The co-chairman of the Conservative Party, Ben Elliot — a nephew of the Duchess of Cornwall — has been in trouble for the last week over allegations that his business profited from providing a client with access to the Prince Charles. The company, known as Quintessentially, is a “concierge business”. It posed the interesting conundrum in one’s mind, would I pay money to avoid having dinner with a royal person?
I mean, we monarchists recognise that there have to be people to occupy the royal role. And, to stop them being lonely, they need loyal, discreet courtiers. But for us non-courtiers, the possibility of actually breaking bread with them makes the heart sink slightly.
Charles must be under the impression that he is the greatest wit since Groucho Marx or Voltaire, as whenever you see him meeting his future subjects they are bursting into gales of nervous, sycophantic laughter. Anything he says makes them guffaw. Nerves prompt the hoots of mirth — “coo, look at me, meeting a royal” — combined with a wish for the whole strange experience to be over as soon as possible.
Archetypical of the awkwardness which occurs when non-courtiers meet royals was the moment when Dr Samuel Johnson was working in the royal library of George III and the sovereign decided to drop in on the great lexicographer. The conversation was as stilted as the ten thousand moments when our present sovereign asks someone if they have come far. The King said he heard that the doctor had lately been at Oxford, going on to inquire whether the library at Christ Church was bigger than the one at All Souls.
When he relayed the royal conversation to his cronies, Wharton, Goldsmith and the rest, Johnson preposterously claimed that the conversation had been an interesting one, and made the blustering boast that it was not for him to “bandy civilities with my sovereign”. In fact, “bandying civilities” is all a non-courtier is ever likely to do when these strange encounters take place. There is also, inevitably on the commoner’s part, an element of disappointment, as when Pepys set eyes on Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s toothy little widow, when she came back to England after the Restoration.
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He found her “a very little plain old woman, and nothing more in her presence in any respect nor garb than any ordinary woman”.
What did he expect? But to those of us who have occasionally been hoiked out of what might laughingly be called real life and placed beside a royal person at dinner, we know exactly what he meant. I got into trouble about 35 years ago for blabbing about a dinner conversation with the Queen Mother. Where did the idea arise that it was a sin to repeat the table talk of sovereigns? I did not think there was much harm in relaying her memories of hearing TS Eliot reciting his obscure verse. In the anecdote, first the King, George VI, then the little princesses and finally the Queen herself all got the giggles.
“He seemed just like a bank manager,” she recalled.
“I believe he did once work in a bank, ma’am. Do you remember what he recited?”
“Yes. It was a poem called The Desert”.
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Of course, snootily, I thought it was hilarious that this amiable Wodehousian lady could not even remember the name of The Waste Land. But afterwards I remembered that George VI’s electrifying wartime Christmas broadcast “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God” — was quoting the Minnie Louise Haskins poem God Knows which appeared in a volume called The Desert, and there was something retrospectively moving about Queen Elizabeth’s muddle.
Clearly it is a favourite royal anecdote, since I was told by Carol Ann Duffy that when she was made poet laureate she was asked to dinner with the Queen at Windsor Castle and Her Majesty trotted out the tale of having the giggles in the presence of our greatest modernist.
I met the Queen Mother at the table of Woodrow Wyatt, and our fellow guests were Peregrine Worsthorne and his first wife Claudie, who co-wrote the Peter Simple column in The Daily Telegraph. None of us, then, famed for our discretion, as she knew well. Woodrow led the hue and cry of outrage, as if I had broken the Official Secrets Act. After his death his diaries were published, at his request, in which he blabbed a whole lot of stuff about Queen Elizabeth which I do not suppose she would have much wanted made public — revealing that she was almost as right wing as Woodrow himself.
All water under the bridge but it had been an object lesson for me that if you respect the monarchy as an institution, as I do, you do not necessarily actually want to meet its earthly representatives.
Of course one can fantasise about which kings or queens in history you’d pay to meet. My two faves would be Victoria, because I have spent so long writing about her, and Elizabeth I, because she is so toweringly the most interesting and intelligent head of state this country ever had.
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Victoria loved meeting actors, singers and writers. As a young woman she cultivated the soprano Jenny Lind, and in old age one of her happiest moments when holidaying in the south of France was spending an evening with Sarah Bernhardt. But when she nagged Dickens to have dinner, after he had performed one of his plays, he made the excuse that he could not meet his sovereign while still covered in greasepaint. Wise man.