Long Live the Queen 23 Rules for Living from Britains
Longest Reigning Monarch 1st Edition
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Long Live the Queen!
TURNER PUBLISHING COMPANY
Nashville, Tennessee
www.turnerpublishing.com
LONG LIVE THE QUEEN
Copyright © 2020 Bryan Kozlowski
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Cover design: Lauren Peters-Collaer
Text design and composition by Karen Sheets de Gracia in the Palace Script, Mrs Eaves, and Adobe
Garamond typefaces.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Upon Request
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
20 21 22 23 24 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Live Long the Queen!
23 RULES FOR LIVING
FROM BRITAIN’S LONGEST-REIGNING MONARCH
Bryan Kozlowski
For Kristin, the loveliest sister in the land.
What do you mean by “If you really are a Queen”?
What right have you to call yourself so?
You ca’n’t be a Queen, you know, till
you’ve passed the proper examination.
And the sooner we begin it, the better.
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Contents
INTRODUCTION God Save My Gracious Me
EAT LIKE A QUEEN
The Tupperware Lady
Queen of Scones
Tiaras if Possible
The Windsor Wets’ Club
WORK LIKE A QUEEN
The Most Excellent Order of Order
The Buckingham System
Airs and Graces
Vive le Devoir
PLAY LIKE A QUEEN
Her Majesty’s Pleasure
Fit to Rule
Tweedy Mode
Hibernate
THINK LIKE A QUEEN
The Merry Stoics of Windsor
Ostriching
View from Above
Stinking Willie
LOVE LIKE A QUEEN
Noblesse Oblige
Off with Their Heads
Some One Else
AGE LIKE A QUEEN
Radiance
Jubilee Me
The Marmite Theory
London Bridge
APPENDIX: The 23 Queen Be’s
Source Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
GOD SAVE MY GRACIOUS ME
OR, THE WHITE MAGIC OF WINDSOR
As far as I can see, some people have to be fed royalty like sea-lions fish.
—LADY STRATHMORE, MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER OF ELIZABETH II
It’s a curious sensation, to those who have felt it. So very much like a
“high,” one is tempted to begin with a drug-related analogy (though I’m
wary of mixing up narcotics with Her Majesty’s good name). And what
would be an appropriate royal parallel? It feels like a drop of ecstasy in a
bracing cup of Earl Grey? I didn’t think to record the particulars the first
time I experienced it, or imagine how much it would change the way I live.
The whole thing began so inauspiciously. Come to think of it, it caught me
as unaware as most mind-altering highs usually catch out naive new
initiates—half asleep and in my pajamas.
I remember it was early, very early, on the morning of April 29, 2011,
otherwise known as the wedding day of Prince William and Catherine
Middleton. Feeling like a groggy version of Ethelred the Unready, I wasn’t
quite sure what I was doing up at this hour, stumbling in the dark to turn on
the television, momentarily blinded by the frenzied mass of waving Union
Jacks. It certainly wasn’t due to any obsession with the royal family whom,
at the moment, I was finding slightly hard to forgive for arranging the
whole “wedding of the century” thing in the morning, without apparent
thought for the inconvenience posed on their ex-colonists across the pond.
At the time, I was no more intrigued by the workings of royalty than a rush-
hour commuter is intrigued by the occasional glimpse of a rainbow across
the freeway. It was pretty when it popped out from its lofty abode, and I
was content to simply stare. To watch the pageantry of a royal wedding, to
be just another spectator of this ancient, beautiful and, perhaps, rather silly
spectacle was good enough for me. And when all the hoohah was over, to
promptly stumble back to bed was my only ambition. I was not one of Lady
Strathmore’s sea-lions barking for more. Or so I thought. But oh no; this
royal rainbow had its way with me.
As the dawn rose and the Abbey choirboys sang and the trumpets blared
and the sea of fascinators bobbed merrily in their pews, some sort of strange
magic took over. If I may briefly sound like a spacey druid, that morning
Westminster Abbey felt like a power outlet, pulsating sheer joy, the heart of
euphoria on earth, and I was plugged in, baby! I felt more alive, more
human, more capable of checking off whatever to-do list I could possibly
dream up. I might even have attempted a semi-successful cartwheel to mark
the occasion, something which normally filled me with bodily dread. But I
didn’t analyze the experience or chalk it up to anything more than simply
the thrill of watching a live television event (with the cross-reference
thought that, yes, perhaps I needed to get out more).
