It seems Queen Elizabeth II has helped Britons forget that their reigning "House of Windsor" is German

Oh, the horror! Is it any wonder that this photo "has sparked a furore in Britain"? It's terrifying! It's . . . . Oh wait, it's not this photo of Queen Elizabeth that's sparked the furore.

by Ken

It's an understandable mistake, isn't it? I mean, Queen Elizabeth smiling? Aren't we more used to seeing the queen grumping and grouching, looking as is she'd like to slam whichever kitschy little handbag she's toting into the cranium of whoever's been presumptuous enough to approach her grumpy and grouchy royal self?

But no, this isn't the image that's sparked the furore. It's this one, thoughtfully shared by The Sun:

Secret 1933 film shows Edward VIII teaching this Nazi salute to the Queen



THE Queen and Queen Mum raise a Nazi salute in an astonishing home movie shot at Balmoral and seen today for the first time.

The film shows the then Princess Elizabeth, just seven, larking about in 1933.

Egging on her sister Princess Margaret, three, is their uncle Prince Edward, Prince of Wales. He was a sympathiser towards Hitler’s Nazi Germany and became King Edward VIII.

The stunning film footage of the Queen performing a Nazi salute is today revealed by The Sun.

The astonishing clip lay hidden for eight decades. The grainy home movie is thought to have been shot in 1933 or 1934, as Hitler rose to supreme power in Germany.

The 20-second cine film reveals Edward, who once gave a Nazi salute to Hitler and claimed he was “not a bad chap”, larking around with his sister-in-law the Queen Mother and her young children in the grounds of Balmoral.

The Queen, in tartan kilt or skirt, is aged around seven while Margaret is three. The clip opens with a playful Elizabeth grabbing one of the royal corgis and pushing the dog across the lawn.

Facing the camera, she raises her arm in a Nazi salute. Margaret lifts a hand — her left, in a playful wave.

Elizabeth performs a Scottish jig then raises her right arm again, joining in with the Queen Mum as they both stand bolt upright with right arms hoisted.

Encouraged by Uncle Edward, Margaret raises her arms again before the clip ends with the Queen Mum and Edward saluting with their right arms.

Despite his real Nazi salute to Hitler, the film clip is the only pictorial record of Edward in the pose.

Experts last night hailed the footage as an incredible new historical document of huge public interest.

While there is clearly no suggestion that the Queen or Queen Mother were ever Nazi sympathisers, Edward’s links with Hitler and fascism are very well documented.

And historians believe the film could cast important new light on the Royal Family’s attitudes towards Germany in the 1930s — and the influence of Nazi-loving Edward.

Dr Karina Urbach, a top Nazi expert and member of the renowned London-based Institute of Historical Research, described the film as “remarkable”.

She said: “The video is pretty shocking. The Queen has a proud Second World War record and sense of duty to her country and no one would ever suggest she was sympathetic to Nazi Germany.

“She was a child when this film was shot, long before the atrocities of the Nazis became widely known.

“But Edward was already welcoming the regime as Prince of Wales in 1933 and remained pro-Nazi after war broke out in 1939.

“He could well be teaching the Queen and Princess Margaret how to do the salute.”

The University of London academic added: “Hitler’s movement had been growing fast since 1929 and many German relatives of the Royal Family were attracted to it.

“They could well have seen the salute on newsreels and are copying it. The film involves our monarch and is an important historical document that asks serious questions of the Royal Family.

“It is right that it is put into the public domain. It is high time the Royal Archives were open for serious research on the 1930s and the issue of Edward’s politics and their impact upon his generation within the Royal Family.”

Juliet Gardiner, former editor of History Today and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, said: “It’s an insight into British attitudes towards Germany at that time in 1933, long before everyone really realised Hitler’s designs on Europe. It is absolutely right that the public sees it.”

The film is even more remarkable as — just seven years after it was made — George VI and Queen Elizabeth became inspirational figures of wartime defiance after visiting bombed-out Londoners during the Blitz of 1940.

At the time the future Queen Elizabeth, now 89, would have had no inkling of the implications of making a Nazi salute.

The original film remains under lock and key. But copies of the clip were made several years ago and one has now been handed to The Sun by a source who believes it to be of massive public interest and historical importance.

Experts last night defended the Queen’s Nazi salute as evidence of the royals playing around.

Respected military historian James Holland said: “They are all having a laugh, there are lots of smiles, so it’s all a big joke.

“I don’t think there was a child in Britain in the 1930s or 40s who has not performed a mock Nazi salute as a bit of a lark.

“It just shows the Royal Family are as human as the next man.

“It’s no secret Edward met Hitler and had right-wing sympathies. But the same cannot be said about the Queen Mother or King George VI.

