Twenty years ago this Wednesday, the woman Diana nicknamed “the rottweiler” entered Windsor Guildhall in a tasteful oyster-silk coat and a big white hat, and walked out with her prince. Onlookers back then were respectful and cheery; the late Queen remarked that her son was at last “home and dry with the woman he loves”. And over the intervening years, “the most hated woman in Britain” has been transformed into “the nation’s grandmother”; harmless, homely and horsey. These days she more resembles her mother-in-law than a minxy Jezebel. This is, after all, a woman who relishes “cooking her own simple supper on the Aga leaning over her dogs… listening to The Archers”. How could one resent that?

But our Queen’s status as “the other woman” has never quite left her, despite the tradition of royal mistresses being far more conventional than the romantic fairytale marriage Diana represented. Joking about ancestral infidelities (that of Edward VII and Alice Keppel) on their first meeting marked Camilla out as a consummate aristocrat — a realist who accepted the chasm between love and marriage, passion and practicality, which persisted in high society. When Charles and Diana became engaged, Prince Philip was pleased because the leggy Spencer girl would “breed in some height”. We commoners find this hard to accept, the judging of the quality of a match by hands, like the purchasing of a racehorse. Hilary Mantel, though, knew that royals are a “breeding stock, collections of organs”. The legs, then, were just part of the cynical selection process for admission into monarchy, and Camilla, so long content with remaining the “Gladys” to her “Fred”, understood this.

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Quite different from the moral codes the commoner abides by, the gentry have until recently always maintained fashionable French-court conventions of infidelity; the role of maîtresse-en-titre was formalized in Paris and emulated in England by Nell Gwynn, Barbara Villiers, the Boleyn sisters et al. Other European monarchies exercised more pious discretion; Spain, for example, laboring under austere confessional Catholicism and the long shadow of the Inquisition — with its emphasis on moral surveillance — couldn’t tolerate such transgressions. Conversely, in 14th-century England, affairs of both men and women in the landholding classes were “far from uncommon”.

Camilla’s story represents an adherence to, not a departure from, the sexual mores of the haut monde: the expectation of romantic love within the practical and contractual alliance-and-dowry structure of marriage — an expectation naively held by the teenaged Diana — is a relative innovation. The late Queen’s temporary froideur towards Camilla — “that wicked woman” — was connected not to the existence of the affair, but the fact that it was permitted to derail the marriage of her heir, a betrayal of convention rather than morality. She herself had never strayed, but it is almost certain her husband and various of her children had. Do what you will, but don’t rock the boat.

Noble mistresses existed precisely because the requirements of matrimony were more stringent than in general society: Camilla was, let’s not forget, discounted from the role of Charles’s wife as recently as 50 years ago because she was not a virgin. Prevented from marrying a paramour for arbitrary reasons of protocol, the nobility accepted the role of mistress as a satisfying, if cynical, alternative. Of course, this arrangement is unacceptable to the British public, whose views on infidelity are exceptional in having remained unchanged despite other attitudes on sex and the family liberalizing. One study from 2023 found that, over the course of 40 years, people had become overwhelmingly more tolerant of same-sex couplings, premarital sex and having children out of wedlock — yet the figure who now agreed that extramarital sex was “always wrong”, 57%, was a slip of just 1% from 1983.

Against the force of these baked-in attitudes, how was Camilla to be brought into the fold? In practice, her rehabilitation involved a series of carefully stage-managed photocalls, a modern royal tradition; this remains one of the few elements of royal life I covet — how I’d have relished being papped looking conspicuously serene after any number of my own romantic clangers. The setting was chosen as Camilla’s 50th at Highgrove; unfortunately she was rather upstaged by Diana’s appearance in a revenge swimsuit, which plastered the tabloid’s front pages that same day. She went quiet after Diana died in Paris just two months later; as every Sex and the City devotee knows, you cannot compete with a dead wife.

An attempt was revived a couple of years on, with a well-choreographed exit from a party at the Ritz. It seems incredible now to think of Camilla as having to be introduced to the public like vegetables hidden in a fussy child’s pasta sauce — but we must remember that the Camilla-Diana melodrama was not just about two women, but about how we expect women to conduct themselves as wives and mothers.

