Prince Harry: the cult of Monarchy & the hypocrisy of Media

HRH Prince Harry was busily rebuilding his public image once again last night with a well-timed visit to one of the children’s charities of which he is Patron.  I know a young six year old boy delivered him the firm rebuke which the Prince took in good part. He is good with children. Indeed he seems to be generally good with people and in particular pretty young women. But a good portion of the last night’s news was carefully devoted to the carefully staged Media fight-back by the Palace and Clarence House.

Prince Harry is the youngest son of Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales. And none knows better than the Prince of Wales the way Media shape modern monarchy.

What to do with second, third and fourth sons – and on –  has been a problem inherent in monarchies as long as monarchy has been a problem to mankind. The spare to the heir is often a decorative position which affords too much leisure. Though some of our most controversial monarchs (and maybe greatest) have been the spare whose time unexpectedly came – Richard I, Richard III; Henry VIII;  Charles I; James II and William IV immediately come to mind. In this century of course more notoriously there is the case of George VI succeeding Edward VIII. And old Continental monarchies are as replete with such examples – most famously those in France of Charles IX and Henri III in succession; and again,  Louis XVIII and Charles X in succession. The  vagaries and uncertainties of life that haunt mankind do not except monarchy – as we know from the biblical story of the death Pharaoh’s son as the first-born victim of the Last of Eygypt’s infamous Ten plagues.

Even so, despite the wisdom of my years, I suspect Prince Harry will remain ignorant and unmoved by anything I add to the furor which has surrounded his most recent shennanigans in the United states.

I’m certainly in no position to offer a moral critique upon his behaviours – when mine if painted over the Internet and Press would have made an even less pretty picture on many levels.

Though I might observe that when I was still employed my contract did contain a clause about ensuring one’s behavior  was not likely to bring the firm into disrepute. And to my certain knowledge there were cases from time to time where individuals were disciplined under this code of conduct. And no matter how good the party one still has the ultimate responsbility to be sure about who one asks to join it.

In addition I’m unsure if any member of the armed forces caught on camera in such a compromising manner might not also have been usually subject to a diciplinary rebuke. And whatever the rights and wrongs of the intrusion into his private life – he asked the women in question into it-  of his own volition – and posed for their camera delicately using his hands as a fig leaf to cover his indiscretion. Despite the convulsive excitement of the tabloid press – which referred to the Prince covering his ‘crown jewels’ there was in fact little sign of  “the rod” that “empire might have swayed”.

But there was plenty of signs of two rather different social hypocrisies on show. The first, the Media hypocrisy that this was a dreadful intrusion into the Prince’s privacy after all his hard work at the recent Olympics and his tour of duty in the army. This piety granted them permission to talk incessantly about what had gone on in Las Vegas – naturally without actually pruriently displaying the offending pictures. But of course they could and did refer their interested audience to a place on the Internet where they could see for them themselves if only in order to shake their heads in wonder. His lapse of good taste allowed them to lapse into all sorts of speculative moral sorties which naturally included the faux concern about his safety and the whereabouts of his bodyguards – the latter being probably being out of camera-shot.

The second hypocrisy is the political one inherent in monarchy. Institutional monarchy inherently elevates the accidental into the special. It matters not whether the monarchy is elective – as in the case of the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperors – or hereditary or, as is the case with the UK monarchy, quasi-hereditary, since in 1701, in the Act of Settlement, Parliament asserted its primacy in establishing the legality of the succession. Thus whether the process of election is deemed to make special or merely the accident of birth makes special, any political system that elevates one citizen over another bestowing privilege upon one and obligations on the other involves a trade in rights – not least the right to privacy.

To pretend otherwise is a particular exercise in a particular sort of hypocrisy to which royals and royalists are prone – namely trying to have one’s cake and eat it. And as the folk memory of the French Revolution demonstrates the connection between monarchies and gateaux hasn’t always been a happy one.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t those courtiers who will decorate this simple reality with so many constitutional ifs and social buts as to evade this ultimate truth but History’s facts govern themselves. Monarchs and their families enjoy privileges and access to privilege – in return they lose among other things rights to privacy and anonymity. The private behaviours of kings and queens and princes has brought down many dynasty and that may be unfair but it is no more unfair than the caprice that elevated them in the first place. And those in today’s world who do not wish to pay the price for their inherited privilege there is always the possibility of withdrawing from the royal family. Living like the late Duke of Windsor in splendid isolation in Paris may not be for everyone but for many the gilded hardships he endured are not of themselves arduous.

So I’ve had my say. I like Prince Harry as much as I know anything about him. I don’t think he was entitled to behave as he did in Vegas. To be entitled to anonymity for such behavior he would need to be untitled.  Even then like the rest of us, he will have obligations to his employers and to his paying public – like say Tiger Woods. You cannot take the shilling and be exempt from the terms of service.

But whilst I reserve no more than that mild rebuke for Prince Harry – for those couriers and such who justified his actions with recourse to the fact that he was a young man; he was on on holiday; he was in private; he was letting off steam after a tour of duty, those who then wrap themselves in the crown & the Union flag; those who speak fervently of traditional values and the Church; those who espouse the England of the Book of Common Book and King James Bible – I refer you to Matthew 23:14

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.