04.05.2023

A manufactured illusion

Today’s monarchy is not a precious inheritance dating back to the Saxons. It is a product of the mass media, argues Paul Demarty

An image has been circulating on social media, lifted originally from The Daily Telegraph - an annotated photograph, or perhaps photomontage, of Charles Windsor, in his full royal regalia. The creators helpfully distinguish the dozens of medals and baubles, the sashes, sporrans and dress swords.

On the surface, it, like all images of regal gewgaws, hints at a vast historical inheritance - indeed, in some mystical way, at the Eternal itself. Yet the annotations give the lie. Apart from the orders of the garter and the thistle - established in 1348 and 1687 respectively - none of the honours signified by the clanking of precious metals are terrifically old. Mostly, indeed, they refer to various military regiments, and therefore point us to the 18th and especially 19th centuries - because empires do not maintain themselves.

This image, despite its cloying servility, thus contains an important truth. It is not the crown of Alfred the Great that Charles will formally inherit on May 6; or that of William the Conqueror, or even of William of Orange. Instead, he will become the latest in a rather shorter line of kings and queens, shaped above all by the coterminous rise of the mass media.

Nuisance

We begin, then, in 1688. The Stuart restoration collapsed, already unable to manage the political and religious divisions before James II revealed himself to be Catholic. Prominent Protestant members of the gentry combined with the urban bourgeoisie and even the nascent urban working class in opposition to the Stuarts; William of Orange was invited to invade, and duly did; James was put to flight; and royal decision-making was decisively limited by the rights of parliament thenceforth.

Of course, this coalition did not spring up spontaneously. A crucial accelerant was the most important invention of the early-modern era: moveable type. From the mass production of vernacular bibles to the first newspapers and journals, hot lead was a nuisance to rulers all over the continent, and Britain was no exception. In 1662, Charles II’s parliament passed the Licensing of the Press Act, which restricted who could and could not use printing presses, enabling the crown to operate a censorship regime; but it could only limit, not prevent, the production of seditious materials.

The post-1688 regime allowed press licensing to lapse; it also largely concluded Britain’s transition to capitalism - with the foundation of a national bank, international expansionism and mass proletarianisation following. The new political regime was somewhat unstable, with the Tories and Whigs emerging both as parliamentary parties and broad trends of political allegiance throughout the country. The monarch would have to pick his or her way through this division; and the press represented an increasingly important arena where this would be fought out.

As the house of Orange gave way to the previously obscure Hanoverians, the relationship between the press and monarchy could be friendly or hostile, according to the prevailing politics. Even when friendly, it could be irreverent – George III, before his famous psychological frailties took hold - was often portrayed in cartoons of the era as an honest farmer, cleaning out the stables. William IV’s habit of producing illegitimate children and cheerful ‘life in sin’ with an actress energised the forerunners of today’s tabloids.

It was the long reign of his successor, Victoria, that set the pattern still in place today: though her popularity waxed and waned, by her death in 1901 her cult was immovable. This was not a mere accident, or an achievement of Victoria’s per se, but a question of wider politics. In this time, after all, the Whigs and Tories became the Liberal and Conservative Parties, with their more formalised existence and membership structures. The Conservatives deliberately promoted the royal cult as a point of British unity. Victoria’s title of Empress of India, after all, was an initiative of Benjamin Disraeli’s. Liberals were queasy about this overt imperialism, but it is notable that they came up with their own wizard wheezes to achieve such unity - for example in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and anarchy, which supposed that the construction of an English literary canon could integrate the masses.

Contradictions

But it was hardly surprising that the great and the good of the Victorian age should be so vexed. The empire reached its greatest extent, and thus the incidence of colonial revolts quickened, from Ireland to India. Domestically, the long period of enclosure and scouring of the shires gave way to the industrial era, and immediately to a nascent political consciousness among the mass of the workers. Chartism and trade unionism terrified the ruling class. (It was a demonstration of the pro-suffrage Reform League in 1866 that motivated Arnold to write Culture and anarchy.)

In the long run, it was the Disraelian Tory-imperialist-monarchist approach to the problem that had the most legs. And further transformations of the media helped it along. One consequence of the long struggle of the working class for some political voice - in the first place through alliances with Liberals - was the extension of literacy ever further into the mass of the population. That in turn created the market for the popular press. The Harmsworths first published the Daily Mail in 1896, and made it a stunning success by combining tittle-tattle, jingoism and - if absolutely necessary - journalism. Inevitably it spawned imitators; simultaneously the labour movement produced competitors like the Daily Herald and, later, the Daily Worker, and so the mass media became another front in the battle between capital and labour.