Just as with Angelina Jolie, Monica Lewinsky or indeed Helen of Troy, the greatest moral outrage is generally reserved for the woman who strays, not her partner in crime. Society affords men more forgiveness than it does women; the poor helpless darlings submit to what is so often framed as an insurmountable biological instinct. Women, though, are encouraged to be understanding of their partners’ toddler-level command of their impulses; no such grace is afforded to the Camillas of this world. Why?

Here, the mysterious workings of love are depressingly explicable with science. The theory goes like this: men tend to cheat more frequently and with many more partners via one-night stands; women tend to be unfaithful only in order to “trade up”, carefully risk-assessing a tactical punt for better security and resources for their children via a “mate-switch”. Evolutionary biologists theorize that these behaviors are connected to genetic imperatives: while infidelity can be disruptive in a community, it can also diversify the gene pool, produce more young and provide children with the most suitable substitute fathers possible.

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The double standard in shaming, by extension, makes sense — evolutionarily, high-risk sexual behaviors are more detrimental in women than in men, and so sexual prejudice in attitudes towards infidelity was useful in the world of animal skins and clubs. This also explains women’s particular ire for other women who cheat (in a recent conversation with my mother about this very issue, she said “well, look at Anthea Turner”, still tutting over beef from 30 years before). Women are gatekeepers of sexual morality because of their compulsory caretaking role; it is they, then, who are the most repulsed by peers — or indeed royals — who cheat.

Camilla has been up against royal convention, the romantic fantasies of the public and evolutionary biology… but has her rehabilitation worked? At the Coronation two summers ago, the new Queen seemed born to it; she has broadly commanded the respect of the public in the wake of her husband’s cancer diagnosis, and only been burnished by barbs from Harry. She is pleasant, uncomplaining and traditional, qualities that have evaded the Sussexes; she is stoic in the face of her forever-oddball husband’s fits of pique. Her approval rating has gradually ticked up over time, the fruits of a decades-long master plan. Yet it is difficult to imagine history remembering Camilla more for this latter-day golden age than for the carnage of the Nineties, deliciously scandalous as it was.

The curious history of Camilla Shand, the plucky girl from the polo, tells us more about ourselves than anything else: it shows the British public its own sexual conventionality, the ways in which it remains stubbornly conservative. We may have forgiven, but forgetting is quite another matter. So exercise caution, lusty ladies — and if you must step out, make it worthwhile. Only an heir to a throne will do.

Instead, we get William Windsor, who carries himself with the quotidian air of a secular, modern Everyman: the sort of amiable public servant you might find working in a countryside charity. Watching his meeting with Donald Trump after the re-opening of Notre-Dame in Paris at the weekend, the royalty seemed to be on backwards. It was the democratically elected leader who came across like a monarch, grandly telling the actual prince he was “doing a great job” while Wills nodded and smiled like a bureaucrat.

It has long been presumed that even those retrograde nations that keep falling for strongman leaders will see the superiority of liberal democracy in the end. And this goes some way to explaining the hysterically overblown progressive panic about Donald Trump’s purported “fascism”. For simply by existing, and being popular, Trump contradicts this supposed arc of the moral universe toward rational, besuited proceduralism.

This must be frustrating for the progressives; the arc has been bending their way for a long time. In a 1923 essay, “Roman Catholicism and Political Form”, the political theorist Carl Schmitt was already cursing their triumph. In his view, the “economic-technical thinking” behind it — which today we’d call “managerialism” — displaced an older, more esoteric mode of representation with its “representative” government through elections and parliaments for a far.

What it replaced was “representation” not as a count of voters but a series of metonyms: parts that represent a whole, as “keel” might be used metonymically in poetry to denote the whole ship. In this mode, hereditary or appointed figures stand as representatives of distinct “estates” — that is, interests within the overall polity — such as the clergy, the landed gentry, the artisans and so on. But as we arrived in modernity, Schmitt argues, this understanding of “the principle of representation” was gradually lost — for it is the “antithesis to the economic-technical thinking dominant today”.