The encounter would have passed me by entirely if it wasn’t for the
premier, years later, of a little show on Netflix called The Crown. Watching
it brought back something similar to what I experienced on Will and Kate’s
wedding day—an irresistible urge for personal improvement. There was
something contagious in the way actress Claire Foy portrayed Elizabeth
Windsor. Episode one had hardly finished and I was already standing taller
and conducting myself with more bodily grace and decorum. I stopped
short at trying to learn the Queen’s cut-glass accent (I totally didn’t), but
you get the picture. Apparently watching the splendor of monarchy—even
via a dramatized miniseries—brought out the better, more polished side of
me. I reckoned there were only two possible explanations: either I’m a
long-lost royal simply acting out my natural destiny (I’d settle for
Anastasia’s fourteenth cousin) or I’m just a royal dweeb.
Turns out it was nothing so personal. With the hindsight of an entire book
behind me, I can now say that I was simply an unconscious participant in a
universal phenomenon affecting millions throughout history. Its roots lay in
a fascinating blend of cultural anthropology, quasi-religious symbolism and
tribal magic. The ancient Greeks had a closely related word for the concept
—kalokagathia, an ideal of personal grace and beauty, believed to be the
birthright of the high born, which often inspired yearnings of excellence in
lesser mortals. Watching the great and good stirs us to greater goodness. In
other words, royalty tends to rub off on its spectators. And rather
fantastically, the British monarchy is one of the last remaining institutions
where you can still observe and experience kalokagathia, in its purest form,
today.
Royal researcher Jeremy Paxman calls it the “benign influence” of the
Crown, something that makes countless cynics drop a curtsey in front of the
Queen and impels many more to stand bolt upright in their living rooms,
should Her Majesty appear on their television sets. Helen Mirren famously
experienced the sensation during her Oscar-winning performance in the
film The Queen. Brought up with staunch antimonarchist tendencies,
Mirren admitted to previously having “a Sex Pistols attitude to the Royal
Family,” explaining, “It wasn’t a world I was enamoured with.” Yet her on-
screen role as Elizabeth II worked an inward alchemy, gradually
transforming Mirren into a self-proclaimed “Queenist” who felt no shame
in shouting Elizabeth’s praises to a bunch of equally bemused Americans on
Oscar night. “I basically fell in love with [her],” said Mirren.
Loyalists and scoffers alike have tried for decades to winkle out how
and why this all works so successfully, how the Crown—currently occupied
by an unassuming grandmother, barely over five feet tall, with absolutely no
political power—can exert such tremendous power where it counts most.
Though most agree the mystery lies in the fact that the British Crown is
ultimately reflective and, for an unelected institution, far more
representative than you might think. As writer Rebecca West once famously
opined, to look upon the splendor of monarchy is to see “magnified images
of ourselves … but better, ourselves behaving well.” A sentiment earlier
echoed by The Times of 1936: “The Queen has come to be the symbol of
every side of life of this society, its universal representative in whom her
people see their better selves ideally reflected.” For Robert Lacey, royal
historian for The Crown, kingship gives us a peek into “the majesty of the
ordinary man.”*
People once shamelessly spoke of the English aristocracy as “our
betters” for a similar reason—in them they saw a more polished reflection
of themselves. Class systems have evolved, no doubt, but the impulse
appears ingrained. For instance, it usually stuns the press that crime rates
tend to go down during big royal events. Newspapers in London once
braced for a dramatic surge in thefts on Elizabeth’s coronation day in 1953.
Nobody knew what a tightly packed mob of 30,000 onlookers could get up
to. Their best behavior, so it seemed. There was a surprising decrease in
thefts that day. It happened again in the 1980s. Despite one of the biggest
precautionary police forces deployed for Prince Charles and Diana’s
wedding, nothing unorderly took place. “There is something about a royal
show which mysteriously reduces the crime rate on the day to negligible
figures instead of quadrupling it as everyone expects,” writes biographer
Elizabeth Longford, who attributes “the common source of grace” to
“royalty itself.” A grace which extends to children too.
When researchers asked a group of young schoolboys in London what
they would do if the Queen dropped by for a visit, one Paul Pitchely
imagined big improvements at home. He would make his bed, sweep the
floors, paint the house, do the dishes and, just to be sure, “I would put some
money in the meater so the lights would not go off half frow [sic] the dinner
…” Only the language of fairy tales seems appropriate for such a
motivating influence for good. To one observant housewife, who felt all the
royal tingles on coronation day 1953, it was just that. Nothing less than
“White Magic,” she said, was behind it all.
