The Eagle and the Crown Americans and the British Monarchy by Frank Prochaska
Yale, 240 pp., $40
In the autumn of 1985 I was in Washington when the "Treasure Houses of Britain" show at the National Gallery was opened by the prince and princess of Wales (a royal visit fabled in the thousand-year story of the English monarchy as the occasion when the princess took to the dance floor with John Travolta). Then I returned to the Athens on the Potomac in the spring of 1988 and was taken to a dinner where President Reagan was the guest of honor.
Two things struck me. On the latter occasion, an Englishman was bound to notice the almost reverential manner in which the president was regarded, even by journalists who felt no political sympathy for him. It was all unlike the genial derision with which we treat London politicians, in private or even in public. But before that, the adulation surrounding the royal couple made me realize that the American spirit of equality and republican virtue was not all that it was supposed to be.
Was it possible that the Yanks were as snobbish as the Limeys, or even more so?
Well, "there is a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government," or so Benjamin Franklin said, in words which Frank Prochaska quotes as an epigraph to this highly informative and enjoyable new book. It might surprise Franklin's admirers to know just how how much he once revered George III: No Frenchman, he wrote after dining at Versailles in 1767, "shall go beyond me in thinking my own king and queen the very best in the World and the most amiable." The Founding Fathers were, after all, transplanted Englishmen, and by inheritance Tories as much as radicals.
A seditious pamphleteer like Thomas Paine might denounce monarchy as "the Popery of government"--the very phrase a reminder, by the way, of how strongly Protestant, and virulently anti-Catholic, was the American sentiment he addressed. But the American rebellion, like any other event in history, was not inevitable. It remains a fascinating "what if" to suppose what would have happened had the London government been less pigheaded in its treatment of the colonists. Although it's not so likely that, by the end of the 21st century, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand will share a sovereign with England, the fact that the queen is still their head of state as the century begins is remarkable enough. Might she have been Queen Elizabeth of America also?
After Yorktown and the formal separation, Americans visiting England found much they still liked and admired about their former monarch, "industrious, sober and temperate . . . a great and wise king," said John Jay, George Washington's trade envoy to London in 1794. To be sure, attitudes to England and its monarchy divided America, Anglophile Federalists against Anglophobe Jeffersonians. But then Jefferson was at this time infatuated with the French Revolution, and even tolerant towards its bloody Terror.
By the next century, other long and short royal affairs would be grist for the mill of the very fast-expanding trans- atlantic press: One of the things I learned from The Eagle and the Crown was that fewer than 200 American newspapers in 1800 had become 3,000 by 1850. The lurid public failure of the marriage of that couple who came to Washington in 1985, and the subsequent antics of Princess Diana, followed by her sad death and the weird ensuing cult, with its overtones of Latin American peasant hagiology, rang historical bells.
In 1820, the case of Queen Caroline, sued by George IV for adultery, electrified Americans. Their press went into paroxysms of righteous wrath on behalf of "this unfortunate woman, who, alone and unprotected, has stood as yet unmoved and unsullied amid the tempest of filth and calumny with which she has been assailed by the royal debauchee, her husband, and his sycophantic allies."
One way or another English royalty continued to exercise a thrall over Americans. While Queen Victoria, whose astonishingly long reign began as Andrew Jackson's presidential term ended, and ended as the first President Roosevelt's began, was no Charlotte or Diana, she was deeply admired in America. Indeed "Victoria Fever" and "Queen Mania" much annoyed some American patriots. And her son the prince of Wales seemed to Americans a figure of immense glamour.
In late 1860, he paid the first of what would be many visits by royalty to the United States. "No president could excite such a fervor," the New York Times recorded, and there was endless speculation about whether the 18-year-old prince would find an American bride. The only discordant note--also inaugurating a long tradition--came from Irish malcontents, complaining about "the spirit of flunkeyism."
But if Irish Americans resented the English royal family, African Americans loved them. When the prince of Wales arrived, slavery had been abolished in the British Empire for a generation, but persisted in the South. The prince received from "the Colored Citizens of Boston" an "expression of their profound and grateful attachment for that Throne which you represent here, under whose shelter so many thousands of their race, fugitives from American Slavery, find safety and rest." And in 1873, the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University visited England and performed for "the grandest and noblest queen of them all," whose flag had "sheltered so many in the dark days of bondage."
On both sides of the Atlantic some believed that the two countries were united, not least by "a hatred of what is not just or free," as the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey would say. This could take the form of "Anglo-Saxonism" and an unabashed belief in the racial superiority of these "English-speaking peoples."
At the same time, on the American side, there was also unmistakably what Australians would later call a cultural cringe: As Senator Henry Cabot Lodge said, any American with literary aspirations pretended to be an Englishman "in order that he might win the approval, not of the Englishmen, but of his own countrymen." And the infatuated Anglomania of the American rich during the Gilded Age reflected the harder economic fact that the United States was still, to a large extent, a financial dependency of the City of London. In his novel Democracy, Henry Adams dryly remarked on "the respect which all republicans who have a large income derived from business feel for English royalty."