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But if this case seemed hopeless to Schmitt, something has changed. Whatever the official policies on the table, at the vibes level, the 2024 US Presidential election pitted the spirit of “economic-technical thinking” against that of “representation” in the sense Schmitt describes. Consider: Trump’s opponents offered what was by then very plainly a purely self-propelling managerial regime, whose ability to run entirely on autopilot was revealed when its purported leader became so senile in office that his dementia could no longer be hidden.

Against this, two of the most iconic images of his presidential campaign — Trump “working” in McDonalds, and Trump in a bin lorry — show him deploying the vocabulary of representation-as-metonym: in them, he stands as part-representative for whole classes (or, as the medieval world would have had it, “estates”) of the American electorate, especially in lower-paid and menial jobs.

And while there has been discussion of Joe Rogan and the podcast ecosystem, this is one of the less well-understood ways the digital revolution helped to win the election for Trump. That, as contemporary readers of the great 20th-century media theorist Marshall McLuhan are fond of asserting, “digital retrieves the medieval”. According to McLuhan’s theory, shifting to a new technology will often retrieve older social forms or ideas the previous technology seemed to have rendered obsolete. Contemporary McLuhanists argue that shifting from a print to digital-based information environment re-opened space for cultural norms and practices that were common in the Middle Ages, but which “arc of history” enjoyers had since come to view as relics of the past.

For example, digital media reliably produces increasingly neo-feudal concentrations of wealth and power, which in turn enables the rise of a new class of lords and princes. The same revolution has retrieved the medieval experience of signs and symbols as a living language, in the form of memes. And Trump is by no means the only political leader who has grasped the power of digital to retrieve political legitimacy in a register that’s far more like the one Schmitt describes than the “economic-technical thinking” he decried.

If Trump does this instinctively, perhaps the most obviously skilled communicator in this register is El Salvador’s leader Nayib Bukele. Bukele (or his social media team) is online a lot, plugged into the Anglophone meme discourse, and artful in cultivating his presence in this field. His X timeline blends retweets of frog jokes, conventional state announcements, and visuals from Little Dark Age edits of El Salvador’s armed forces to intimate and painterly visuals such as this, seemingly calculated to convey a sense of the king among his people, lit as if by the grace of God.

As for Trump, having secured his election at least partly via his instinct for internet-mediated medieval-style representation, he is now presiding over a de facto court his haters decry as markedly monarchic in character: picking favourites, greeting petitioners and toadies, and playing courtiers off against one another. Henry VIII was reportedly by turns charming, volatile, generous, and mercurial, and always completely confident of his right to power. And when I try to imagine life in his court, it sounds much more like being around Donald Trump than the polished, controlled, and formally powerless William.

And much as a medieval monarch would, Trump is choosing his inner circle from among the realm’s real lords and princes. This has always been a pragmatic consideration, for a monarch: how do you keep your nation’s most powerful close enough to be on your side, but not so close they try and depose you? Accordingly, Trump has already appointed enough billionaires to his cabinet to form a football team. Indeed, if we were in the 13th rather than the 21st century, these notables would likely already have been granted honour and titles. As it is, Americans don’t really roll like that; but perhaps first-name-only fame, plus serious proximity to the empire’s nuclear core, is the 21st-century equivalent. (Elon was also at Notre-Dame.)

But while in some ways most of this is just a different inflection on existing democratic norms, what’s distinctive about “representation” in the digital age is that you gain legitimacy via genuine affection between people and leader — and this is hard to fake. As disdainful politicians from Gordon Brown’s “Bigotgate” to the Boriswave migrant explosion attest, it’s easy enough in the UK to be elected as a parliamentary representative, via “safe seats” and the party machine, without feeling any special affection for or affinity with the people you represent. But for leaders exposed online, that’s almost impossible to disguise. Regular people may be busy, but they’re not stupid: they will swiftly identify a representative that disdains them, and take note, and hate them for it.

Genuine affection, on the other hand, will cover a multitude of flaws: a blessing for Trump, who is not short of them. And yet he has a clear love for America and Americans, evident in the way he can pose in a bin lorry, a McDonald’s apron, or a police mugshot and look iconic, rather than stage-managed. He may thus turn out to be a terrible leader; but he’s nonetheless a potent antithesis to the headless, faceless, “economic-technical thinking” order not in spite of but because of his personality. The same goes for Bukele: it’s clear, in the way he speaks to and about the people of El Salvador, that he views them as continuous with himself.

