EUROSCOPE. Whitewashing the royals

“Lord Darlington wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t a bad man at all,” concludes Stevens, butler at Darlington Hall and protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s powerful and tragic 1989 novel, The Remains of the Day .

So loyal was Stevens, and so convinced of his employer’s courage and wisdom, that he was willing to overlook the fact that, as one character puts it, Darlington had become the “single most useful pawn Herr Hitler has had in this country for his propaganda tricks”. Lord Darlington at one point facilitated a meeting at his home between the German ambassador and the British prime minister, in which he attempted to persuade the government to drop objections to the King visiting Adolf Hitler, and of the merits of a visit of Hitler to England.

A fictional account of course, Ishiguro’s portrayal of the troubled aristocrat drew on an uncomfortable truth — the proximity that notable members of the British aristocracy, and Royal Family, had with the party and supporters of Hitler in the run-up to the Second World War.

There were some who were very well known, such as Oswald Mosley, a minor aristocrat who became infamous for founding the British Union of Fascists in 1932. And of course there was Edward VIII, the King who famously abdicated and became the Duke of Windsor when he married American divorcee Wallis Simpson. With Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, he established close links to the Nazis, even visiting Hitler in 1937 — a meeting that was captured on camera at the time and was considered a major publicity coup for Nazi Germany.

That history has come into the spotlight again in the past week after the tabloid newspaper, The Sun , published footage from around 1933 showing Edward VIII — then the Prince of Wales — doing the Nazi salute along with the current Queen Elizabeth II’s mother, the Queen’s younger sister and the Queen herself, aged around seven.

While no one is suggesting any culpability or responsibility on the part of the young girl herself, it has raised a number of issues — about the links the higher echelons of British society had with the Nazis, as well as the huge and largely unquestioning amount of privacy and discretion that has been accorded to the Royal Family and its networks.

The first issue is the subject of a fascinating new book by London-based historian Karina Urbach, who in Go Betweens for Hitler , looks at the German aristocrats such as Carl Eduard, the Duke of Coburg, who played a key role as informal emissary for Hitler, embarking upon secret missions to Britain, where they often met with others within aristocratic circles.

Playing on the fears European aristocracy had over the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, and their eagerness to defend their “spheres of influence,” Hitler courted royalty, realising that their international networks with others of a similar background, ability to travel, education, and links to the corridors of power made them vital people who could work unobtrusively — with far less scrutiny and documentation than official channels such as ambassadors — to foster relations.

Urbach focuses, in particular, on their attempts to woo supporters in Britain, and portray Germany — even as late as 1938 — as a “reasonable power.”

But equally important as the events themselves is the whitewashing that followed: while books like Ishiguro’s deal with that past in a nuanced way, more recently the historical drama, The Kings Speech , glossed over the links Edward the VII and his brother George had with the Nazis.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, a visit by Anthony Blunt, a former MI5 agent (who it was later revealed had worked for the Soviets), to a German castle in Kronberg, Germany, was long thought to really be an attempt to clear it of any damaging records of the Nazis, notes Deborah Cadbury in her book, Princes at War: The British Royal Family’s Private Battle in the Second World War .

Urbach herself notes the reinvention European Royals, Brits included, attempted in order to cover the insalubrious past — something that proved relatively simple for many as written records of their informal workings — had largely been avoided. “They simply gave a stylised picture of themselves, cleansed of any political haut gout,” she writes.

That cleansed depiction of the Royal Family has continued to the present day (with a few exceptions). By and large, personal scandals aside, major controversy involving Royals has been sidestepped by all but a few British media houses.

This was certainly the message implicit in Buckingham Palace’s rather patronising response to The Sun story as it expressed “disappointment” with the decision to publish the footage — as though the topic was somehow beyond the realm of discussion.

Fortunately, few seem to have bought this argument. While some media have launched into the predictable defence of the sanctity of the Royals, others have argued that the latest revelations clearly drives home the need for Britain to have an open and honest conversation about the issues that continue to haunt its Royals, and in particular the need for the Royal Archives to be finally opened up in a way government archives have been.

The argument that Royals deserved a level of privacy not accorded to politicians struggles to convince, given the political influence they continue to wield. This has become even clearer in the last couple of months with the publication of letters sent by Prince Charles to government ministries on topics ranging from the military to environmental policy.

“It’s not like you are trying to trash people – you are just trying to get a balanced picture and the facts,” says historian Alex Von Tunzelmann, author of The Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire , who has, in the past, found the Royal Archives “very restrictive” to work with, even when it came to dealing with people on its outer fringes, such as Lord Mountbatten.

The links that the top echelons of British society had with Nazi Germany are far from the only historical matter glossed over — the same can be said of much of Britain’s colonial past.

Historians such as Niall Fergusson have proselytised a picture of a splendid empire far removed from the brutal experiences of those it colonised. It has been left to historians and families of victims, such as the courageous veterans of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, to remind Britain of the empire’s vicious realities.

Writing recently in The Guardian , BBC filmmaker David Olusoga, who recently created a documentary on British slave ownership and trade, notes that Britain has proved far more successful at covering up this history. “Where the cotton plantations of the American south were established on the soil of the continental United States, British slavery took place 3,000 miles away in the Caribbean.”

Of course, sanitising history is an issue not just for Britain and its aristocracy but also for other countries across the world. “We have to be grown up about history,” says Tunzelmann. “It’s not about goodies and baddies. It’s not a comic book. It’s about owning up to what happened.”

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