The monarchy was a great asset to the reactionary popular press; and vice versa, at least some of the time. The love of king and country stood as the content of good old English common sense; opposed to it were an army of fanatics, socialists and Bolsheviks (often of, let us say, cosmopolitan extraction). At the same time, radio took off as a mass medium, under the rule of the high Tory, John Reith; little enough dissent was to be permitted to the paternal elitism of the BBC’s founding director general. That said, even the most fanatical royalist editor would have struggled to keep the yellow press in line, given the chaos that afflicted the palace in the 1930s. The abdication crisis badly damaged the monarchy; Edward VIII’s pro-fascism was, of course, shared by the Mail and the Mirror at the time, but, as Britain geared up for war with Germany, the papers retreated from ‘hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ material, and Edward was gotten far out of the way to avoid any security risks.

Suspended unsteadily during wartime, the social contradictions that demanded a celebrity cult of the monarch re-erupted shortly after victory over Hitler was achieved. Winston Churchill was dispatched from office, replaced with a Labour administration that retained the wartime state ownership of key industries and built a new welfare state. The empire crumbled (though the British made sure the process was as bloody as possible, notably in the partition of India). In this period, the ‘celebrification’ of the monarchy was completed. Elizabeth II’s coronation was the first to be televised in full, and was a success in spite of the relative rarity of television sets - roughly 17 people watched each TV. In the 1960s, the decision was made to market the whole royal family. Parasocial identification with the monarch herself was no longer enough - they had to be visibly an ordinary family, like yours or mine (except, somehow, not).

In its own way, this was a pioneering move. The last 60-plus years have effectively been a continuous ‘reality TV’ show, and it is sobering to think how much is owed to the Monarchy Show by, say, Keeping up with the Kardashians. More recently, you would have to say that the media has had a better deal than the Firm. The Charles and Diana saga, Diana’s death, Andrew’s sweat glands, Harry’s Californian exile - all are catnip to tabloid editors and the social media ranters who follow them. Yet the portrait unavoidably develops of a family, alas, all too like yours and mine - a pack of bitter divorcees, alienated children and creepy uncles.

The accession of Charles III is, of course, a chance to reset the clock somewhat. He has mended fences enough with Harry that the latter will be present, at least. The media will not like that; a large part of the opprobrium directed at the notorious spare seems likely motivated by revenge on the part of the yellow press he so obviously and justifiably despises. His memoir described Rebekah Brooks - long-time Murdoch tabloid editor and CEO during the phone-hacking crisis - as “an infected pustule on the arse of humanity, plus a shit excuse for a journalist” (go off, king!) and made plainly clear that he blames the tabloids for the death of his mother. Last Tuesday, he resumed his endless civil battles against the Murdoch papers: he seeks £200,000 in damages related to phone hacking. (It was, specifically, the hacking of his phone that was first discovered and led, ultimately, to the whole scandal.)

Tensions

There is a tension, then, as there always has been, between the immediate interests of the newspaper proprietors as individual proprietors (or anonymous bodies of institutional investors, as the case may be) and the collective interests of the bourgeoisie per se. The latter demands, for its continued rule, some measure of consent from the governed and the mass media are a crucial lever for doing this. Yet the commercial interests of the tabloid press, US cable news and so on lie fundamentally in sensationalism. The bourgeoisie needs little tricks like popular monarchism to marginalise its enemies as unpatriotic vermin; but the tabloid as a particular business venture cannot help itself from transcribing the new king’s skin-crawling sex talk, the sordid details of his infidelity, the conspiracy theories about his ex-wife’s death, and so on.

It is perhaps not surprising that it does not work terribly well. The proportion of republicans in Britain hovers between 20% and 25%, and among the young rises to 41%. Small wonder: nobody under 45 can remember the fairytale wedding of Charles and Diana (another great TV event, and the model for the pile-up of ceremonial occasions of the last 15 years). We can only remember the tampon fantasy, the tell-all interviews, and the paparazzi flashbulbs in the Paris road tunnel.

Yet this sentiment is essentially invisible this weekend. The blanket uniformity of media coverage of the coronation; the popular celebrations, enforced by bribery (an extra bank holiday) and implied threat (‘Why aren’t you joining in the pledge of allegiance, exactly?’); the sheer tonnage of bunting and memorial tat in every shop - all conspire to give an impression of totally undivided monarchical patriotism that would be thought a little gauche even by the first queen called Elizabeth.

That is, in the end, because the 20% (let us lowball it for the sake of argument) is a mere statistical aggregate of individuals, liberals and socialists and social democrats - indeed no doubt some rightwing libertarians who merely resent the tax subsidy. An organised left with any real roots in wider society, ie, a Communist Party, might not be able to capture that sentiment in whole, but it would be able to give it form and direction; crucially, it would be able to give it media to equal those of the bourgeois monarchists.