By contrast, it’s difficult to imagine Starmer feeling warm and fuzzy about ordinary Brits; he usually emanates something more like tightly controlled fear and disgust. As for William Windsor, I have no reason not to believe he feels some fondness for the people of Britain. But it’s an open question whether he’d ever represent us in this sense. After all, his whole dynasty, and mode of royalling, only came into being after Britain’s last absolute monarch was deposed in 1688. The “constitutional monarchy” that replaced it has always known itself to be defanged, a settlement that suited an increasingly mercantilist country and which has served Britain well enough for several centuries.

For the same deeply embedded historical reasons, I think Britain will have to grow considerably more fed up with our managerial overclass than we are even today, before we’re willing to revisit the pre-1688 monarchical register in any more serious a manner than the Faragist pantomine style. But there’s no reason to believe political legitimacy always and forever flows through the same channels. And it’s clear that something much more like the medieval version is now re-emerging, in the internet age, to challenge the managerialism Carl Schmitt so vividly depicted, and viscerally loathed. So perhaps there’s still hope for us; certainly I’d like to believe assisted political death by Starmerism is not Britain’s inevitable terminus.

So in this sense, perhaps the restoration and re-opening of Notre-Dame does indeed serve as sign. Not for moral collapse, but for the recovery of older forms we thought had burned to ashes. Both ancient yet brand-new, a restored medieval cathedral destroyed and then restored stands as a fitting representative for the restoration of medieval representation. I expect none of us will like everything about this development; but the managerialism it opposes is a whited sepulchre. Let it be defeated by its new, ancient antithesis; and in its place, long live the new kings.

When it comes to their media image, things could be worse for the House of Windsor. Last week, the fifth Netflix season of The Crown began after an overture of outrage deploring the drama’s distortion or fabrication of various episodes in royal history during the Nineties. While former premiers (John Major and Tony Blair) rail against the “malicious nonsense” and “complete rubbish” in the scripts, few champions of the “Firm” have paused to reflect that, even now, the royals enjoy a smoother ride than many of their ancestors.

James Gillray’s 1791 print “Hopes of the Party Prior to July 14”, described above, added one more acid drop to the flood of satirical engravings that lampooned the Hanoverian monarchy — along with other pillars of the ruling class — between 1780 and 1820. In this “golden age of caricature”, with Gillray, George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson as its lords of misrule, palace misconduct and political intrigue unleashed a level of obscene ridicule that makes the snide smears of The Crown’s lead writer Peter Morgan feel like the softest of touches.

Yet a glib contrast between Georgian ferocity and 21st-century gentility will only take us so far. The stance of the shape-shifting Gillray, in particular, is famously hard to pin down. Tim Clayton’s definitive new study of the artist, James Gillray: a Revolution in Satire, notes that his “ambiguous, enigmatic” pen means that “it is rare in mature Gillray for either side to be entirely right or wrong”. Is “Hopes of the Party” an awful warning against the sanguinary horrors of French Revolutionary radicalism (Gillray engraved it two years after the Bastille fell, but before the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette)? Or could it be interpreted as a parody of reactionary scare-mongering, a jibe at whipped-up alarms about the rotund Whig leader Charles James Fox — who features as George’s III’s executioner, while his gaunt Tory foe William Pitt dangles from that rope — and his reformist comrades? Proper satire slices both ways: different strokes for different folks.

Yes, Gillray and his colleagues could be brutal. In “A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion”, the bloated, gluttonous Prince of Wales recovers from his vices with an overflowing chamber-pot and bottles of pox-pills behind him. Chamber pots, in fact, became something of a running gag with Gillray. In “Lubber’s Hole — Or — the Crack’d Jordan” (“jordan” was slang for a chamber-pot), the future William IV, then Duke of Clarence, dives through a suggestive gash into a giant receptacle that represents his long-term mistress, the actress Dorothea Jordan. Even when he opted for an epic style, Gillray might be gross. In “Sin, Death and the Devil”, which alludes in his richly inter-textual way to Milton’s Paradise Lost, the wrinkled-breasted, Gorgon-haired Queen Charlotte intercedes in a fight between the naked Pitt and Thurlow (a rival minister), with her hand clasped over Pitt’s genitals. Although that particular scene did apparently give offence to King and Queen, the rudeness — and crudeness — of the “Prince of Caricatura” and his epoch can never be mapped neatly onto anti-Hanoverian attitudes.

