in London, today. Performed outside Buckingham Palace this morning and, as I write, a short distance away in Downing Street; granted, without the royal pomp and ceremony but with some very civil good cheer and good will.
An interesting (almost) all-nighter behind me; this time ending with some hopeful signs. Which can not be said of some previous experiences, nor represent future expectations. After fourteen years and a series of leaders, the United Kingdom has rid themselves of an appalling generation of Tories and a Labour government has been elected with a huge majority.
05/07/2024. London, United Kingdom. The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria arrive at Number 10 Downing Street Picture by Rory Arnold/ No 10 Downing StreetOutside 10 Downing Street in London, Friday, July 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)The day after and Keir Starmer, having accepted the King’s invitation to form a government during an audience at Buckingham Palace, arrives in Downing Street and delivers his first address as Prime Minister.
The new Prime Minister (the 58th -and an elected one this time!) is Keir Starmer. A serious man has left his audience with the King and, as I write, with the midday sun shining after a rainy morning, approaches the lectern in front of No. 10 to make his first address as Prime Minister.
An overtly thumping majority not to be taken for granted, for a closer analysis indicates a complicated result with tensions from the Right (and to a lesser extent Left), the potential for messy intraparty conflicts and a fickle, unenthusiastic electorate.
The very opposite of angelic this ‘little’ England at the end of the Elizabethan period, as it hurtled towards the headless state – symbolically and actually with bloody precision – that it was to become in the 17th century – or as such it was seen from a Continental perspective: intemperate, delusional, diabolical this land – a veritable playground for the devil and his helpers.
And it is with this particular slant that Clare Jackson shades her terrific history of that turbulent period of Stuart dynastic power grabs and downfalls, civil wars, religious fervor and parliamentarian purges. Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688 (Penguin, 2021) is neither a quick nor easy read, it has taken me ‘forever’ – or a few weeks at least; it is a book that demands concentration, but ultimately one is rewarded for the effort; for it is an endlessly thought provoking book – a sweeping, wonderfully written immersion into a violent, volatile epoch defined by all the intricate webs of subterfuge being spun within and without the borders of a ‘middling’ kingdom, a still only imagined ‘great’ Britain, and the reciprocated meddlings by the powerful absolute monarchies on the Continent. And always amongst each other – nobles, courtiers, clergy, diplomats, pamphleteers – intrigants, disputants are they all, having their say and rarely getting their way. One day’s friend is the next day’s foe. Today’s loyal subject is tomorrow’s rabble rousing republican. Lines of succession, familial loyalties and matters of fertility mean everything or nothing. Words, written or spoken out loud, vulgar or lyrical: long-winded, idle ‘talk’ exposed, rightly or wrongly, to be seditious; hushed gossip becoming loud and with conspiratorial intent – the next plot brewing. Crowns and heads are lost and crowns at least restored, in-between all means of civil and uncivil strife, religious and sectarian conflicts contested with zealotry and culminating with a bloodless coup – okay, Glorious Revolution has more oomph – and the reign of William of Orange.
It is any wonder the movers and shakers across the channel – above all, Habsburgs and Bourbons strewn all over the Continent – were at first bemused and then (literally) up in arms – at the antics of those intemperate ratbags on the other side of those narrow, treacherous waters to be crossed at one’s own peril; channeling in its capriciousness that very folk. Though, it must be emphasized, things weren’t exactly going down well in their own backyard either! To call foul (“REGICIDE!”) on the public execution of Charles I was a bit much when half of Europe lay in Schutt und Asche in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War.
It is left to be said, with the beginning of the 18th century the House of Stuart would be succeeded in an orderly, that is, a predetermined fashion (lessons had been learnt!), by that of Hanover, and the chaos of the ancient English parliamentary system and flirtations with republicanism gave way to one anchored in law and reconstituted under a united Great Britain, which, on the back of brutal colonial expansionism, quickly rose to become a globally dominating power. The devil may still have been at work on the island, but a devil to be taken seriously and his objectives clear. Besides, it was on the other side of the channel on a vast continent struggling with modernity, variations of – and alternatives to – absolutism and the rise of nationalism fervour, that his focus was to shift during the next centuries. Therein, of course, lay another story.
As a reader, however enmeshed I was in this tumultuous past, the contemporary had a way of insinuating itself upon my reception – the ghosts of a ‘glorious’ past tainted by nostalgia and nationalism, and exemplified by the hubris of Brexit; controversial and unsolved questions of devolution and more generally nationhood and identity (see, for instance, Scotland’s striving for independence, a non-functioning Stormont in Northern Ireland); the role of the monarchy (it just has to be Charles III doesn’t it!); the deficits of the Westminster parliamentary system (prorogation, serial PMs, etc.); the limits governments can place on individual freedoms (during the plague of 1665, restrictions included the closing down of taverns and play-houses – sounds familiar?). But these very here and now intrusions that flutter in and out during the long reading of Devil-Land – some of which I suspect were deliberately planted by Jackson – help to illustrate and focus the big picture on the tensions created in the relations between England and Europe, the personalities at its core, the interests being served, and how the parties could be now, as then, so near yet so far.
From my childhood I remember a large red tome embossed with crowns. I also remember its name (or think I do): Coronation Cavalcade. Having come across it during a juvenile rummage around, I remember thinking it to have been published in commemoration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953; this probably suggested to me by reliable sources, and I have no reason to believe that was not so. It was chock a block full of black and white photos from that day but also from the young Queen’s childhood and formative years, and there were lots of words too on that shiny paper once favored for such books. There was only one color plate: a frontispiece of the newly crowned monarch in her coronation regalia. (It may well have been like this one.)
