By George, don’t take royal pomp too seriously

12 April 2012

The brilliant new film The King's Speech, out tomorrow, is the best royalist propaganda for years, possibly ever.

George VI's struggle to overcome his stammer with the help of a cheeky Aussie speech therapist is hugely touching — and then the great speech he is finally able to make on the radio, on the day war is declared, September 3, 1939, unites the nation.

We see the King's subjects up and down the land listening with rapt devotion — gents in a club, soldiers gathered around a truck, stricken pensioners in a pub. There could hardly be a more potent ad for the Crown.

On the one hand, it makes you feel as never before that being the monarch demands the greatest of courage and self-sacrifice. On the other, it suggests that only the King could have brought the people together so effectively. This is the monarchy's finest hour.

Before the film carries us all away, it's instructive to take a look back at what people actually thought at the time. Take the abdication crisis, naturally presented here as the gravest of events.

When it happened, in December 1936, Evelyn Waugh made this imperishable entry in his diary: "The Simpson crisis has been a great delight to everyone. At Maidie's nursing home they report a pronounced turn for the better in all adult patients. There can seldom have been an event that has caused so much general delight and so little pain. Reading the papers and even listening to announcements that there was no news on the wireless took up most of the week."

A great delight to everyone: once you've read that, you need never feel automatically pious about such historic events ever again. We can permit ourselves to guess, I think, what Waugh might have made of Princess Diana's funeral.

Then again, just look at the entry for the day of George VI's death in 1952 made by that most sympathetic of diarists, Frances Partridge. As she was cooking lunch, her daily rushed in and told her the King had died in his sleep. "Isn't it awful?"

Partridge didn't agree. "My first reaction was to think Lucky fellow, to die so peacefully'. Then came the implications: a young Queen, new stamps, court mourning — only faintly interesting, but certainly not awful'."

The radio coverage was quite ridiculous, she thought, with its "bulletins of thunderous gravity and richly revelled-in emotional unbuttoning The whole effect is of ham' acting; and a lot of nonsense is being talked about the relief necessary to our tortured feelings'. What the public is feeling is a sense of great drama, not at all unpleasant."

"To talk of personal sadness is absurd," Partridge observed. "When a great actor, artist or writer dies, one feels sad for what one will miss But the King is after all at once supplanted by a Queen, who will, I'm sure, do just as well; and though he was probably a good, hard-working man, there are plenty of other such."

Plenty of other such: to find somebody delivering such brisk sense on the very day that history is made is tremendously heartening. Frances Partridge would not, I think, have been moved to tears and loyal subjection were she to have seen The King's Speech. Nor need we be. And as for those upcoming nuptials

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