Indeed, Gillray’s portrayals of George III and his consort as cheese-paring peasant bumpkins — as in “Frying Sprats, Toasting Muffins” — edged into outright affection. Gillray’s heyday coincided not with a fall but a rise in the royal household’s popularity after the débâcle of the American Revolution. When the widely-welcomed revolt against elite injustices in France turned regicidal and expansionist after 1792, the cross-Channel threat rallied sceptics to the House of Hanover. In “Anti-Saccharrites”, the frugal King is urging sugar-less tea on his daughters not simply to cut costs but as a blow against the West Indian slave trade. What “a Noble Example of Oeconomy”! And in Gillray’s master-stroke of loyalist toilet humour, “The French Invasion — Or — John Bull Bombarding the Bum-boats”, sturdy patriotism and poo gags reach a joint apotheosis. George III has morphed into the map of Britain itself (although he still wears a dunce’s cap in the shape of Northumberland) as he craps majestically — from somewhere around Lyme Regis — all over the hapless French fleet. As Tim Clayton puts it: “The daubs of the caricaturist produced no contempt for ‘Farmer George and his wife.’”

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Never mistake vulgarity for venom. Partisans both of the Windsors and the digital dukes of Netflix (a new elite if ever there was one) should reflect that mere rudeness about royals, however scurrilous or scatological, might not weaken monarchy itself. Critique, mockery and caricature — dim, cheapskate kings, randy, farting princes, blowsy mistresses and all — could leave the institution intact if the idea behind it remained robust. The flawed royal person (in Gillray’s time, that meant above all George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, then Prince Regent and, at long last, George IV) might guzzle, booze, schmooze, fornicate and plunder at will. But if the core faith in monarchy held, an artist’s vitriol-tipped burin would not in itself corrode the crown.

For much of the audience could still separate frail individual from sacred office. The medieval doctrine of the king’s two bodies — one fallible and mortal, the other an impersonal “body politic” — just about survived in many minds. In his terrific book on London in the great age of satire, City of Laughter, Vic Gatrell argues that star caricaturists “didn’t aim to influence the common people, still less to subvert the monarchical principle”. Besides, mockery usually shadows flattery. Dr Johnson dreaded the time when his name would cease to provoke “calumny or ridicule… for then I would be neglected and forgotten”.

Once the firm hold of an ideal starts to slip, however, and the public no longer accepts a necessary gap between person and principle, then even mild and oblique sniping, Netflix-style, may take a toll. In a disenchanted time, private life and public role have to align. Of course, the player in the royal show who best grasped — and acted on — that insight was the late Elizabeth II. Whereas the politician who has most shamelessly tried to revive in his favour an ancient distinction between the errant human being and the august office-holder who “got all the big calls right” was none other than Boris Johnson. Now there’s a target for some Gillray Redux.

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Gillray, Cruikshank and co. assaulted the royal family but not the royal function. In the age of Tom Paine, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, real revolutionaries certainly did the latter. The circles of the graphic satirists seldom overlapped with theirs, although in the 1810s the Cruikshank brothers would forge stronger radical links. However, even the implacable George Cruikshank fell prudently silent on royal matters after a paltry-sounding royal bribe in 1820.

In 1797, Gillray himself had taken a £200 pension from the Tories while remaining a “deniable” loose cannon. For many years he lived and worked in St James’s Street, in the belly of the Establishment beast. He would have spotted his victims en route to club, town-house or palace. Some called in to buy the sort of prints that depicted them as grotesque bags of piss, pus and wind. Fox himself — the engraver’s beloved bugbear over many years — dropped by to purchase a portrayal of himself as a swarthy, sinister Jacobin insurrectionist (“A Meeting of Unfortunate Citoyens”). He left Hannah Humphrey (Gillray’s landlady, publisher and chaste life-partner) with a cheery “Good morning to you”. The Prince of Wales himself made sure that lackeys came in to buy successive caricatures of his flabby royal personage. There were many of those. Between 1803 and 1810, the Prince’s establishment at Carlton House spent £57 (a lot) on Gillray prints of their master as a preposterous balloon of lust and greed. Sometimes, he just wanted them taken off the market. But vanity loves even a distorting mirror.

