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Vive la Belle Alliance! Why Her Majesty might be wrong about Brexit
Robert Lacey
History will record that Queen Elizabeth II has been the model of a constitutional monarch – impeccably non-political in public. But in private it is different. Her Majesty can be refreshingly outspoken, as we discovered last month from her comments on the ‘very rude’ Chinese – and the same is true when it comes to Europe.
Back in March, someone who can only have been Michael Gove, her own Lord Chancellor, revealed that the Queen had, allegedly, spoken up strongly for Brexit in a discussion with Nick Clegg. And while BuckinghamPalace has rightly deplored the impropriety of disclosing Her Majesty’s private remarks, the Palace has been careful not to deny that Brexit does hold a special place in her heart.
‘Give me THREE good reasons,’ she has, apparently, been asking her dinner companions recently, ‘why Britain should be part of Europe?’
Well, Ma’am, may I respectfully try you on this trio – King Canute, William the Conqueror, and William III? They were three of your wisest and most successful predecessors, and each of them was a European – a Dane, a Norman, and a Dutchman respectively.
As Your Majesty learned from your history tutor Sir Henry Marten, your Stuart predecessors had problems with those key constitutional s-words – ‘sovereignty’ and ‘sharing’. The two King Jameses and King Charles I and II had an aversion to working within a larger community like Parliament. They could not see how sharing power could contribute to the wider good – and also to their own survival. Charles I actually lost his life arguing the point, along with the 84,000 or more who died in the warfare he provoked.
It took the Dutchman William of Orange to modify the Stuarts’ obstinate divine right of kings in 1688 with his pragmatic experience of European democracy. His ‘Glorious Revolution’ was the foundation of the ‘English’ constitutional monarchy that stabilized our political and social progress – alongside the Church of ‘England’, with its reforming theology provided by a German (Martin Luther) and a Frenchman (John Calvin).
What was the original family name of the Queen’s beloved ‘Grandpapa England’, King George V, before he nimbly invented the House of Windsor in 1917? He was a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the name of the British royal family for seventy-seven years following the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert. And how about our present-day prince consort, Philip Mountbatten – born a Danish prince of Greece? More than three million British schoolchildren have benefitted from the challenges of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme, the inspiration of Phil the Greek (along with his German Jewish mentor, Kurt Hahn). Our monarchy is a mongrel miracle.
In this it is matched by the successive waves of foreigners who have mingled to create our imagined ‘island race’ that is actually inseparable from Europe – as we discovered recently from a segment on HM’s favourite wireless fare, Radio 4’s TODAY programme, which glorified the great ‘British’ victory over the French at the battle of Waterloo.
In fact, of course, it was the arrival of the Prussian army under General Blücher which won the day that Wellington might otherwise have lost – and the forces that Wellington commanded were a pan-European coalition embracing Russia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Sardinia and a number of German states. How right Blücher was to propose ‘La Belle Alliance’ as the ideal name for the battle, particularly as King George III, Britain’s king at the time, was also King of Hanover, the second largest state at that time in northern Germany.
We know from another leaked royal conversation that the European Court of Human Rights has annoyed the Queen as much as the rest of us. She felt that the Court’s shielding of Abu Qatada, the extremist Muslim cleric whom the Home Office wished to deport in 2012, ‘denigrated’Britain.
But the European Convention on Human Rights predates and operates quite separately from the EU. First proposed by Winston Churchill in 1948 and largely drafted by Elizabeth II’s first Home Secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe, later Lord Kilmuir, the ECHR is very much a British creation, and will continue to exercise jurisdiction over us even if we choose Brexit. So if the Convention still annoys us, in or out of the EU, it is for our talkative Lord Chancellor to devise an alternative.
We still have the Queen’s face on our stamps and our bank notes. We are outside both the Euro and the Schengen Agreements. London has made itself the Hong Kong of the modern Belle Alliance, thanks to the free flow of European money. We island mongrels seem to have negotiated a pretty flexible deal for ourselves inside ‘monolithic’Europe – and we’re still free to leave at any time in the future we might choose. If we vote to leave now, however, we will NEVER get back in again on such advantageous terms.
It’s not surprising that Elizabeth II’s views on Europe should be shaped by her fondness for the Commonwealth that she did so much to create. But the big beasts of the Commonwealth like Australia, Canada and India now operate their world-wide commerce from the basis of localized trade pacts – and our own local EU pact has set up or is busily negotiating Free Trade Agreements with 90% of the 50 Commonwealth countries outside the EU (Malta and Cyprus are both inside). Britain’s exports to the Commonwealth increased last year by no less than ten per cent.
Then there’s that other great achievement of the present reign, the resolution of the war with the IRA and the reconciliation with Ireland to which the Queen has personally contributed so much. Leaving the EU could restore the divisive barbed-wire along the twenty or more crossing points of the ‘hard’ Irish border – a body blow to the still fragile peace process in Ulster. And with the Scottish government resolute to remain inside the EU, Brexit could mean Break-Up for the United Kingdom as we know it.
So it’s a pity, Ma’am, that you won’t have a vote on June 23rd to help us strengthen the European moorings of your miraculously semi-detached realm. But I suspect that might be just as well.
Robert Lacey is the author of Majesty: Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor (Random House, 1977) and A Brief Life of the Queen (Chivers Press, 2012).