Heather Cox Richardson:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Now and Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. The topic of today’s episode is probably not going to be a surprise because it’s been the dominant story in the news for a good many days. And that is the death of the queen of England, Queen Elizabeth II, who died on September 8th.

So by the time you listen to this episode, her funeral will have taken place. As of now, over 750,000 people are predicted to travel to London for the state funeral so that they could pay their respect. So certainly this is a major event in England, but it’s also a major event around the world because Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1952 and reigned for over 70 years, the longest reigning monarch in English history.

So she has been on the throne for the lifetimes of a good many people and her monarchy and the legacy of her monarchy, and more than anything else the reaction to her death, led Heather and I to begin thinking about the interaction and the feelings about Americans towards other monarchs over the course of American history.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So I’m really excited about this because I have never been a royalty watcher. I have no feelings about it either positively or negatively. It simply has not been on my radar screen. So the research for this for me was really rather as if you said to me, “Let’s talk about American opera.” Where I know it existed and I know sort of the highlights, but I’m completely not invested in it, so I got to start really from scratch. And I have ideas, but I will have to say here that I want people to remember that I am not invested in this the way I am in somebody like Anson Burlingame. I had to say that for you, Joanne.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s such a you-and-me thing to say. No, it’s really not like Anson Burlingame.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So if I offend anybody by seeming flippant, I promise you it’s not deliberate. It is not internal to me in a way that so many other things are. But I think we found a really interesting take on this because what we’re really looking at is how Americans have interpreted the monarchy throughout American history. I think the point you just made is an important one, that it’s really the British monarchy that has mattered most to Americans. And I point out here that many people don’t even know that the same weekend the queen of England died, the queen of Denmark was celebrating her jubilee. She has been on the throne for 50 years and I did not find in my casual perusal really any articles about the Danish royal family or Queen Margrethe and you’d think that somebody would’ve mentioned these two things, but then again, I didn’t read that many of them; there may have been some out there. That being said, her jubilee did not make the same sort of splash that, for example, Queen Victoria’s did or Queen Elizabeth’s.

Joanne Freeman:

For sure. And I suppose one easy thing to say at this opening point is surely part of the obvious reason for the connection that the United States has always had with the British monarchy has to do with where the United States began before it was the United States, when it was the cluster of colonies that were all united in the sense that they were together underneath in the period that we’re going to be talking about today, King George III. But we began as a nation in a period when the monarch was beloved. So from the very beginning, the United States has had a bond with the British monarchy, and democracy makes that interesting and complicated in some ways, I think.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And again, I know I sound like an alien discovering Earth, but one of the reasons I also think that Americans care about this monarch so much is simply that there was so much back and forth between the countries and because we speak the same language, which sounds like something that should be incredibly obvious, but it wasn’t to me until I started reading about why we care about this particular monarch and not others, because we understand when there’s a coronation, we understand what they’re talking about.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, and culturally too, there’s a point early on in the American Republic, the first few years of the republic, when Alexander Hamilton is meeting with a British, not a formal government official, but someone who’s kind of there doing diplomatic duty. And he says to this person, “We think in English.” And I think that’s very much true, that there is a cultural and a political and a historical link between our two nations, that whether people are conscious of it or not, I think, still has an impact.

Heather Cox Richardson:

When we talked about the monarchs that we wanted to choose, we talked about a lot of them. We talked about why they might have been important, and then we ended up with three quite naturally. Then we discovered something, again perhaps a no-brainer, about the people we had chosen, and I think that’s significant, that is they all reigned for a gazillion years. Elizabeth II was on the throne for 70 years. We’re going to talk about Queen Victoria who was on the throne for 63. And this first monarch was on the throne for 60 years. By the time he was at the end of his reign, most people could not remember a time when he had not been king. Let’s start here with George III.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, let’s talk a little bit about King George II. Just years. Why? So we can plot him on a calendar. He ruled from 1760 when he was 22 years of age until his death in 1820 when he was 81. So I’m going to repeat that. 1760 to 1820 is a remarkable stretch of time if you think about all the things that happened in there.