“The two were completely steadfast from start to finish in their abhorrence of Nazism in their role as leaders of the free world and the fight against that tyranny.”

The young princesses' Uncle Edward would become better known to us as the genetically male half of 20th-century Britain's most hilarious comedy drag act, "The Duke and Duchess of Windsor." (Yes, he's that Edward!)

Now that we've mentioned that word "Windsor," I would just add the note that apparently lost in the shuffle, to The Sun and to CNN in its rehash of the story, is that there's a little more to the Germanic slant of the story than Edward's unquestioned Nazi sympathies. (There's also what we might call "the moronic slant." The guy really seems to have been a monster-caliber twit.) It's a slant that was much on the minds of Brits when they went to war against Germany in World War I. The result was the royal concoction of the "House of Windsor" in 1917 (links onsite):

The House of Windsor is the royal house of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms. It was founded by King George V by royal proclamation on 17 July 1917, when he changed the name of the British Royal Family from the German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (a branch of the House of Wettin) to the English Windsor, due to the anti-German sentiment in the British Empire during World War I.[1] The most prominent member of the House of Windsor is its head, Queen Elizabeth II, who is the reigning monarch of 16 Commonwealth realms.

-- first graf of the Wikipedia entry on the House of Windsor

It's true that it's now a long time since the first "English" king of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was crowned in August 1902, and by now its descendants can legitimately be thought of as "naturalized." The German link, in case you've forgotten, is Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert, a scion of the aforementioned House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. King Edward VII was the son of Victoria and Albert, and that was good enough to earn him the throne, despite Brits' still-rigid loyalty to male-only inheritance in the Age of Downton Abbey. But Edward's subjects tended to remember that, despite his British mum, he was German.

Maybe it's Queen Elizabeth II's crowning accomplishment in her -- what is it? -- hundred years on the throne to make her compatriots forget where the "Windsors" come from. Not that there's anything wrong with it.

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Smartly done, Queen E. Now you can go back to focusing on your little great-granddaughter being born healthy and happy

You can view the clip here.

Description: The Queen overturned a rule that had been in place since 1917. The rule required a male heir to be first in line for the crown, but due to Kate's pregnancy announcement in December, that rule will be extracted. The new rule states any gender will have a stake in line for royalty. If the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have a girl, she will be third in line for the throne.

by Ken

Two first responses to this momentous news:

(1) You mean she can just do that, the queen? Just sign her name, and make royal girl-children just the same as boy-children in the line of royal succession, just as if the girl-children were, like, regular little people?

(2) And, um, who cares, exactly? (That is, apart from fetishists who obsess over the lives and vicissitudes of the Royals the way some other folks do over the Kardashians?)

The upshot is that the queen's as-yet-to-be-born great-granddaughter will come into this world taking her rightful place as No. 3 in the line of succession behind her grandfather -- you remember the prince of Wales, Dopey Prince Charlie (whose reign, if it ever happens, is looking briefer and briefer by the year) -- and her father, Prince William, or should I say HRH the duke of Cambridge? (I happen not to be one of those people who believes that Prince William should be yanked out of the succession on account of his increasingly frightening resemblance to his pater, Dopey Prince Charlie. Surely that fact should in itself be punishment enough for any man. Besides, does anyone of sound mind believe that the prince's brother, the Other Prince, is a better prospect?)

AND REMEMBER, WHEN WE TALK ABOUT "THE
LINE OF SUCCESSION" IN THE U.K. . . .

It's not like here, when we try to remember who comes first in the line of succession to the presidency, the president pro tem of the Senate or the speaker of the House or the secretary of agriculture? No, barring unforeseen developments, Dopey Prince Charlie will succeed his mum to the throne, and then Prince William, that is to say the duke of Cambridge, will succeed him, and then his daughter will succeed him. Like her father and grandfather before her, she's not going to have to gather brochures at her schools' Career Days.

Then I thought about this historic development a little, and I came to the realization that it's probably a fine thing, and if it took HRH nearly 60 years to get around to it, well at least she did. And in fairness, there was no great need to do it before. After all, Elizabeth herself produced a male heir on her first try -- not to mention her third and fourth -- and Dopey Prince Charlie and the Lady Diana went two for two.

Oh, it's easy enough to see how the idea of boys-only kingships got started. Back in the day (and I mean the olden, olden day) when a king was someone who went forth to the battlefield accompanied by his trusty warriors to try to slaughter the rival king and as many as possible of his trusty warriors, this was pretty clearly man's work, all that slaughtering (and being slaughtered). But the king business changed a lot over the centuries.

