History, Biography, Royal Family, England ( )

A. N. Wilson likes the British Royal Family, as an institution. He also likes—no, make that “adores”—Queen Elizabeth II. The monarchy, he argues, is the cultural equivalent of ballast in a ship’s hold: it does its job best by remaining stolidly in place, acting as a stabilizing force, and causes serious problems when it moves about. The stolid, beige presence of the current Queen is, for Wilson, exactly what the monarchy requires.

Lurching backward and forward through time, Wilson judges the other members of the House of Windsor against her high standard, and (not surprisingly) finds them wanting. Queen Victoria is borderline-psychotic, Edward VII a libertine, George V puritanical, Edward VIII (who abdicated in order to marry the love of his life) selfish, and Elizabeth the Queen Mother a self-righteous phony. The Queen’s own father (George VI) and sister (Princess Margaret) emerge relatively unscathed, but her husband (Prince Phillip) comes off as a befuddled clod and her eldest son (Prince Charles) as equally dull-witted . . . though more dangerous because he thinks of himself as clever. Princess Diana—whether breathtakingly naïve or coldly calculating—commits the unforgiveable sin of being vivid, and calling public attention to herself as a person.

All of this—the ruminations on the role of the monarchy in modern Britain, and the hatchet-job portraits—is couched in language that drips with icy disdain for such cultural travesties as marrying for love, attending schools other than Eton, drawing satirical newspaper cartoons about the Queen, and revising the Book of Common Prayer. The cultural-conservative savagery of the book (Wilson gets the vapors when the Church of England calls itself the “Anglican Church”) makes it read like an Oxford-accented version of American right-wing talk radio. It offers watching-a-train-wreck entertainment value, but little in the way of real enlightenment. ( )