Heather Cox Richardson:

An important one, because he’s going to be king at the end of the Seven Years War in England or the French and Indian war in America, which means into his lap is going to be dumped the need to figure out how the British government is going to handle the American colonies at a time when it’s desperate for money. And here’s a spoiler: it’s not going to go well.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, precisely. I mean, it is a time when the British monarchy, generally speaking, parliament and the monarch, needed to decide how they were going to fund and deal with the cost of the Seven Years War. But also they were thinking more broadly about the organization of the empire. These are major things that they’re having to rethink after the Seven Years War. And obviously, their colonies of various sorts all over the world are part of this. But as part of that shifting of how the British monarchy is dealing with their colonies, they begin imposing taxes of a sort that they hadn’t before. So I think probably most Americans, if you ask them about the Revolution, they will say in one way or another, “No taxation without representation,” or they’ll say, “It’s all about taxation.” But it was about more than that.

It was about the relationship between the colonies and ultimately the monarch. It was about where the colonies fell within the empire. And it was King George III who represented in the end the sort of final sense that American colonists had, that they had a place in the empire, that they belonged in the empire, and that the king, in a sense, was their protector. Before the beginning of the Revolution. And then the Revolution itself, Americans, American colonists, were loyal to King George. He was their king, he was their monarch. They sang to him, they did what you would expect people in a monarchy to do to their monarch. They praised and valued him, particularly when he took office. When he assumed the throne in 1761, there was all kind of waxing eloquent in favor of King George III, the young monarch, like the Boston Newsletter, in true 18th century style, “Hail princely youth! May guardian powers defend the Britain safety and to distant times transmit the honors of thine lengthened sway. Hail princely youth!” There was all kinds of hailing going on at the time for the new youthful king.

And throughout this period, 1760s, Americans, for part of them at least, were looking to the monarch as someone who they greatly respected. Benjamin Franklin, 1763, writes a letter in which he says, I am of opinion that King George’s virtue and the consciousness of his sincere intentions to make his people happy will give him firmness and steadiness in his measures and in the support of the honest friends he has chosen to serve him. We’re looking backward in time with hindsight and we know a revolution is coming, but looking forward in time, he’s a very much honored and loved monarch. So Americans feel quite favorably towards King George III, but then as he and parliament are beginning to reckon with how to organize the empire, how to deal with its finances, how to fund things, and they begin imposing taxes of a sort on the colonies that they weren’t used to having imposed, in particular internal taxes. American colonists were used to paying taxes on imported goods. They were used to paying taxes, having to do with matters that were shipped, basically, but not internal taxes regarding things that were in the colonies already.

So the colonists were not very excited about that. They blame a lot of these taxes and policies on parliament. It’s evil ministers to the king that are causing all the trouble. It’s parliament that’s causing all the trouble. And when you look at initially colonists trying in one way or another to appeal to the folks back overseas to fix things, they first are trying to appeal to parliament. And then when that doesn’t work, they send a petition to the king himself. There’s a point just before the Revolution really begins when Americans feel a height of loyalty and respect for the king because he is the only person in their mind who could be their savior at what they now perceive to be a parliamentary crisis. In a sense, that’s the peak of love of king and country for colonists. It’s totally counterintuitive, is when parliament seemed to be the core of the crisis.

Now what ends up turning this is some of the policies not only become more severe, but the king increasingly begins acting as if the colonists are actually in revolt and even begins in 1775 seeking Hessian mercenaries to send to the colonies. So basically, when he begins sending soldiers to the colonies, and not only that, but mercenaries to the colonies Americans rather quickly turn. We’re not talking about something abstract and ethereal like, “Oh, we shall no longer respect our monarch.” This was something that had a deep meaning to them.

That was a profound betrayal on the part of the king and there was a lot of emotion tied to it. And a great example of that, and this is in a sense going to be obvious, but you might not have thought about it this way before. If you think about the Declaration of Independence, which is the document that was intended by the Second Continental Congress to declare to the world why the colonies were declaring independence, we all focus on the initial opening, discussing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But in fact, the bulk of it, the part that at the time was most immediate was the middle part that we tend to overlook. And if you look at that, what it says over and over, and over again is, “He has done this to us. He has done that to us. He has, he has, he has…” It’s a long string of ways in which the king has betrayed his people.

