Every columnist likes to get letters in the paper, so I was pleased to read Bill Robbins’ letter last week, seeking to correct my British history. He sounded so sure I’d mixed up two of the many women involved in the struggles surrounding the succession of King Henry VIII that I plunged back into my history books to check.
Much to my chagrin, I found Mr. Robbins was right: I had muddled Jane Seymour (mother of my school’s founder, King Edward VI) and Lady Jane Grey, whom Edward named as his successor. It was Lady Jane who ruled as Queen of England for an ill-fated nine days before being murdered on the orders of Mary Tudor, King Henry’s first-born daughter. Mary seized the throne, reinstated Catholicism as the state religion, and subsequently earned the title “Bloody Mary” for her merciless murder of Protestant priests.
Such tales of regal misdeeds, mayhem and murder bring to mind more current events involving contemporary British royals. Chief among these is the recently published letter from Princess Diana, written in the months before her fatal car crash in Paris, in which she stated her belief that Prince Charles was plotting to kill her in a contrived car “accident” — to clear the way for him to marry his longtime mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles. A new inquiry into the crash has just opened in Britain.
Other dimensions of Charles’ sexual appetites have also been in the news, when he was reported to have been involved in sexual shenanigans with a male member of his staff. Lurid accusations and rumor were rife, and it was widely assumed, but never confirmed, that he had been caught in the act of buggering the butler. Speculation flared over the implications of having a future king who was not only divorced, but bisexual too! The British tabloids salivated over the prospect.
All this salacious rumor and gossip demonstrates the only tangible value of maintaining Britain’s royal family: the ever-present royal soap opera satisfies Britons’ lowbrow desires for prurient sexual tittle-tattle. The Queen and her brood can otherwise be reasonably regarded as rich parasites living off British taxpayers, as large sums of public money subsidize the royal palaces and the lifestyles of the pampered house of Windsor.
Politically neutered by democracy, the members of this regal clan have little effect on government, and are thus free to entertain their subjects with their dysfunctional behavior. This allows British politicians, by and large, to get on with the business of trying to run the country. Compared to Americans, Brits are less interested in the sex lives of their politicians, as they’re served regular helpings of scandal from Buckingham Palace.
Not that British politicians are lilywhite. There have been plenty of instances over the last few decades of bed hopping and infidelity. But apart from the 1963 Profumo affair when the Minister of War, John Profumo, was caught having an affair with prostitute Christine Keeler (a liaison that nearly brought down the government) sex has relatively little impact in British politics. Even in this celebrated case, the issue wasn’t the sex itself, but the discovery that Keeler was also sleeping with a Russian spy, giving rise to the danger of sexually transmitted state secrets.
Usually a mixture of sex and politics has been good for politicians’ reputations in Britain. Witness the case of former Prime Minister John Major, once considered the grayest figure of recent British politics. A couple years ago Major was revealed to have enjoyed a long and sexually passionate affair with Edwina Curry, a government colleague. Ms. Curry’s published opinion that although “John may have been grey to the world, he was a very exciting lover” who “treated her to . . . marathon sex sessions” earned the previously boring Prime Minister the approving title of “superstud” in the national press, where his “considerate and skilful sexual techniques” were publicly praised. This was a remarkable makeover for a man once derided for the sartorial sin of wearing his shirt tucked into his underpants.
If America possessed a hereditary aristocracy, long on pomp and circumstance but short on common sense, whose members allegedly had anal sex with servants, were accused of plotting to bump off their wives to marry their mistresses, or simply acted like spoilt, foul-mouthed brats — Princess Anne was recently quoted in the Daily Mirror and the Guardian newspapers as calling one of her assistants a “fucking incompetent twat” — then perhaps Americans would treat the sex lives of their politicians with more levity and less self-righteousness.
President Clinton’s ill-advised escapade of oral sex in the White House, for example, could have assumed its proper place as a private marital crisis between husband and wife.
Just think how much more efficient the government could be if Americans didn’t care too much about their politicians having sex! It’s a wonderful irony that in the UK, having a feckless royal family actually makes democracy better.
This article appears in Jan 21-27, 2004.