There was a fold out royal genealogy attached to the inside cover to which my mother had neatly inked in further unions (she didn’t live to see the procession of dissolutions!) and progeny. My mother was of the Queen’s generation and very much a royalist. Not a silly, fawning sort, mind, but a traditionalist just the same. (And, she did have a sort of ‘queen’ look and disposition: there were hats and gloves and handbags, she loved horses and dogs and the Anglican Church…) What she did not have in common with the Queen was a long life. What happened to that book I don’t know, or even whether I am misremembering all I have just said.
So this day, the Coronation Day of King Charles III, was spent in a state of trying to rise above a surge of sentimentality – and not succeeding , instead being swept along in the moment, nourished with tea and scones and the temptation of nostalgia. The public spectacle was awesome (despite the inclement weather, and what I thought to be my original word play on “…long may he reign [sic] over us…” ) but I was most moved by the very personal emotions that the event stirred – memories and childhood, people and places lost.
The Coronation invitation and an official portrait of the newly crowned King Charles III and Queen Camilla (www.royal.uk)
A couple of weeks have now passed. What remains (other than a renewed penchant for the much maligned scone)? This newly cast Royal Family – modest now in number, with a more modern agenda – has been dutifully going about their business. Looking good. Doing what they do. Only Time will decide whether the House of Windsor and its hereditary monarchy will continue in its constitutional role in British life. My own Re:publican sympathies are not to be denied, but the ancient isles must decide their own fate. And, that, something which they do with exceptional regularity one has to say!
Each aerial view of each mini-cavalcade of darkened Land Rovers led by outriders in royal blue and luminous yellow brings one near to all that topography of land clustered tight, then precisely coded, within the celebrated London environs of SW1; compressed there within its borders all the ruling powers of a kingdom.
The Postcodes Project – SW1: Belgravia, Brompton, Millbank, Pimlico, St James’s, Victoria, Westminster
A neck of the woods that I know well, albeit from from the vantage point of another SW (storied also but where real people live – or once lived) and from halcyon days long gone, but few I would say have ever journeyed these fabled routes, either actually or on the wings of imagination, as many have done in most recent times gone – as the late summer of 2022 turns to autumn, as a monarch departs the mortal world and another ascends to her place, as a Prime Minister goes and another comes, and as a Prime Minister goes and another comes. I am not repeating myself! Blink and history was there just waiting to be missed.
On Thursday, after 44 (!) days in office, Liz Truss announced her resignation, and today this found its formal conclusion in the requisite audience with King Charles III at Buckingham Palace and, shortly thereafter, Rishi Sunak, the newly elected [sic] leader of the Conservative Party, being invited by the King to be his Prime Minister.
From memory: After the wheels finally fell off Boris Johnson’s government at the beginning July, a convoluted process for the leadership of the Tories began with the whittling down to two contenders – Truss and … yes, Sunak! – and continued through the summer with a series of so-called “hustings”. Sunak was favored by conservative parliamentarians and Truss by Party members and, yes, the latter trumped the former. Two days after receiving Johnson and Truss (not in SW1, but Balmoral – for reasons which were sadly to become clear) and doing that which the monarch is anointed to do, the Queen died. Granted, an interrupted start extraordinaire but then Truss seemed to tout the powers of disruption. All very well, one could say, but did she not know that in times of global crisis markets and their makers crave at least the promise of stability. In a matter of weeks a complete economic framework, misguidedly constructed on a toxic mix of low taxes and high borrowing lay in shambles, and with it Liz Trusses job and reputation.
And so it was, this time round, in just a few days, and with Boris Johnson returning with fanfare from a Caribbean jaunt, the Tories heaped on the wearied Brits another leadership “election”! More skillfully modified this time round, with a set of rules that would, with any luck and some reason, circumvent interference from pesky Members. And in the end, so it did: Bojo knew when to fold, as did, albeit at the last moment, another penny pretender (called Mordaunt), and Rishi Rich was left holding the winning hand. Like democracy is a game of poker!
On Rishi Sunak, putting aside the politics, it should be said that he is the first Prime Minister from an ethnic background (okay, there is the Disraeli exception – not quite the same thing I would suggest) – his parents, of Punjabi descent, migrated to the UK from eastern Africa in the 1960s; married to the daughter of an Indian tech. billionaire (with modest beginnings); a practicing Hindu. In other words, a biography, irrespective of the advantages granted to him by good fortune, and fortune, that only a very few years ago would have made a rise to the highest echelons of power almost inconceivable. Meritocracy sometimes works it seems. A remarkable story in many respects, and that Sunak’s success should correspond with Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Light, and in this year that remembers the end of the Raj and the 75th anniversary of Indian independence, is highly symbolic and one of those strange quirks of fate.
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II – The Queen – died yesterday at Balmoral. Ancient isles morn – as do I, for she was my Queen too; as a child of the realm, she a presence in my entire life. The Queen offered constancy and dignity in an ever changing and fractious world – for seventy years and in places far flung. As with many who have long harbored republican sentiments and just as long lived in denial of her mortal state, I too have been taken aback by the welling of emotion that the Queen’s death has summoned from deep within. Psychologically, unresolved “mummy issues” comes to mind to explain what I can only identify as an overly sentimental reaction on my part. But I have already noted an abundance of, shall we say, rational persons of standing, of, shall we say, approximately my age, mentioning how much the Queen reminded them of their mother. And I don’t think they are talking about physical resemblance or occupational or situative dispositions but, rather what, until yesterday, was the living, breathing symbolism for an entire generation, an epoch.
So, the second Elizabethan age ends, and that of King Charles III begins; a new era (called what? Caroline? Carolean?) to be observed with less baggage, greater distance, less emotional attachment, but perhaps more rigorous intellectual curiosity. And that cannot be a bad thing.
Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II – born 21st April 1926, died 8th September 2022
The newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey in London, 1953. Photograph: STF/AFP/Getty Images