Even England's King Henry V probably did less battlefield duty in his post-Agincourt years -- not to mention in general when his life wasn't being storyboarded by Shakespeare. Even by the time of Henry VIII, the "manly" arts of kinging tilted more toward chicanery, betrayal, repression, and general ruthlessness (and you thought the time you put in trying to watch The Tudors would be a total waste?) -- not to mention male-heir-producing and period wife-upgrading.

Surely Queen Elizabeth knows better than anybody that the duties of a British monarch will be just as doable by a grown-up girl-child as a grown-up boy-child, even with the grown-up boy-child having to manage the additional responsibilities of having an appropriate hat and purse for every royal occasion. And if it was concern for her soon-to-be little great-granddaughter that finally prompted her into action, well, I think that's fine. Could she really have faced the new addition to the family with a clear conscience while saying to her, in effect, that while it was fine for the country to struggle along all those decades and decades with her own personal gender-inferior head under the crown but now the little one's mum and dad would have to go back to the drawing board and try to produce a truly suitable heir? I don't think so.

TO RETURN, FINALLY, TO THE QUESTION OF
WHETHER ANY OF THIS REALLY MATTERS . . .

No, it may not seem of earth-shaking moment to introduce this rule change to an institution as quaint and pointless as the British monarchy. But the very fact that the rule needed to be changed makes it important that it has been changed. Nicely done, Your Royal Highness.

Now, as a result, you can go back to anticipating the blessed event with the normal great-grandmotherly concern for a healthy and happy newborn. And when the time comes, of course, much health and happiness to your whole family. I assume there will be pictures.

And I assume you'll be carrying a representative assortment of those pictures in the designated Royal Purse of the Day -- just in case one of your subjects, or perhaps a guest from abroad, happens to ask. (Or even if they don't.)

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Ohmygosh, it's a "rebirth for Britain"! (In which DWT takes official note of the historic Royal Development)

Caution before clicking: Do you really want to look at Prince William? (Gosh, he used to be so beautiful, before he started looking more and more like his father. Now he makes his depressing brother Harry look almost human. Hmm, I suppose these are just the sorts of comment that would horrify my English relations, as explained below.) On the plus side (work with me here -- I'm scrounging), if you click through, you get to watch a free commercial!

"Prince William's engagement a rebirth for Britain"

-- a headline today on washingtonpost.com

by Ken

A rebirth of Britain, eh? So the slash-and-burn "austerity" crusade is already showing results?

Oh, no, it's apparently not that kind of rebirth. It's more along the lines of what the British government can do for its subjects without actually doing anything for them -- unless you count sucking generous quantities of pounds out of the treasury for this great public event.

NOW, FOR THE RECORD --

What follows about the Royal Announcement was written before I set eyes on the above washingtonpost.com headline, which I encountered only when I went searching for visual adornment for this post. In other words, at a time when I could have been writing about, say, Elizabeth Kolbert's incredibly depressing "Comment" piece in the new (Nov. 22) New Yorker, "Uncomfortable Climate," about the criminally ignorant "F*@k Science" mentality of the Teabagger-blessed band of can-do sociopaths who'll be in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives come January, I undertook to write about the feather-light subject of the Royal Engagement, in full awareness that it's about as shamelessly trivial a story as I could be taking on. Apparently I was wrong!

At this point I'm afraid all I can do is wonder what my mother would have made of Princess-to-be (and, presumably, Queen-to-be) What's-Her-Name. Oh, I'll learn her name eventually, but you know who I mean. The New Diana.

Come to think of it, I don't rightly know what my mother made of the old Diana. It's not something we talked about much, and I never really understood the thing she had for British royalty.

The closest I can figure is that we do have English cousins. My stepfather's Austrian family mostly dispersed in the first several decades of the 20th century to various points outside the German-speaking world. (The undispersed became, of course, the disappeared.) The English branch, if I remember right, found its way to London by way of Ireland.

And to illustrate the, er, unconventionality of my mother's royalism, I offer this story, which I don't doubt I've offered before. I think you'll see why it's one of my favorite stories.

My folks were visiting the cousins, which they loved to do. In fact, when my stepfather's Alzheimer's was still in its milder stages, they were planning a trip to London for an especially joyous event: the wedding of the daughter of the house they'd watched growing up. (Time took care of that plan. By the time of the wedding it was no longer possible for him to travel. My mother, sadly, made the trip alone, having with some difficulty asked if I would come down to Florida to stay with my stepfather. It was an educational experience -- horrible, but educational. I got a small glimpse of what her life was like in the years of his decline.)