You might say that the surface cruelty of Gillray’s time masked an underlying kindness, or at least solidarity. The royal satirists wanted to rock the boat but not to sink the ship. Whereas The Crown lavishes an unctuous, pseudo-respectful concern on its characters (Morgan has called the series a “love-letter” to the late Queen) while not caring too much if it does its bit to send the yacht of monarchy beneath the waves. You may think that a desirable outcome. If so, then the comic hyperbole of Gillray and Cruikshank would offer a more honest mode for hostile royal soap-opera than Netflix’s gear-crashing blend of fancily-written tittle-tattle with boring slabs of po-faced court reportage for “balance”.

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At the high noon of caricature, ribaldry and reverence could rub along together. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s slide from liberator to despot (brilliantly chronicled by Gillray himself) handily blocked the path in many British minds that might have led from burlesque to the barricades. In any case, chortles tend to limit theoretical critique. As Clayton says of prints such as Gillray’s “Presentation of the Mahometan Credentials”, with the Turkish ambassador pointing a long phallic scroll at the royal couple as Pitt the pet monkey cowers at their feet, “they induce laughter, not hatred”. Even (especially?) at their rudest, Georgian and Regency graphic satires have a strong flavour of Carry on up the Throne-room.

Their artists’ slaps and digs bruised Hanoverian flesh but broke no vital bones. Once the tide turned in the direction of reform and respectability in the 1820s and 1830s, memories of the debauched Prince Regent and his idle clan did nothing to stop the emergence of Victoria and Albert as discreet, bourgeois monarchs for an increasingly discreet, bourgeois nation. Today, in contrast, the simpering faux compassion of The Crown has neither the candour of a principled aversion to royalty nor the coherence of a principled defence. Gillray and the satire squad’s tough love did not kill the monarchy; arguably, they made it stronger. In contrast, the unaccountable plutocracy at Netflix want to stifle it in a long, slow, sickly kiss of death.

But such is the nervousness that hangs over the monarchy’s future, in any rendition of the national anthem there is a palpable charge on the words, “long to reign over us, God save the Queen”. In that moment, one can sense a shivering fear that the Queen’s death may open the path to a troubling future where the forces stacked against the British monarchy, from outside and in, begin to overwhelm it — without there being any unifying idea about what could come next.

The Queen’s being was not always fused in this way with a near ideal form of British monarchy. The joyful festivities for the Silver Jubilee bank holiday in June 1977, for example, felt as much about a country needing to remind itself that one purpose of a monarchy is to create such a national occasion, as a celebration of the Queen herself.

Since Victoria’s reign established the idea that the monarchy’s legitimacy had, in part, to rest on public affection, the British have not continuously loved quietude in their monarchs. There was nothing austere about Edward VII: he ate excessively, smoked too much, gambled, and had a string of mistresses. Queen Victoria feared her son would bring down the monarchy. But after Edward VII died in May 1910, throngs of people waited through the night under a deluge of rain outside Westminster Hall to see the coffin of a man who appeared, at least, rather to enjoy being King. When it came to his funeral procession, the crowds were much larger than they were for his mother.

But the present Queen is a successful part of a continuous story about duty that began with the monarchy her grandfather George V established. She is the last of a family trio. Although Edward VII did as much for the modern monarchy as his parents, his reign belongs to another world, one in which the British monarch still had real political influence. During the constitutional crisis of 1909-10, Edward VII successfully demanded a general election before the Liberal government could pass its budget after its defeat in the House of Lords, and then another before it could expect to legislate to remove the Lords’ right of veto — although he did not live to see that vote.