You can feel, when you understand the context of this, some of the emotion behind that. So Americans very much for a time are drawing a political and to a certain degree a cultural identity from King George. But when this happens, suddenly Americans have to rethink not just their relationship with Great Britain, but what kind of a polity they’re going to be, what kind of leadership they’re going to have and what their relationship is in and of itself with executive leadership. A huge part of the 1780s and 1790s in the United States is figuring out who will lead a nation who will not be a monarch.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So one of the things that jumps out to me about this relationship of the colonists to the king first clinging really tightly, and maybe I’m wrong, but it almost seems like deluding themselves into believing he’s not behind the changes in the tax laws, that he has nothing to do with them because they keep saying it to him, “We know it’s just your ministers in parliament. We know you’re the good guy.” At some point, it almost feels performative, but I wonder if it sets up a pattern that I think is going to be important in the other periods we’re talking about in which people are able to divorce the head of the monarchy from the real changes that are going on in the empire and in the world itself. So that in a way it’s almost like being an anchor and being able to cling to that anchor while everybody’s madly rebuilding the boat and moving stuff around and doing all kinds of stuff. And then finally, when they have to, they can recognize that the anchor was almost a safety blanket, just to mix a metaphor.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s really interesting. One of the reasons why Americans are looking to the king is that I think they saw the king as a kind of constitution broker, the person who could be there for them and help with the problem with parliament. So I don’t think they’re totally deluding themselves, but I think your point is really important one. And that is, I think generally speaking, a monarch is a twofold figure. It serves a political function and also, as you’re suggesting, if they’re in office for long enough, is a person as well. And you can engage with that person in a way that enables you, if you don’t want to engage with the government itself, you can bond with the monarch and thereby bond with the country and have some distance from monarchy itself. Now, I think this is something Americans wrestle with forever, but I think you’re totally right that these monarchs who are in power forever, their identity becomes something that people can engage with and that they do engage with, that can be if they want it to be less complicated than the politics of that position.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and not just the politics, also the change of history. When he takes office, the Seven Years War or the French and Indian War in America is still going on. When he dies in 1820, we’re in an entirely new era. And if you’re nervous about going through the extraordinary changes of a period, having that guy just existing sort of says, “There is continuity.” They are a physical symbol of continuity.

Joanne Freeman:

Makes me think of Washington Irving’s story of Rip Van Winkle which, in a sense, captures that very thing. That Rip Van Winkle sleeps, I don’t know how many years supposedly he sleeps, but when he goes to sleep, all the taverns are in the King’s name and then he wakes up and they’re all in George Washington’s name. What that story is doing is really highlighting just what you’re suggesting here, that the world changes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Extraordinary changes and the monarch remains. But here’s a question for you. I’ve always wondered about this. After the Revolution and in the revolutionary war, what happened to the way Americans thought about the king and what happened to the way he thought about them?

Joanne Freeman:

There’s evidence, certainly… I mean, it’s a big moment when the United States, when it is a nation, sends its first diplomats over. John Adams is sent to meet with the king and that is a moment… There are respectful words exchanged, so certainly it’s not as though the king turns his back and storms off and leaves John Adams in the dust.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I have to ask you, do we have any sense of what Adams thought when he was walking into that room where the king was? I’ve been in stressful situations, but I’m guessing that’s right up there.

Joanne Freeman:

It certainly was. John Adams as a person, on the one hand he’s highly self-conscious and very insecure, and would’ve been very aware of that moment. On the other hand, he’s also very self-important. So that would’ve been quite a moment for John Adams. He certainly was nervous about how he would be received. And this gets back to the larger point we’re making about the monarch embodying so much more. On the one hand being a person and then embodying everything else. The significance of that meeting, where an American diplomat meets with the king who lost but becomes the United States, the significance of that meeting would’ve been apparent to everybody. So even as much as Adams would put a lot of meaning in it, and he did think about it a lot and he did worry about it a lot. It was a significant moment. It was a moment of one polity meeting another polity, and one of them was new and broken away from the other one.

But I think it’s when long lived monarchs die that people begin to reckon with who they were. So when King George III dies, people, I think, really begin to wrestle with who he was. For example, there’s an article from that time period that says, “The last arrival brings news of the long-looked for death of King George III of England. No reign was ever more eventful than his. Was there ever one under which more extensive aggressions were committed against the natural rights of man, more wars undertaken against the principles of human freedom?” There, they’re reckoning not with the king, but with the reign. And those things are bound together, but you can see the ladder in a different way when the monarch dies.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The American farmer said of the death of King George III, “No reign was ever more eventful than his.” I’ve just got to say to that, get a load of the next two, because really the next person we want to talk about is Queen Victoria. And Queen Victoria reigned from 1837. She took the throne when she was 18 years old until her death in 1901 at age 81. Think of what happened in the years from 1837 to 1901. And she is going to be deeply involved in virtually all of it by virtue of her position.

