Being an essayist in New Jersey, USA, is an exciting existence. There are pageants and banquets and balls to be attended. New Jersey honors its essayists weekly with an uncommon display of gratitude and outright affection. In the midst of all these ceremonies, there is a chance that Americans, particularly those of Irish ancestry, will overlook or forget to pay rapt attention to news from the mother country to us all – England. This small report is intended to acquaint you with recent developments in the country which we lovingly call Blighty.
There is elegant news from Prince Charles, Prince of Wales. The news about his paramour, Camilla Parker Bowles, is somewhat less elegant. Charles and Camilla have not sought the blessings of the Church of England for their living arrangements. And finally, there is horrid, distressful news about fox hunting with hounds. Let us start with the news of the Prince that will cause you to display your Union Jack for all to see.
Before we get too deeply into developments about the Prince, it is necessary to know just which prince will be the subject of our peasantly adulation. If Charles used his family name, he would tell you it is Windsor. That name came about because his proper name is Wettin, the family name of Queen Elizabeth’s consort. Not this Queen Elizabeth, her grandmother. The full name of the consort was Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In 1917, the Prince’s ancestors changed the German sounding name to Windsor, a more proper British name. So now we know which prince we are dealing with.
Alan Cowell, the New York Times reporter in London wrote in a mid-November dispatch that our prince has “a magnetic attraction for gaffes,” which is a gross understatement. It began when Elaine Day, a former secretary in Prince Charles’s office went to court alleging sexual harassment from the Prince’s private secretary, Paul Keffard. Ms. Day, who worked on the Prince’s staff from 1999 until 2004, also told the court she had asked whether the royal household offered a route to promotion for secretaries such as herself.
Well, asking about “a route to promotion for secretaries” set off a large size bomb under the lovable Prince of Wales. No one seems to have responded to the charge of sexual harassment, but asking about how one may be promoted set the Prince into a tizzy. He wrote these lines:
“What is wrong with people these days? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things above their capabilities?
“It was a consequence of a child-centered educational system which admits no failures. People seem to think they can all be pop stars, high court judges or brilliant TV presenters or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having the natural ability.”
The thought that the Prince would say “without even putting in the necessary work” strikes this American peasant as a phrase concordant with Churchill’s “blood, sweat and tears.” To think that Ms. Day, while evading her harasser, would have time to ask about a route for promotion without “putting in the necessary work” is, on its face, astounding. Who does Ms. Day think she is?
The Prince got his station in life the hard way, starting from the bottom. In the beginning, he was a rail layer on the London Underground. Then he collected garbage for a few years before getting a job driving a street car. That put him in a good position to become a policeman who started by patrolling the streets in high crime districts of London. Later, he serviced Port-A-Johns with his sister Anne. He ran a Johnny-on-the-Spot toilet facility franchise. The point is that Charles Windsor, nee Wettin, earned every one of his promotions. Soon after he was promoted to a Prince, the people of Wales demanded that he be a candidate for the demanding title of Prince of Wales. The vote was unanimous with every citizen of Wales casting an enthusiastic ballot. As we all know, the Welsh adulate their Prince just as they adore every English person.
So the Prince clearly earned his lofty station in life by “putting in the necessary work.” Hear, hear. When he sees this accolade from this side of the Atlantic, perhaps the Prince will hint that his Assistant Secretary Kefford should refrain from sexually harassing Ms. Day, if that is possible.
The news from the Prince’s Royal household is not so splendid with respect to his companion, Camilla Parker Bowles. The Prince has built an apartment next to his quarters with connecting bedroom doors. But in strict observance of British protocols, he has never been in
Mrs. Parker Bowles’ bedroom. Total abstinence, you know. Whether she has ever been in his bedroom is being shielded by the Official Secrets Act of the British Parliament. There is a feeling that Mrs. Parker Bowles looks very much like Charles’s mother. Make of that what you will.