In Europe, he sought to check German power, leaving the Kaiser convinced his uncle was “Satan”, standing between Germany and its world destiny. By visiting Paris in 1903, against the advice of British officials, and transforming in just four days French public opinion of him, he played his part in the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Working his other nephew, Tsar Nicholas II, while influencing the appointments of the British ambassador in St Petersburg and the Russian ambassador at the Court of St James’, he was also instrumental in realising the 1907 Anglo Russian Entente.

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As the pre-1914 European world approached its dissolution, Edward VII, as elder statesman of a continent-wide royal family dominated by Victoria and Albert’s descendants, appeared a peacemaker. A popular song in 1909 proclaimed “as long as there’s a King like good King Edward there’ll be no war”. On the King’s sudden death, the Russian foreign minister Alexander Izvolsky declared: “We have lost the mainstay of our foreign policy.” In France, Edward was mourned in the republican corridors of power in Paris and in provincial towns. When the moment of crisis arrived in August 1914, leaving the Kaiser to contemplate the terrible necessity for Germany to wage war against both Russia and France to achieve any of his ambitions, he complained bitterly that “the dead Edward was stronger than the living one”.

No European monarch could ever have such hope and dread projected onto them again. By the end of the First Word War, Edward VII’s second son had turned Prince Albert’s House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha into the Windsors, surrendered the use of all German titles, and refused asylum to the Tsar and Tsarina, both his first cousins, to protect the British monarchy from the sins of association. Instead of continental leadership, George V ­— who had become heir on the death of his older brother from the Russian flu — offered Britain the idea of a monarchy based on dutiful, quiet service and a largely domestic royal family.

Of course, the Windsor monarchy was still bound to the empire in the Twenties. George V wanted to be an imperial king replete with imperial ceremony; before the war, he had insisted on travelling to Delhi to be crowned Emperor of India. But, whatever its creator’s imperial emotions, the post-1914 monarchy had, in a world where European decline was inescapable, to be detachable from empire. A good part of the Queen’s achievement has been to facilitate that imaginative separation while, through the Commonwealth, preventing the monarchy falling into British parochialism detached from the wider world.

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Above all, the emotional rituals of the new Windsor monarchy were tied to the rituals of remembrance created by the losses of the First World War. These liturgies were reinvigorated by the Second World War both in its national mythos of virtuous sacrifice and the imperial mobilisation of the Indian Army as the largest volunteer force in history. On 11 November 1920, George V unveiled the Cenotaph as part of a procession to Westminster Abbey for the funeral of the Unknown Warrior. On entering the Abbey two-and-a-half years later for her wedding to the future George VI, the then Duchess of York – the future Queen Mother – laid her bouquet on the tomb in honour of her brother who fell at the Battle of Loos, beginning a tradition for royal brides, upheld by the Queen and later the Duchess of Cambridge. At her own request, the Queen Mother’s funeral wreath was placed on the grave. The fusion of the seasons of monarchical life with the national remembrance of war is why the Queen’s absence from last year’s Cenotaph service was such a watershed moment. Nothing could state more potently that her reign is coming to an end.

In its post-1914 casting, the monarchy was far from constitutionally irrelevant. George V played his part in normalising Labour governments, and effectively demanded that Ramsay MacDonald form the National government when MacDonald came to the Palace to resign in August 1931. Until the Conservative party changed its leadership rules, the monarch had the formal discretion to choose a Conservative Prime Minister on the departure on an incumbent, a power the Queen exercised when she chose Harold Macmillan in January 1957 and Lord Douglas-Home in October 1963. But during George V’s reign, a great deal of constitutional service became passive: dealing with boxes without active responsibility for their content and performing the constitutional ceremony of the opening of Parliament.

In this requirement for quiescence lay a problem that would haunt George V and perhaps does the Queen. It is not only the monarch who must accept an inert role, but the heir after years of waiting for the Crown to be theirs. In George V’s case, his eldest son’s temperamental constitutional unsuitability was thoroughly compounded by his unwillingness to make a conventional marriage and have children.

But Edward VIII’s short reign paradoxically strengthened the Windsor monarchy. Once George VI acceded to the throne, he was helped by the very fecklessness of his older brother. What story could more demonstrate the idea of necessary duty than one where the stammering second son had to take the Crown from a once-idolised brother and remake himself as a public man? During the Second World War all aspects of the Windsor monarchy became one when that King and his Queen partook in the national experience of aerial assault by working in Buckingham Palace during the Blitz and refusing ministerial advice to send the young princesses to Canada.