When she first ascends the throne, she has widespread support throughout the United States. Of course, this is a period when Americans are trying to figure out what it means to live in a democracy and they have literally started magazines trying to teach people to be good, little small-d democrats. And here everybody’s running around admiring this queen taking the throne. In Philadelphia, one newspaper wrote, “I confess with grief, with shame confess, some of my countrymen are all inflamed at courtly pomp. A queen, like one in chess, is all the life and spirit of the game. Yes, though Victoria hath bewitched the hearts of sober men as well as thoughtless boys, though fairer forms are seen in dairy carts and brighter minds the cotton mill employs.”

Joanne Freeman:

Oof.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, exactly.

Joanne Freeman:

There’s a slap. Coronations and weddings, big grand royal ceremonies grab the imagination of Americans and they just want to revel in the pomp and circumstance. And there is a magazine called the United States Magazine and Democratic Review which talked about what it called “Victoria fever” or “Queen mania,” and there’s an anonymous letter writer who went by A.D.F. and he describes what he considers to be this sickness. He’s in Philadelphia and he says he sees souvenir hair brushes with Victoria’s picture on them, Victoria soap composed expressly for the coronation and Victoria riding hats. He says, A.D.F., that by the time he left Philadelphia, he had seen so much evidence of the new queen’s influence that he suggested changing the city’s name to Victoriadelphia. So people were very, very excited by the coronation. The Saturday Evening Post talked all about the jewels and the pearls and the crown and the pageantry. Americans were fascinated by the pomp of monarchy.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I think that also is significant culturally in the sense that, think about America in the 1830s. Among other things, it’s dirty. I mean, people are on stage coaches, they’re in steam ships, they’re in dirty conditions. And here is this woman who is walking around in a long gown, which of course you can’t do in American streets because people are throwing their slops in the streets and spitting in the streets, and they’re muddy, and they’re dirty, and they’re nasty. She’s wearing white clothing and that’s going to be significant because she shows up in a white dress, a long white dress, which is indicative of the fact she’s not living in dirt and she’s got a lot of servants. And that, it’s very hard to take care of the color white. So her white dress is itself almost a fantasy. And it’s a fantasy that Americans are going to adopt during the middle part of her reign when they start using wedding dresses, the idea of girls being able to have their own special coronation, if you will, in a wedding dress, which did not originally symbolize purity so much as “I don’t have to worry about dirt.”

Joanne Freeman:

And that idea, not the wedding dress idea, but the wearing white to prove your high status idea, that goes back a good ways too. So if you think about your stereotypical image of people in the late 18th century, or just 18th century with all the white lace on their sleeves and around their collar, part of the reason for that is you’re wearing that because you can keep it clean.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Or somebody else can keep it clean for you.

Joanne Freeman:

Correct.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So I’m pushing on that and her clothing to start with because one of the things that jumped out to me about the queen mania for Victoria was what seems to me to be a gendered interpretation of her reign. That is, there are a number of people who talk about Queen Victoria’s reign, and it’s a really interesting reign. So she is clear about the fact she’s not real keen on motherhood, on babies and motherhood, but she also produces nine children, all of whom live, and she is very much in love with her husband. Lots of people look at this and say that people could appreciate her or could be behind the monarchy because she embodied the mid-19th century American vision of women being in the home and being submissive to their husbands and becoming wives and mothers. And she does absolutely defer to Albert.

But I also suspect that there is something else going on in that she is a woman in this time in which women really don’t have a lot of options in America. They are the property of their husbands. They don’t have control over their children. They are quite likely to lose children in infancy, and she doesn’t. And they’re also quite likely themselves to die in childbirth, and she doesn’t. I think that there is probably at least an element of Americans loving this woman on the throne because she is a woman navigating this incredibly difficult sphere and still being able to be powerful and still being able, if you’ll excuse me, to wear white, which is sort of a fantasy.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s a really interesting thought to consider if it’s easier for Americans to reckon with monarchs who are women, because on the one hand they embody something that people are comfortable with as a parent of empire in some way, a mother of empire, but on the other hand, they’re women. So the power is perhaps not as threatening.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And therein lies the other side of this, because the other thing that really jumps out to me as a 19th century Americanist about Victoria’s reign is look at those years. She’s on the throne from 1837 when America is just really crawling itself out from the war of 1812, just starting to figure out what it might maybe, kind of, sort of look like to have, maybe-ish, a navy and figure out what kind of power the country can have. It’s only very recently in the 1820s come up with the Monroe Doctrine which says that America’s going to monopolize the geographical sphere.