Now the cousins, you should understand, are not just lovely people, but sensitive and well-educated ones too. (Both father and daughter were lawyers.) So, anyway, my folks were watching the telly in the cousins' house, and there on-screen was (a much younger) Prince Charles. My mother ventured, as she recounted it, "Wouldn't you think, with all their money, they could do something about his ears?" She did a pretty good job of conveying the shock and horror with which this innocent question was greeted.

Among the clutch of magazine subscriptions I had to tend to when I relieved my mother of the burden of dealing with her own finances was one to a magazine I had never heard of called Royalty. It was, and perhaps still is, a magazine devoted solely to chronicling the British royal family. [This is apparently incorrect. See the PPPS below.] My mother was possibly more devoted to it than it was to its readers; I recall some hiatusing owing to straitened finances during the years I watched over that subscription.

I have to say, the magazine came in handy. In the senior residence to which my mother moved, living on the modest proceeds from the sale of her apartment when, at 83, after living on her own for a decade (six-plus of those years following a cerebral hemorrhage) and deciding she'd cooked enough meals, the social director was an ex-pat Brit. She turned her copies of Royalty over to him when she was done with them, which scored her big-time points.

Wait, Catherine! That's here name, isn't it? The New Diana? I remember because I read . . . Oh goodness, I have to admit that I actually clicked through to the link on AOL yesterday and skimmed a piece on the subject. Anyway, I remember reading that, assuming the royal succession eventually eventuates the way it's mapped out (and it's always dangerous to assume; after all, Prince Charles didn't expect to spend all these decades cooling his heels waiting for his accession), she will/would be Queen Catherine, which gave me a jolt, because I realized I'd never actually registered her name. Kate, I guess it is. (Judging by her résumé since leaving school, I'm thinking she may have gone for career counseling and been counseled that off her work experience to date, she might be best suited to snagging the heir apparent to something or other.)

All seriousness aside, I wish the happy couple the best of luck. Given the bridegroom's family's track record in matters of the, er, heart, they'll need all the luck they can garner.


PS: THERE'S COMMON, AND THEN THERE'S COMMON

A key point in the buzzy rebirth of Britain is that our Kate, as a commoner, is an unprecedented match for Young Will. I suppose it's just the way my mind works, but as some of you are aware, I recently completed a grand tour through all eight of Armistead Maupin's sublime Tales of the City books, and so inevitably I'm flashing back to the opening of the fourth book, Babycakes, where the author imagines some of the private life of Prince William's grammy on the occasion of her 1984 royal visit to San Francisco, which is enmeshed in the plot with the author's customary impudence and ingenuity. And, allowing for the outsize aura of entitlement that I supposes comes with, you know, the title, people don't come much commoner than the queen portrayed there.


PPS: ONLINE "ASK THE AUTHOR LIVE" CHAT 
ON "REPUBLICANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT"

Just because, as noted above, I wasn't up to writing about Elizabeth Kolbert's depressing New Yorker "Comment" piece on the marauding anti-science mentality of the new Republican House majority doesn't mean you couldn't read it if you want to. (Here's the link again.) Note that there's an online "Ask the Author Live" chat with Kolbert scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, Nov. 18, at 3pm ET.


PPPS: ROYALTY LIVES!

And apparently I'm wrong in thinking that its subject matter is limited to British royalty. Crown Princess Victoria (born 1977), after all, is Swedish. I guess the admirers of royalty can't afford to cast their net so narrowly. I apologize for the erroneous information above. Pretty much the extent of my involvement with the magazine was mailing in the renewal forms with the checks.

Victoria's royal wedding, I see, took place in June. I seem to have missed the event entirely. I suppose I should at least have sent a card.

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Bulletin from the "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" Dept.: Chimpy the Prez threatens to write a book

"Look up!" cried Prince Phillip, but our Chimpy wasn't falling for that one -- again. Luckily, Mrs. Chimpy was on hand to look up, just in case there was a safe or a piano or something falling on her husband at Windsor Castle. Chimpy was only the second U.S. president, after Ronald Reagan, invited by Queen Elizabeth II to her favorite residence. The Reagans, however, were overnight guests, while the Chimpys were hustled out after an hour. (As the president himself might put it: How do you say "trailer-park trash" in English?)

"[I]n an interview with the Observer, Bush said he's thinking about writing a memoir.

"'I'm going to think about that, yes -- writing a book,' he said, adding that he also planned to build a 'freedom institute' along with his presidential library at Southern Methodist University."

--Chimpy the Prez, in London, quoted by Dan Eggen in today's Washington Post

Meanwhile, our Chimpy was telling Rupert Murdoch's Times, speaking of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq:

"I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric," he said, adding that phrases such as "bring them on" or "dead or alive" may have "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."

Both thunderbolts seem to call for comment of some sort, but I'm rendered speechless.

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