And yet--this is something Prochaska could have examined--there was a strong contrary current of political and military hostility to the English. In 1895, amid a frenzy of sabre-rattling Anglophobia, President Cleveland nearly went to war against Great Britain, and in 1914 President Wilson feared that he might have to do so. As it turned out, the two countries became military allies, in 1917-18 and again in 1941-45, and here the royals played their part. The latest prince of Wales visited America in 1919 and, despite what his aide, Admiral Sir Lionel Halsey, called "disgruntled Irishmen and a very doubtful lot of hyphenated Americans," the tour was a brilliant success.
Once again it was endlessly wondered whether the prince would wed an American "gal." When one intrepid female reporter put the question to him directly, he said he would if he fell in love with one. And so he did. Alas, it was Wallis Simpson of Baltimore, who precipitated the greatest crisis for the monarchy in centuries. The gloriously snobbish (and brilliantly observant) diarist Chips Channon complained that, since he met her, the prince's manner had become "Americanized," by which he meant "over-democratic, casual and a little common."
Needless to say, Americans were fascinated by the romance, and some believed that a shot of New World blood was just what the kingly line needed, now that the prince had become Edward VIII. In England the feeling was very different, from Leo Amery's astonishment that the king could put his duty behind "his affection for a second-rate woman" to Queen Mary's reaction to the very idea that her son might marry a twice-divorced American: "Really! This might be Rumania!"
After the abdication, Edward's shy, less glamorous, but more solid brother succeeded as George VI, and won American hearts on a visit in the summer of 1939. Even some Irish Americans softened. President Roosevelt had made his single worst appointment in the appalling form of Joseph P. Kennedy as ambassador to the Court of St. James, but that corrupt anti-Semitic bigot and appeaser was susceptible to royal allure: "Rose, this is a helluva long way from East Boston," he said to his wife when they spent the weekend at Windsor Castle. And when their son Jack attended a formal court levée, he had no objection to wearing knee breeches, "in which I look mighty attractive."
After a greater war had been fought and won, Americans were captivated again by the pretty young queen who was crowned in 1953. (Among those covering the coronation was a star-struck reporter for the Washington Times-Herald called Jacqueline Bouvier.) Royal visits continued: first the Queen Mother, as George VI's widow now was, and then the queen in 1957. She and President Eisenhower found an unlikely bond in their shared enthusiasm for baking, exchanging recipes for scones, and other humble fare.
Initially at least, the queen's children were less of a hit. The present prince of Wales, well-meaning but gauche, did his best with President Nixon in 1970, but his sister Princess Anne, who accompanied him on that visit, "made no effort to conceal a mood of incredulity and vague discomfort," wrote the New York Times--not that she always struck her compatriots much differently.
And so to Prochaska's penultimate chapter, "A Wedding and a Funeral," with that visit of 1985 coming between them. My recollection of an awestruck America was not so wrong. Time called Charles and Diana "the most glamorous couple" on earth, and the New York Times reported that "the British have landed and Washington is taken." The Eagle and the Crown is very well illustrated, and there are two wonderful photographs from this period, of Princess Diana smiling in her knowing gamine way next to a chuckling Henry Kissinger, and of President Reagan laughing uproariously as a completely stony-faced queen reads her speech. What was the joke he got but she didn't?
Nor was my perception of the president as a kind of royalty so wrong--or so original. As Prochaska says, the Founding Fathers were more monarchical in their assumptions than is widely believed, and they created a veiled monarchy. Many others have seen this. Henry Clay complained in 1833 about the "elective monarchy," William Seward told an English journalist that "we elect a king for four years," and Theodore Roosevelt, "not one to minimise the powers of his office," likewise described the president as an "elective King."
What Prochaska might have added is that there has been a curious historical twist. Although consciously in reaction from England, the Founding Fathers unconsciously copied an English model, which was then preserved immutably by the Constitution. But over the next century and more what Walter Bagehot called "the English constitution"--unwritten and therefore flexible--changed out of recognition. It came to combine two crucial characteristics, constitutional monarchy and parliamentary government. Head of state was thus separated from head of government, the former a decorative sovereign who reigns but does not rule and who accepts the advice of a prime minister, defined in turn as the person who, at any moment, commands a majority in the House of Commons. In curious consequence, the British political system now bears no resemblance to the England of 1776--which the American political system closely resembles. The president is very like George III, his own chief executive who may or (as recently in Washington) may not command a legislative majority, and rules by a mixture of fiat, cajolery, appeals to loyalty, and outright bribery.
Meantime, while American absorption in the doings of our more or less wayward royals seems undiminished, the dynastic principle is in eclipse in England but flourishes across the ocean in the noble houses of Kennedy, Gore, Bush, and Clinton. Maybe Prochaska is right: What distinguishes England and America is the difference between a disguised republic and a disguised monarchy.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of the forthcoming St. Winston.