Joanne Freeman:

Democratic politics too, right? Martin Van Buren is president when she takes the throne. Andrew Jackson is the one who kind of brings party-looking-ish politics. So again, just as you’re saying, think of all of the things that are beginning to happen when she takes the throne.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then think, from an American perspective, of what happens in the next 63 years. We’re going to have a civil war, we’ll talk about in a minute, and then America is going to develop a navy. It’s going to become an imperial power really deliberately from the 1880s into the 1890s, and then of course into the 20th century. And it’s going to do so, to some degree, at the expense of Britain. So if you are thinking about the monarch from a geopolitical perspective, you can say all sorts of lovely things about the queen without feeling in any way like the queen threatens the United States, which I think is also an important piece of looking at Victoria.

And we talk about the Victorian era and everybody thinks about Queen Victoria in her black clothes. And that, I think, while she defers to Albert who’s very ill during the Civil War about whether or not Britain should intervene on the side of the Confederacy. And that’s an important moment, both because she’s deferring to Albert and because he says to her, “No, don’t get involved.” But also, I think, when he dies in 1861 and she puts on mourning, and she does not take that mourning off, she wears black clothes for the next however long. And even some people are like, “Lady, get over it.” I think Americans care deeply, deeply in this period about honoring people who are lost during the Civil War, so there’s all these new poems and all these new books about mourning. There’s even a new stock character, a child, Little Willy, who dies in the Civil War and all the monuments we put up. And this idea that people really could love somebody so much that they’re going to stay in mourn clothes until their death over the loss of a husband, I think really speaks to the American psyche or has the potential to speak to the American psyche in this period.

Joanne Freeman:

What’s fascinating about this to me is it’s partly, I think, subconscious. Because they’ve been there for so long, because they’re always there for the whole course of some people’s lives. You’ve used the word “anchor” a few times. I think that’s really accurate. They become a kind of social and political, and national, anchor of sorts that you feel some degree of comfort and some degree of stability regardless of what you think of monarchy or the monarch because that person is there and has been for so long.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And yet with her, the same way with George III, by divorcing her from what the actual government is doing, by saying, “Oh, look. She’s mourning.” I wonder to what degree Americans could overlook what the empire was actually doing during those years. Because it wasn’t affecting America that much, they didn’t really pay a great deal of attention to, for example, the growth of Britain’s Empire in Africa and in Asia and the real extraordinary reach of the British Empire in that period. And to sort of feel, if not to the degree they were paying attention to it, sort of feel warm and fuzzy about it and to take Britain’s side rather than to have a clear picture of what was actually happening.

Joanne Freeman:

The symbolic power of a monarch, which sounds as though that means lack of power, it’s only symbolic, but that symbolic power is immense.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And we could just stop there because nothing happened with Queen Elizabeth. I just love that guy with George III going, “Oh, he had such an incredibly important reign, this can never be equaled again.”

Joanne Freeman:

It will never be, right. Never be matched, never be matched.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We hit Victoria who had an incredible life and something happened when Elizabeth was queen, what was it?

Joanne Freeman:

Think of the years here, right? That she becomes queen in 1952 and has just stopped being queen now. But just think about that span because that’s within our range. Now, we’re moving into a zone where we are personally, in the course of our lives, going to understand that range of years, 1952 to 2022, what that looks like. Think about those years.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the post-colonial establishment of new countries out of many of the former British colonies, which creates this incredibly new and revolutionary change in the globe.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s kind of hard to imagine one person being in power for that stretch of time and the ways in which the world changed around her and how she did or didn’t adjust for it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s one of the reasons I think about these long reigns as anchors. Think about all the people you know and have lost, maybe a long time ago, who talked to you about the queen. The fact that I had those conversations with people I cared about is important to me. It’s one more tie.

Joanne Freeman:

The queen in some sense was on your radar screen just as a presence with people mentioning it because I don’t remember ever thinking about British royalty in any way. I don’t remember people talking about her, but do you have a memory of that?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh yeah. World War II was huge for me growing up because my mother had been in the war and virtually every parent I knew had been in the war and many of them had been stationed out of England. Not necessarily ending up fighting there, but some of my people are buried there. So yeah, we talked about… I mean World War II was very much a presence, an everyday presence, in my life. And of course she was a part of all that because she was the princess. It’s not like we sat down and chatted about her every day, but she was part of that landscape of when my brother flew overseas, he went from England. Oh, let’s talk about the blitz.