When the Prince’s mother cashes in her chips, the Brits will have a decision to make about whether Camilla will be a Queen. Or a consort or a companion. My bookie, who guaranteed a Kerry victory in the United States says, “It ain’t gonna happen.” We shall see. Do you think that if Charles called her “England’s proper mother-in-law,” the church would say that is a “saintly title”? We don’t know, do we? The Archbishop of Canterbury has no comment as he is dealing with a gay Bishop in New Hampshire.
The final bit of news from home is that the British House of Commons invoked a rarely used Act of Parliament into law that would ban all hunting of the fox with hounds. The Act stipulates that shooting foxes is fine, but doing it when accompanied by hounds is forbidden.
The unfairness of it all is astounding. People who dig the trenches for the Metropolitan Sewer Commission will be denied their only sport. The men who drive the subway cars and the newsboys and the hotel maintenance workers rely on a diet of fox meat.
After work driving spikes into ties in the Underground, Mike Davis loves to go to his flat, have a warm beer and put on his fox hunting costume. The men from the assembly line of the Austin-Healey Motor Car plant wait impatiently for their weekends when they will go to their country estates to ride their horses and make loving gestures to their hounds. The men who slaughter cows and sheep at Lancaster’s packing houses will be denied the only pleasure available to them. How sad. How tragic.
Oh Britain, what have you done? Simple folk are being deprived of their God given sport. Every Briton will rue the day of November 19, 2004 when this happened. It could be worse than September 1, 1939 when World War II started.
Those of us who exalt England’s name at every opportunity are aware that the Celtic nations, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, have never been absorbed by fox hunting as the ordinary working classes of Englishmen are. Perhaps it is blasphemous to cite an Irish wit in conjunction with our sacred love of hunting foxes with hounds. But blasphemy wins the day. An Irish wit named Oscar Fingall O’Flahertis Wills Wilde once wrote that fox hunting was “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.” How absolutely horrid. To think that an Irish author would have the gall to comment on a sacred English activity such as shooting foxes is nothing less than unthinkable.
Well, that is the news of the upper classes of the British Empire. It is deeply regretted that the news about Prince Charles and his letter asking what is wrong with people these days is so soggy.
See here. Charles was a working man just as the blokes in the unions in Britain are. Charles succeeded by hard work. His labor was eventually recognized by his becoming a prince. Any working man could do what Charles has done if he “puts in the necessary work” at dreary tasks until all obstacles are overcome.
Prince Charles is now being unfairly criticized. He knows what hard times are as his family was once on the dole. Fortunately, the Unions that he belonged to during his ascent to princedom are now coming together to sponsor a rally on New Year’s Day. There will be the ditch diggers, the packing house men, and the men who take care of London’s Johnny’s-on-the-Spot as well as old bus drivers and subway employees. They will meet in Hyde Park to hear from the Lord Mayor and titled consorts from the House of Lords. Red Ken Livingstone will lead the cheering for the Prince of Wales.
Delegations from Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Canberra, Wellington, and Moscow and Beijing will be on hand to cheer Charles in his quest for a wider divide between classes in Great Britain. Princess Anne, who scrubbed floors before she was promoted to royalty, will be on hand with her carnivorous dogs.
Until we see you on New Year’s Day, keep your mind on Camilla and on the urgent need to keep the hounds in fox hunting. Don’t worry about the Black Watch Regiment in Iraq. Fox hunting and Charles’s future with Camilla demands your full attention. Until we see you in Hyde Park, “Cheerio!”
E. E. CARR
November 20, 2004
Post Script: This essay was written with a sense of deep and abiding love for Blighty and the British Royal Family. English editorial cartoonists responded less splendidly. Steve Bell’s cartoon in The Guardian is one example. It is attached. It appeared after our heart felt tribute to Charles, the Prince of Gaffes. It is fair to say that Charles may be the best gift to cartoonists in all recorded history.
PPS: Steve Bell is a cheeky fellow who probably knows little about fox hunting.
~~~
I think it would be a lot more exciting to be a prince of Whales than a prince of Wales, personally. Since “Prince of Wales” seems to be a dead-end posiiton for him, he should consider either laboring much harder to become king, or changing tactics to govern marine animals.
Damn I miss essays. Sorry for such a long gap between them!