Royal funerals have died - and we won't see their like again

Prince Philip will get his "no fuss" wish this Saturday, writes George Pitcher. But it couldn't be otherwise - it's about how we tell our stories now...

When the Egyptian pharaoh King Djer died in around 3000 BC, getting on for 600 retainers were buried with him in and around his magnificent tomb. As the seminal 1983 work Ancient Egypt: A Social History notes with almost regal understatement, it’s unlikely that so many of his servants died simultaneously of natural causes – so they were most probably human sacrifices, despatched to serve the pharaoh in the afterlife.

So you could say that they were heavily invested in the funeral. But then they weren’t looking forward to a Masterchef final in those days. By contrast today, the BBC receives a record-breaking email-bag of well over 100,000 complaints for its schedule-clearing coverage of the passing of the Duke of Edinburgh.

No pharaoh, Prince Philip had allegedly claimed, among his last instructions, that he didn’t “want a fuss”. But then he wasn’t fond of lese majeste either – any more than is his wife of 73 years. Any vicar knows that the “don’t fuss” directive from the dying over their funeral arrangements ranks in disingenuousness only with “I don’t want an anniversary present”.

It’s not so much that the nation has taken the Duke at his literal word over the fuss quotient. It’s more that there seems to be something of a paradigm shift over royal obsequies. If that is so, we may be anticipating a lesser degree of hair-tearing and garment-rending when The Queen herself passes – important to pay our respects, yes, but no reason not to broadcast a football match on BBC One.

Californian reality show

An assumption to date has been that, while British monarchy deteriorates into a Californian reality show with its younger members, deference for its wartime generation endures. But it begins to look like deference may have pre-deceased the Queen and her late consort.

Take a step back two or three monarchs (depending on whether you count Edward VIII) and see how different things were. In analysing the Victorian death cult, Professor Simon Heffer records that a

nation increasingly conscious of its stature, and of its history, felt that marking the passing of great men in an ostentatious and indulgent way was de rigueur. It validated the average Briton’s idea of himself as much as the standing of the deceased.

Great women too. When Queen Victoria died, she didn’t have any retainers executed, so far as one knows, to serve her in the Elysian version of the Isle of Wight, but as Heffer again observes: “The Victorian cult of death had full expression as the presiding spirit of the British nineteenth century went to her grave.”

Mind you, that was as nothing compared with Tudor monarchs. Elizabeth I and her fat father Henry had hearses that were effectively model mausoleums, with life-size effigies of themselves on their coffins and an armed guard at a sleep-over at Syon House in Kew on the procession to Windsor to prevent jewel looters. (Interesting to note that in the pre-television age a funeral at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, where Prince Philip’s will be held, was considered anything but “no fuss”).

The tomb of Queen Elizabeth I, Westminster Abbey

The Tudor doctrine of divine right, God’s mandate for the ruling monarch, and the Victorian idea of a Queen’s funeral projecting the grandeur of realm and empire drove these occasions. When our own HMQ meets her maker we can still expect the fuss-o-meter to go temporarily off the scale, but nothing like to the degree of its historical precedents.

The recent concentration on Britain’s place in the world and its exceptionalism that was wrought by the Brexit process doesn’t appear to enjoy its expression in the circumstance of royal demise, where you’d expect to find the joy of sovereignty (geddit?) so cherished by a national majority of EU-leavers.

Our Queen inherits the title of Supreme Governor of the Church of England from those Tudors, but the decline of the royal funeral is only partly to do with growing secularism. Or, rather, it’s as little to do with secularism as it is to do with republicanism, neither of which historically have ever got much traction in undermining the popularity of the royal family.

No, the issue here is less theological than it is teleological; it’s about the narrative that royal subjects tell about themselves, or how we understand the totemic players in our national story.

To measure this, we need less a fuss-o-meter than a floral metric. The sea of flowers outside Kensington Palace when Diana, Princess of Wales met her untimely end in 1997 was a tide of self-association met at its flood. The British public – in every respect a royal audience – for right or wrong identified with this troubled and tormented outsider, not with her former errant heir-apparent husband and his blue-blood family. Diana’s tale of brokenness and redemption had become British Everyman’s story, not the monarchical realm of late-empire and state flummery.

On a different scale, it’s the same story with the bouquets and wreaths that gathered around the bandstand on Clapham Common for the murdered Sarah Everard’s rudely-interrupted vigil last month. In death, she had become Everywoman’s symbol of fear at the hands of the oppressively violent male of the species.

The floral index marks a tectonic shift in society for we commoners. And it’s worth asking what the reason for this is, rather than simply ascribing phrases such as “end of deference” or “royal soap opera”.

Social Contract

Part of that reason can be found in the European Enlightenment, when thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham ushered in the sanctity of the individual and his/her liberal rights. Particularly, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract established the principle, radical in its day (and still so for the lawless parliament-proroguing Boris Johnson), that the state and those who govern only do so with the consent of the governed. Quite a demotion for a monarch who is head of state.

The post-Enlightenment triumph of the individual arguably reached its economic apotheosis a couple of centuries later in Margaret Thatcher. As PM, she got a bum rap for her “no such thing as society” comment – it was actually meant more kindly as a duty of care by and for individuals. But the triumvirate primacies of wealth creation, consumerism and the markets (and therefore personal choice) were genies that were never going to get back in the bottle.

An unintended (presumably) consequence has been for famous people to be treated as commodities, of which everyone wants their piece. Celebrity status is owned by those who grant it (cf. Bentham), who will emote endlessly if it’s taken away from them (cf. Princess Diana). But duty, patriotism, service, perseverance, compassion and all the other qualities of nationhood that Prince Philip endeavoured to represent? Boring…

My guess is that the viewing figures for the Duke’s funeral on Saturday won’t be as high as for the programmes viewers complained of missing when he died. And when it’s the Queen’s turn to be re-united with him in immortality there will be a tremor of nostalgia for a national story that it’s all over. Then it will be truly over – stream Harry’s Hour on Netflix by all means, but popular pageantry? Do us a favour.

The story is one of a monarchy that was treated as mysteriously remote, moving to being pointed at with a TV remote by couch potatoes. The social contract has expired. The royals can’t take the people with them in this life, any more than pharaohs could take them into the next life to serve them there.

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.