Joanne Freeman:

Now she finds out that she has become queen while she is on safari in Kenya, on February 7th, 1952. She apparently had been queen for more than 12 hours by the time she finds out because her father, the 56-year-old King George VI had died in his sleep of a heart attack. And there was a desperate search to try and contact her because now she basically is the monarch. The news took a long time to get to her. She was 25 years old at the time.

At about the same time that Elizabeth found out she was queen, President Truman in the United States issued a telegram basically offering support, “My deepest sympathy goes out to the British people. God bless Queen Elizabeth and may her father’s exemplary memory provide the courage and inspiration she will need in the great responsibilities that lie before her. So he pretty instantly sends out a connection telegram indicating that the United States has registered his death.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then a new piece, or rather a new form of an old piece, comes into play. And that’s that we now have television. And that’s, I think, important for the way that 20th century and 21st century Americans have viewed Queen Elizabeth and the whole royal family. I think that pulls a lot of threads from the past, but the ability of people to see things like weddings and coronations on TV changes the way that they’re perceived in the sense that they become sort of reality TV, but real life reality TV in a way that they were not necessarily before the advent of television.

The coronation was scheduled for June 2nd, 1953 and the television networks are incredibly eager to get the footage of the ceremony. NBC and CBS fight against each other to get the first footage of the ceremony. It’s not going to be live because they’ve got to get the films from Britain and they don’t want to pay for getting it live over the transatlantic cables, so they worked out an agreement by which the BBC, which is the only network that could be in Westminster Abbey for the ceremony, would give them both free access to record their images onto 16-millimeter film. These two networks have this incredibly convoluted race to pick up the films, which the Royal Air Force flies from the coronation to their base in Goose Bay, Newfoundland. CBS and NBC hire competing P51 Mustang World War II fighter planes to ferry the respective tape copies to the network’s respective Boston studios. CBS won the race to Boston but NBC and the new, the fledgling ABC, which had always planned to do this, at the last minute made an agreement to carry the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC, coverage. So it beats CBS’s actual footage by 13 minutes, which at the end of the day, didn’t matter to anybody in any way. It had very little effect on the ratings.

Joanne Freeman:

What’s most interesting about this to me is it so encapsulates Americans panting with excitement at various points about the monarchy and particularly these ceremonial moments. But the idea of these American networks racing to be the first to get the footage so that they could air it, the intensity and the long-lastingness of this relationship that Americans have with the monarchy and monarchs, and particular in this degree, we have the networks assuming mass popular interests, which is part of why they’re doing this to compete for ratings.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m sure. I heard about the coronation long before you and I were doing this episode in part because at the time people cared so much about the fact there was going to be a new monarch on that throne and that England had survived.

Joanne Freeman:

Now there was a Gallup poll taken right around that time, right around the time of her coronation. And the question that people were asked was an open-ended question, “What is your opinion of Queen Elizabeth?” 22% of the people who responded said she possesses good quality, she’s honest, she’s modern, she’s earnest. 14% said she seemed capable, sensible and democratic as a queen. Based I don’t know on what, but that was their comment. 13% in one way or another, and this struck me as interesting, commented on her appearance. She was beautiful, she was sweet, she was charming, she had queenly bearing. 6% had a negative view of the office of queen and of monarchy generally. 2% commented on her intelligence.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Wow. Wow!

Joanne Freeman:

Really interesting to me, what people were looking at. And in a sense, this goes back to our idea of the monarch as an anchor: good qualities, capable, sensible, honest, earnest, queenly, even as a woman being properly attractive in some way or another. All of those things are the things people focus on. Actual intelligence and ability to do the job is way at the bottom of this poll, which is just really interesting. Really does tell you in a sense what people are looking for or think they’re looking for, in the United States at least, in a monarch.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and it also highlights something that I think also matters with Americans reactions to monarchs who’ve been on the throne for a long time and that’s that if they play their cards carefully and don’t make headlines for all the wrong reasons, you can read onto them whatever you want. So the difference, for example, in reactions to Queen Elizabeth between people who say, as an American tourist did, “I think she’s an amazing woman if you think about what she’s seen in her lifetime, what she’s dealt with nationally, globally, with her family. She’s kept her head. She’s 96 years old and she’s been going strong until now. That’s impressive.” On the one hand. And on the other hand, the professor of applied linguistics and critical discourse studies at Carnegie Mellon, who was born in Nigeria, wrote about Queen Elizabeth’s death, “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving, raping, genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.” There, you can read onto a long reign, many, many different things.

