Yesterday Charles III was heckled in Parliament House in Canberra. He might consider it a happy milestone: he has only been on the throne two years. Lidia Thorpe, an Indigenous independent senator, shouted: “You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us — our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. You are a genocidalist. This is not your land. You are not my king. Fuck the colony”.
It was a predictable heckle: the treatment of the Aboriginal Australians is appalling and remains so, even as Thorpe was hustled out. The king looked unworried because strange things happen to kings all the time. They must because they are our sole remaining depositary of public magic, and people behave oddly around them. Meeting Thorpe was not even the oddest thing that happened to the king yesterday.
That was someone bringing an alpaca called Hephner to meet him, wearing a gold crown, bow tie and blue velvet suit. (Hephner’s keeper said: “We just thought, what an opportunity to dress him up as royalty and bring him today” People sound reliably insane around kings). In his pre-heckle speech the king talked about many Australian things — “brown snakes, leeches, funnel-web spiders and bull ants” — that had tried to harm him. In 1994, when a prince, he was shot at in Sydney. He responded by adjusting his cufflinks like James Bond. (Piers Brosnan adjusted his tie underwater in The World is Not Enough).
Queen Camilla looked mildly diverted by Thorpe but, as Craig Brown writes in A Voyage Around the Queen, being royal is very boring. Brown quotes Rebecca West on Elizabeth II: “The poor child spends her life asking questions which people answer!” A didgeridoo announced the royal arrival into the Great Hall. Is shouting really worse?
The British aristocracy is one of the most enduring elites in the world
There is a question here, though: can the British monarchy survive this age of social justice? You might think not. Thorpe was right that monarchy was complicit in what happened to Australia, as it has been complicit in everything that Britain has done. We have been inching away from colonialism for a century: when a former colony chooses to become a republic — Jamaica announced plans in 2022 to consider leaving — the crown responds politely, as it should. Charles III has already said it is up to Australia to decide if it wants to be a republic or not. What else can he say?
The British aristocracy is one of the most enduring elites in the world. The Windsors dodged the fate of the Hohenzollerns, the Romanovs, the Hapsburgs and the Bonapartes, and they did it by adapting to circumstances. In an era of colonies, they were colonisers. In an era of environmentalism, they are activists. If they watch Game of Thrones with jealous eyes they do not say so, and perhaps they aren’t jealous: the Windsors like power, but they aren’t insane. They know that the greater the power on offer, the higher the body count.
They adapt incrementally. They ditched male primogeniture in 2013: had Princess Charlotte been born first, she would be queen. They ditched Prince Andrew after his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein: he was forced into private life, TV and teddy bears. Much of the ancient aristocracy was ditched for Charles III’s coronation, and replaced with Ant and Dec, who are more relatable, though not for me. Beyond that, I sense we are leaving an age of reason, and entering a new age of religion, and magic. These things are tidal and monarchy, which is as much about magic as class, might benefit.
There was another royal story from Australia yesterday, but it was less reported, and as interesting. Jim Frecklington, an Australian master coach builder, has spent six years building a new state coach for the king at his own expense. “I pay for this,” he told The Sun. “It has cost a lot of money. I mortgaged my home to finance the Diamond Jubilee State Coach and have mortgaged my home again to build this. But I have to because no one else in the world knows how to make something like this”. Frecklington’s magical coach, the embodiment of his dreaming, has electric windows, which is a fine metaphor for how monarchy can adapt to survive. The crown won’t be shaken by Thorpe’s words, but they will listen. Where there's gilt, there’s hope.
Tanya Gold is a London Standard columnist
