Can the US love affair with the Queen outlive her?
The American networks have been curtseying to her majesty all weekend. The royalty of US television, the anchormen and women, have set up camp outside Buckingham Palace to gush about monarchy, marvel at the ceremonials and cringe about the weather.
Clutching their popcorn and perhaps handling mugs of tea, millions have been watching from their sofas. Here in Washington the great and the good raised a glass to the Queen and hummed along to God Save Our Queen on the manicured lawn of the British ambassador’s residence.The Dutch, Danish or Swedish royals don’t get that kind of treatment.
President Obama, the son of a Kenyan, who once bitterly resented Britain’s colonial footprint, genuflected to the Queen in a special television address. The founding fathers of America, who fought the oppression of royalty to create the land of the free, would have found his words incomprehensible, if not indecent.
So what explains the American republic’s love affair with British royalty? For the crowds who got up at dawn last summer to watch Wills and Kate tie the knot, it is the rare combination of family soap opera, regal extravagance and fairy tale, all wrapped in the cloak of history that appeals, especially to a young nation like America. Royalty offers an old and familiar spectacle that is so outlandish you couldn’t make it up.
For others, like former secretary of state George Schultz, who served under Ronald Reagan and met the Queen on a number of occasions, the monarch is a symbol of post-war freedoms, the discreet and unwavering embodiment of the much-vaunted special relationship between London and Washington.
“A monarch as a symbol of freedom? Isn’t that a bit ironic” I asked him. “Not at all,” he replied. “She is part of the system that guarantees those liberties.” Again I can imagine George Washington or Benjamin Franklin spinning in their graves.
The emotional birth of a relationship that turned an ocean into a “pond” was World War Two. Since then it has had its ups and downs. But the prime ministers and presidents who sought to define it, use it or neglect it have come and gone. The Queen has been a constant.
Her hats, hairstyles and hosts at the White House may have changed, but she remains a benign witness to America’s century as much as to ours. And she has honored Winston Churchill’s advice after World War Two to stay close to the Americans.
Closer to some than to others. She seemed to like President Reagan, who was of course also Margaret Thatcher’s favourite. There was the Hollywood charm and the self-deprecating Reagan humour. But the two also shared a love of horses and went riding together in the grounds of Windsor Castle.
Former Senator John Warner, who was introduced to his second wife, the late Elizabeth Taylor, at a state banquet given for the Queen, also remembers how the monarch’s eyes lit up when she was shown around the stables of his first wife’s Virginia ranch in 1957.
It is hard to meet anyone in America who doesn’t go weak at the knees when they recall their encounter with the Queen.
The supremely-titled Chief of Protocol for the United States, Ambassador Capricia Penavic Marshall, gave me a rare interview (above) to describe her visit with President Obama to meet her majesty as the “pinnacle” of protocol. She described how she was “breathless for a moment” when she met the Queen for the first time. This is the woman who is at the president’s side during every visit of every head of state in the world.
The tiniest glimpse of normality behind the mask of nobility is cherished like an earth-shattering revelation: her majesty cracking a discreet joke, singing along to a song, patting a horse, or tapping her wrist watch and, like a fussing mother, telling one American president to “hurry along” on a visit to Buckingham Palace.
In a country that worships celebs, expects them to be incontinent with their feelings, and subjects all leaders to the harshest scrutiny, the Queen is different: inscrutable, mysterious and yet reassuring. The question is whether that love affair with monarchy will outlive her.
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