Royalty’s ability to cast this spell over the public, to literally make
people better, has deep roots in English history. For hundreds of years
faithful British subjects gathered in droves outside Westminster, anxious to
receive the “royal touch”—a conviction that one caress of the monarch’s
hand would cure them of certain disfiguring diseases.* Elizabeth’s
seventeenth-century predecessor, Charles II, was such an indefatigable
touching machine, he laid hands on more than 90,000 people during his
reign. Naturally, to perform this and other duties for the country, the health
of the monarch had to be preserved. So it wasn’t long before, in the public’s
imagination, the King or Queen’s health was symbolically linked to the
health of the nation itself, a legacy still strongly with us. Consider
England’s unofficial national anthem. The “save” in “God Save the Queen”
derives from salvus, Latin for “healthy,” making the anthem a veritable plea
to keep the monarch fighting fit, and likewise the country as a whole.
This symbiotic relationship is most evident on days of national
rejoicing. Whenever the English have something grandiose to celebrate,
they naturally congregate—not outside government buildings or the prime
minister’s residence but the monarch’s official home, Buckingham Palace.
As Winston Churchill once observed, “a great battle is lost: parliament turns
out the government. A great battle is won: crowds cheer the Queen.”
Evidently the modern psyche still requires a kalokagathia, someone to act
out the grace and greatness we wish to see in ourselves.
Arguably no other monarch in British history has understood that role or
performed it more successfully than Elizabeth II. For nearly 70 years on the
throne, she has never wavered in her belief in what The Times said of her
back in 1953: “In her is incarnate … the whole of society…. She represents
the life of her people.” To preserve her own life to the best of her ability is
nothing less than her constitutional duty. So much of the Queen’s daily
routine is fueled by this royal drive for survival, even down to the way she
shakes people’s hands and the temperature of her afternoon tea. Elizabeth is
“singularly blessed,” says biographer Craig Brown, “with what Evelyn
Waugh once called the ‘the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation.’” To test
the strength of that instinct is only to look at her ongoing achievements in
longevity. In 2015 Elizabeth broke the monarchial record, surpassing her
great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria as Britain’s longest-reigning
sovereign. She’s currently on her fourteenth prime minister (matching
George III’s hitherto unmatchable record) and has indirectly given Prince
Charles his own less flattering claim to fame: Charles has now waited
longer to assume the throne than any heir in English history.
Yet unlike other modern royals, Elizabeth has never needed a “lifestyle
manager” or health coach or personal trainer or therapist to achieve these
record feats. By her own assessment, she was simply “trained” for the task
from childhood. “You can do a lot if you’re properly trained,” she once told
a soldier she was commending for bravery, “and I hope I have been.” The
Queen underwent the core of this training during a specific era in Britain
and within a certain societal framework practically unrecognizable today—
a generation that approached living, working, eating and emoting very
differently from us. To playwright Alan Bennett, Elizabeth is “a living
archive” of a rapidly fading past, one of the last stalwart icons of a
generation that tackled life—its struggles and joys—with far more pluck
and good sense. Like the Star of the Order’s motto, emblazoned on the blue
satin cape she wears on special occasions, the Queen herself is a true
Auspicium Melioris Aevi, a “token of a better age.”
Even her critics can’t ignore her accumulated wisdom. Writing on the
milestone of the Queen’s eightieth birthday, the Guardian (hardly a loyalist
newspaper) had to concede the utterly remarkable: “She has served in a
demanding role, that of head of state, for half a century and has made barely
a mistake…. By the usual measures—namely sustained popularity and an
ability to avoid trouble—Elizabeth Windsor would have to be judged one of
the most accomplished politicians of the modern era, albeit as a non-
politician.” Little wonder Prince William looks more and more to the Queen
these days for inspiration. In preparation for his own role as future King, he
once jokingly admitted to longing for a sort of pocket-size reference guide
to his grandmother’s extraordinary life, to, as he says, “take all of her
experiences, all of her knowledge and put it in a small box and be able to
constantly refer to it.”
In a modest way, I like to think of this book as that “small box”—an
owner’s manual to upgrading to QE2.0 for yourself. In it we’ll explore the
