The War of the Charleses, Spencer vs Windsor, will keep on raging this week. Earl Spencer’s book Swan Song; Diana, My Sister is out on Tuesday. More revelations, bound to irritate an infuriated King and Prince William, are almost certain to pour out.
But the King has a trump card in his pocket: the mighty, 1,000-year-old institution of the monarchy.
The Royal Family has weathered much worse than this. Just look at the greatest royal publication ever, now on show at the British Museum. The Bayeux Tapestry has it all – the death of two kings, Edward the Confessor and King Harold, and the replacement of Anglo-Saxon monarchs by a Norman one. And yet the institution survived – grew stronger, in fact, under the mighty William the Conqueror.
The modern threat to the monarchy – tell-all memoirs – is nothing by comparison. They’ve been chipping away at the Royal Family for over 75 years now. The first, The Little Princesses, by Marion Crawford – aka “Crawfie”, the late Queen’s nanny – was in fact a charming book, revealing the sweet taste for neatness and horses in the young Princess Elizabeth. And yet Crawfie was still cast into the outer darkness by the Royal Family for not staying “utterly oyster”, as the Queen Mother had ordered her.
The Duke of Windsor published his memoirs, A King’s Story, 75 years ago. It was a sensation at the time but is now harmless, compared with shocking revelations in later books, notably Andrew Morton’s, sanctioned by Diana, Princess of Wales, and the latest by Andrew Lownie, which eviscerates Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Fergie.
Direct revelations, straight from the mouths of insiders, like Spencer and Prince Harry, are that much more devastating. It looks like the Earl and Harry are allies, having spent part of the summer together at Althorp, Spencer’s house.
But, as happened with Crawfie and the Duke of Windsor, those royal insiders soon become outsiders, exiled to Siberia after their revelations and increasingly marginalised. Once exiled, they have fewer juicy nuggets to feed the raging public appetite. And, in time, like Crawfie, they become footnotes to history – of interest only to future royal biographers.
Meanwhile, the King is fighting back. First with his statement about Spencer’s clouded reason, affected judgement and coloured memory. And now a friend has said the King, at his AI summit at Dumfries House, was “rather more concerned about the future of mankind than the unkind claims of one man picking at the scars of the past”.
That’s the quotidian life of official members of the Royal Family – so seemingly dull when compared with the front-page revelations by Spencer and the Sussexes, who’ve made an ever so dramatic comeback to the front pages with their return to Britain.
But, paradoxically, quiet duty – that never-ending round of dinners, ribbon-cutting, meet-and-greet public visits – is what endears us to the Royal Family, and buttresses their millennium-long position at the apex of British life.
Of course, we’re gripped by splashy stories of sex, betrayal and deeply tragic deaths. But that is only the flashy, Netflix-ready drama we momentarily lap up, while longing for and depending on the solid, distinctly undramatic constitutional monarchy that underlies our history, going all the way back before the events in the Bayeux Tapestry.
What do you think Prince Harry was doing this week, as the storms raged over the blazing row between his father and his uncle? He was carrying out his first public appearance since his return to Britain at the inaugural Invictus Spirit Awards in London.
There he was, immaculate in black tie with his military medals, meeting wounded veterans at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. The site was the old Greenwich Palace, built and rebuilt by monarchs from Henry VII to Charles II to Queen Mary.
Prince Harry is no longer an official member of the Royal Family, as the King made clear in a recent statement through his Lord Chamberlain. And yet here he was, trying to recreate all the elements of an official royal visit, the sort of life he and Meghan fled for California in 2020.
So the storm blows – and then passes over – and royal life continues as it ever has.
Harry Mount is author of ‘How England Made the English‘ (Penguin), £12.99
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