Joanne Freeman:

So we’ve been talking throughout this episode on one of the unique sources of power for a monarch being the blend of personal identity, it’s a person that you can identify with or bond with or focus on, plus the office and that they’re there together. In that combination, you can focus on the person if you don’t want to grapple with what the institution means.

What’s interesting about the moment that we’re in, and we referenced it very briefly when we talked about the death of King George III, is that now that the monarch has died, that bond is broken and it’s like the spell has been broken. And now people feel free to criticize and to talk about monarchy in addition to the monarch in a way that they might not have felt as free before. Right now, the public discussion is a bit fraught because you have people who, I think justifiably, are coming forward and saying, “Let’s talk about what happened in this time and what the monarchy was in this time.” This kind of conversation becomes possible when the person of the monarch is no longer there, but the legacy of that term were right in the middle of reckoning with it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And one of the reasons I emphasize that with Victoria, that Americans could get all starry eyed about her and not look at what was happening on other continents, in Asia and Africa, for example, because they could divorce her from the empire, I wonder if the same thing happens now where people say, “The queen is a 96-year-old woman who’s always had her corgis and her beautiful clothes, and obviously a sharp wit but held her cards very close to her vest,” and not talk about things, for example, like this young Nigeria American woman did, saying, “I’ve got nothing here because look what happened to my country, look at what happened to Nigeria and to the hundreds of thousands of people dead there because of the actions of the empire over which this queen, at least nominally, presided.”

Joanne Freeman:

And I think that just is the magic of the moment of death of a monarch when that close bond between person and office is not as close anymore. I’ve seen British press coverage saying, “In a sense, she was the grandmother of the nation.” And a lot of people saying, essentially, “Get out of here with that grandmother of the nation. Really?” It’s an interesting moment because it’s a transition moment. You have to reckon with what came before as you’re looking ahead to what comes next. It’s a transition moment, obviously not only in the realm of the monarch, but also there’s a new prime minister as well. And so it’s a huge transition moment. So in one way or another, they are going to have to reckon with ideas of legacy.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think so, but I also think that one of the things that comes out of this particular moment is, again when I talk about the anchor, there were so many changes during her lifetime. And at the end of the day, from the 1980s onward, the British monarchy touched so many pieces of the modern world. So you think about princess Di and what she did with trying to humanize the monarchy and being a real voice for marginalized people. And then you think, for example, today of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle walking away from the monarchy because of the deeply embedded racism in it. And what it looks like to me, again absolutely coming from the outside, is a time for reckoning with not just the meaning of the monarch, but also with the meaning of the modern world. Like you say, “Is the monarchy viable?” But also, what does that old legacy mean to the present?

Not just the legacy of the monarchy, but of empire, of colonialism, of demographic changes, of race, of money. And I think, too, why so many people care about, or cared about, Diana or Meghan Markle and it makes me think again of Queen Victoria and the idea that these were women who were in really impossible situations because of who they were, privileged in so many ways, and also so circumscribed in so many ways, and found a way to exercise power within that.

One of the things I did to prepare for this episode was actually to call people I know who are royal watchers. And one of them said, “Oh, I don’t care about the men at all. They’re awful. I care about how women have managed to negotiate the changing world around them in positions in which they both exercised power and didn’t have any power.” And that, ultimately, is the theme of many people’s lives and it’s worth watching how it plays out in the royals because of that.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s interesting because I think in many ways, certainly the United States, a lot of countries kind of measure themselves in terms of the fate and nature, and freedoms, of women at a given time. And in that sense, the royals, these royal women are acting on a large stage issues that other women are dealing with on a smaller stage. So that in that sense, despite the fact that we’ve talked about in all of these ways how royals are distant and how Americans look at these coronations and deal with the people and then maybe deal with the legacy, what you’re also suggesting, and I agree with it, is that in some way the human drama of what goes on that level, the humanness of it for better and worse has a bit of a mirror in it. And at this particular moment, questions of empire, questions of race, questions of monarchy and democracy are smack in front of us to a far lesser degree than they are in England, but all of those things are being reckoned with right now.