God save ireland's love for the royals
Bruce Arnold on the revelations in Mary Kenny's new book
Mary Kenny has achieved a remarkable balance in her book on Ireland and the British Monarchy. In a sustained evaluation of a relationship between two countries, two ideologies, two peoples examined largely through their leaders and covering 220 years, she is fair and even-handed throughout.
Her research is prodigious and so is her memory. Her Irish upbringing sets the tone; but her professional experiences as a writer, both in Fleet Street, as once it was, and for newspapers on Burgh Quay and in Middle Abbey Street, as once they were, gives us the clear sparkling light of a fully truthful and penetrating account of a quite extraordinary story.
On the surface, in the political arena, among advisers to different monarchs, in irredentist attitudes within the Irish hierarchy, Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail, there is one story, and it is a chilly one and at times foolish. Beneath that surface is something entirely different. On the Irish side, a passion for royalty; among all the monarchs -- from Queen Victoria to Queen Elizabeth II -- affection, understanding, a desire to do good and do the right thing, together with an instinctive feeling for the people that is the main revelation of the book. And how welcome and moving it is.
The unfortunate side of it is the fact that the wellspring for this attitude on Ireland's side, which derived from royal visits, with their pomp and ceremony, ceased early in the reign of George V and went underground. Mary Kenny gives the best of examples of this in her introduction, where she writes about the countrywide secret society of monarchy-lovers who watch films, or, where possible, television broadcasts, of Queen Elizabeth's Coronation and love every moment of that wonderful ceremony.
Wisely enough, Mary Kenny chooses to begin the book itself with Queen Victoria "because, to me, the Victorian era is the start of modern times". It was also, she goes on to say, the social climate to which her parents and their siblings belonged. Since she grew up in this period of largely settled standards, it created her. She rebelled -- as all of us who knew her were aware -- but she at least knew and understood what she was rebelling against. This is important because the personal viewpoint, tempered by the passing of time, gives to the book a great deal of interest and appeal. Her innately good instincts are reinforced by the good journalist's proper research into facts.
She has read up all her monarchs. She has looked at their diaries and she knows what they felt about Ireland and the Irish. She also puts right errors of fact, telling us that Queen Victoria's donation to famine relief was far from being the £5 invented possibly by Maud Gonne, who favoured the title for Queen Victoria of 'the Famine Queen', a further invention of Parnell's sister, described by the author as "fiery and reckless". Queen Victoria's donation was in fact the largest in the kingdom. This was at a time of significant anti-Irish feeling and ignorance amongst the aristocracy and senior politicians. The queen sustained in her personal diary, which is sensibly and richly used by Mary Kenny, an affection based in actual experience. Her long reign had been a difficult and bitter one for Irish people.
A brief passage records that, "in the archives of Mount Anville, the details of Queen Victoria's afternoon there were subsequently, and mysteriously, torn from the convent record, presumably by a nun-archivist who sympathised with Maud Gonne's view of the British monarchy".
Edward VII's brief reign filled a more positive period, due in part to the Wyndham Land Acts, but also because the king was popular, no doubt because he loved horses and women, both to excess, but also because he was friendly towards the Roman Catholic Church. He was the first British Monarch since the Reformation to meet with the Pope, a point in his favour that was widely signalled during his Irish visits.
There could not have been a greater contrast between him and his successor, George V, a prudish, strict constitutional monarch who loved stamp-collecting. Yet he too was on Ireland's side, restricted it must be said by constitutional and political constraints but brought out in sympathetic terms in this book.
Undoubtedly Eamon de Valera politicised what had once been a relationship between successive monarchs and amenable Irish officials. Stage by stage de Valera eliminated the relationship as it had been and pushed into the breech the heavy, trundling barrier of partition. Its part in the story weighs heavily on two of the three reigns that followed, that of Edward VIII being too brief to be significant.
At different stages in the story there emerges a fascinating figure in the person of John Dulanty, Irish High Commissioner in London and ultimately ambassador. He presided over the period embracing two of the four reigns, those of George V and VI. Both kings favoured him with a degree of intimacy and genuine friendship that contributed an important link between the two countries.
Dulanty set his own rules for diplomacy and became almost institutionalised in royal circles. Those same circles measured accurately the strategy of de Valera and bowed to it without conceding the one thing he wanted -- an end to partition. Now, on the brink of a possible visit by Queen Elizabeth, it is as firmly in place as ever.
Mary Kenny ends her book much as she began it, with accounts of the almost idolatrous attitude to Princess Diana, both before and after her death, and with evidence of comparable levels of curiosity, affection, admiration and possibly love, for the present queen, as existed for her lineage.
I would have liked the author to have added a few sentences about the incomparable professionalism of the present queen as head of state. In the whole world, during more than half a century on the throne, she has proved to be the greatest head of state of her time. That is quite an achievement and one we should admire without restraint.
