. When Diana started rebelling, Elizabeth announced to friends the girl was "schizophrenic," but she was bemused because Diana came from "a good family." The rest of us, by implication, come from "bad families," where you would expect schizophrenia and other lower-class disorders.

The defenders of Elizabeth were left claiming that her drunken inactivity was itself an achievement. W.F. Deedes, the late Telegraph columnist, claimed that "in an increasingly earnest world, she teaches us all how to have fun, that life should not be all about learning, earning and resting. In a world where we have all become workaholics, there she is...grinning at racehorses. Bless her heart." He was in favor of the dole after all -- provided it was worth three million pounds, and went to one single aristocrat.

William Shawcross has won the favor of his fellow monarchists by taking this curdled life and presenting it as the best of British. It's the single most unpatriotic claim I've ever heard. If you don't think Britain can do better -- far better -- than this nasty leech and her stunted family, then you don't deserve to live in this Sceptred Isle.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

To read an archive of Johann's articles about the Monarchy, click here.

 

 

Follow Johann Hari on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johannhari101

Comments

[Christina Lane]

I read this and I am wincing. It really is a bit harsh. Her children have admitted she was not without flaws, and clearly, her attitudes were in fashion in her day. Not one of us with European ancestry can boast of ultra-liberal great-grandparents.

But then, you know, my understanding is that her Elizabeth was quite refined compared with royals in other parts of the World in this day, and progressive for her day. She was elegant, and quirky and quite the celebrity. A lot of the more regrettable approaches to social politics stemmed from Queen Victoria's time, from what I understand. Every few hundred years, we need to make revisions when things get stale.

So far as all this disrespect, the Windsors are a group of very talented, refined people, and they are highly intelligent, cultured and I have a lot of respect for their accomplishments. The shame is that they are not well understood, and I feel the public relations could use a bit of work. Regardless, we appear to feel they deserve not a modicum of restraint when we offer critique, and I have always perceived this as a transparent jealousy. People tend to fear that which they do not understand. The Windsors are rich in history, they have fascinating lives, and without them, public life would not be near as interesting.

[philopatris]

It didn't cost all that much to keep the Queen Mother all the way to age 101 in her illusion that it was still 1920 around her. She was paid to act the role of a snobby old rich lady with a gin and tonic glued to her hand, in the days when a Queen was supposed to be that, and to have servants in dozens. And she was great at it. The one friend of mine who had tea with her was a woman professor of ancient papyrology, and she still imitates the Queen's reaction to being told her profession, "How VERY interesting!" meaning "And now we will just pretend you didn't say that." You're supposed to get an anecdote or a nice personal note or both from meeting princes, and my friend got both and was delighted. If she was snobby about Jews and blacks she was as gay friendly as could be, thinking that was the sophisticated and liberal-minded way to act. Sir Harold Nicolson says in his memoirs that he found George VI and Elizabeth in 1939 in the back yard at Buckingham Palace doing pistol practice, and they told him they planned to go down shooting on the steps if the Germans came in.
There are nearly as many lies as lines in this story. "Here are two sides and only half the story." Aeschylus.

[Blackorpheus]

Here's a British journalist who (like most of his US brethren) can't distinguish an adjective from a noun, but nonetheless he is on target. The monarchy is too boring even to be funny. Abolish them straightaway and give the money to the poor.

[StephenBarry]

Monarchy is a pathetic joke. Sweep them all into the sea.

[GreatNews27]

Hey there!!! You're talking about Britian's number one tourist attraction! Besides, Britian gets what it deserves.

[deluk]

As you cant even spell Britain I suspect you know very little about it.

[almer77]

"Britain gets what it deserves" which I guess is why it is one the world's biggest economies, whose citizens earn more per capita than Americans.

[alexa07]

The Queen Mother epitomized the attitudes, practices & beliefs of the British colonials of the 19th century & the first part of the 20th. That is why MOST if not nearly ALL of the world breathes a collective sigh of relief that the cruelties & inequities of the British Empire are long over. A similar great sigh of relief will happen when in the early part of the 21st century the demise occurs of the American Empire, different in many ways from its Anglo-Saxon precedent, but sad to say, achieving unfortunately many of the same results.

[editorjuno]

It appears from Mr. Hari's commentary that we have found an across-the-pond role model for one Mrs. Barbara Bush.

[jmpurser]

Good point. I didn't see that until now.

[Checquoline]

So true.

[zola77]

LOL at the previous comments extolling the virtues of the British monarchy!

There are a great deal of us Aussies that would like to get rid of the queen and become a republic (she is still, frustratingly, out Head of State).

She sided with Australian conservatives in the 1970s to remove a democratically elected Labour PM and his government from office on a technicality. The only reason they didnt like him is because he introduced universal health care, free tertiary education, indigenous land rights and other reforms that benefited the middle and working class.

She interfered with Canada's parliament just last year after another request from conservatives to prevent parliament from holding a 'no-confidence' vote in Stephen Harper - which he would have lost if it had gone ahead.

She should keep out of other countries business.

Anyone (like the previous posters) who believe the monarchy is benign and purely symbolic needs to take a look at the Queen's continuing political involvement in the colonies - where she still wields power and almost always backs conservatives in political debates.

[huffpostreader10000]

Would you be happy if she sided with whichever ideology you side with?

[zola77]

As i said in my post, I want her to STAY OUT OF the politics of other countries.

Im sure you would be p!ssed if you had a foreign leader telling your democratically elected government what it could and couldnt do.

[zola77]

As i said in my post, I want her to STAY OUT OF the politics of other countries.

Im sure you would be angry if you had a foreign leader telling your democratically elected government what it could and couldnt do.

[wm1066]

Are you confusing the DEAD Queen Mother to the present Queen? This article is about the Queen Mother not the Queen.

[almer77]

Yeah the Queen mother may be considerably more powerful than I realised if she interfered with Canada's elections last year.

[piul05]

Good post; I didn't know about that episode in the 70's - that is one type of historical event that seems to repeat itself all over the globe as if we were all enacting in some kind of eternal punishment straight out of some Greek myth.

Also, it must really suck to have a "Head of State" from somewhere else.

[deluk]

Then vote to get rid of her and stop whinging.

[zola77]

We have tried, but your lot keep interfering - so butt out. Just like you should butt out of this discussion.

[huffpostreader10000]

Inspite of all this the british have produced countless geniuses whose discoveries and policies benefit so many parts of the world. And the british enjoy much wealth and prosperity and freedom and democracy (yes, democracy....the monarchy is just an impotent relic for practical purposes). Britain even opened its doors to people of its former colonies and provides tons of aid all over the world. The fact that the british, such as Johann Hari, don't hesitate to critisize their own country is tribute to the wonderfulness of that tiny island. Thank goodness for britain!

[Gasparilla]

Whatever her many faults, she did not topple Edward from the throne. The British would not accept a divorced woman as the King's wife in the 30s.

[pinkibus]

Actually it was the people of the Commonwealth who didn't want a divorcee. And for the record - where there is a monarch there is no assasination. Why bother. There is always an heir. Government goes on as always no matter what.

[Gasparilla]

You're wrong. Czar Nicholas's father was assassinated.

[woodsywizz]

Dear Pinki,

The list of kings, queens, and their various kindred include hundreds who have been assassinated - more like thousands when you include the melange of dukes, counts, and other nobility in line of succession to the crown.

"Where there is a monarch there is no assasination [sic]."???? "For the record...."???? Back to school! Back! Back!