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The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

The Queen’s inheritance of George V’s monarchy was complex. As was the case with her grandfather and father, the duties of the Crown should not have fallen upon her. But by the time she was born in 1926, her father had, given his brother’s attitude towards marriage, good reasons to suspect they eventually could; and her grandfather hoped, while she was too young really to comprehend what was happening around her, they would. If she shares with them an ability to accommodate duty foisted by circumstance, her temperamental dislike of excess has had to work, not in an age of war but amid rapidly rising consumerism and then a turn to performative public displays of grief. To heighten the dissociation, the appetite for communal expressions of emotion began in the days after Princess Diana’s death, when the Queen’s self-containment was the very opposite of the new aesthetic.

Given this divergence between the monarch and the times, it is perhaps unsurprising that the wholehearted affection felt for the Queen has only come in the second half of her life. This is in part the effect of the sheer duration of her endurance. But it is a function, too, of her character. She has absorbed change she had little reason to like, and so reinforced the story of duty to which the House of Windsor laid claim. Precisely because the country is significantly more secular than when she came to the throne, her Christianity is also an asset. Where the religious rituals of national life might appear hollow, she plays her part blessed by faith. Since some of the symbols are complex in a multi-national Union that was never a spiritual union, she also appears at ease in the ambiguity, seen at worship as she is at Sandringham in a church of which she is head and at Balmoral at Crathie Kirk, a church where she is not. As the United Kingdom has become more divided, she has simply carried on as head of state, as if as long as she performs her duty, the country will be more than it seems on the surface to be.

But the idea of the domestic royal family has been a greater burden for the Queen than it was even for her grandfather. If, on the other side of her reign, lies a great unknown, it is one she has played her part in bringing about. What she has given of her own qualities to the kingdom coexists with mishaps with her heirs. In marrying her third-cousin for love, she inserted the Windsors back into the part of Victoria and Albert’s continental diaspora that had made it back to Britain through the wreckage of the First World War and its aftermath. But no more European royal weddings would materialise. Instead, Prince Charles was left caught between the idea he could marry for love and the eventual necessity of a near arranged domestic aristocratic marriage he was ill-equipped to tolerate. Meanwhile, the Queen’s longevity means that there have been three generations of spares to pain and embarrass her. Like George V before her, the Queen will not to live to see where the story of her life as royal parent of Prince Andrew and grandparent of Prince Harry ends.

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Our Queen’s finest moment

By Giles Fraser

For a moment, the future can wait, as it did for George V. His Silver Jubilee in May 1935, six months before his death, turned out to be an emotional occasion. After the crowds had lined the streets to see him and Queen Mary process to a service at St Paul’s, he took to the radio to declare: “I can only say to you, my very dear people, that the Queen and I thank you from the depths of our hearts for all the loyalty — and may I say? — the love which this day and always you have surrounded us.” After driving through the East End, he said, “I’d no idea they felt like that about me.”

The problem he bequeathed the monarchy as a father had an unexpected resolution: Mrs Simpson was the strange grace note in the story, the contingency that spared the country a disastrous monarch during an attempted conquest. Since Andrew and Harry are not heirs who can be broken or redeemed by the Crown, there will be no resolution to the contrasting problems they cause; the Queen must pass them unabridged to Prince Charles.

Beyond his brother and youngest son, Charles will inherit a Crown that has reached a stasis by very virtue of the Queen’s remarkable success. She was sufficiently formed by the Second World War to be George V and George VI’s spiritual heir. But no child or grandchild of hers could ever have been like her, whatever kind of parent or grandparent she was. She must know the future monarchy, if it survives, will be one that has of necessity again been reinvented.

By giving unflinching service according to the Windsor character script and rituals she has emphatically answered the question of what purpose a constitutional monarchy still serves. There will not be such a sharp rejoinder to republicanism ever again. This will be Prince Charles’s burden. It will also belong to us all who are the Queen’s subjects. If we want the monarchy to continue, we will have tacitly to give our consent to leaving the Age of Elizabeth Windsor behind.