Royalties

John Sutherland

• CounterBlasts No 10. The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favourite Fetish by Christopher Hitchens
  Chatto, 42 pp, £2.99, January 1990, ISBN 0 7011 3555 7
• The Prince by Celia Brayfield
  Chatto, 576 pp, £12.95, March 1990, ISBN 0 7011 3357 0
• The Maker’s Mark by Roy Hattersley
  Macmillan, 558 pp, £13.95, June 1990, ISBN 0 333 47032 X
• A Time to Dance by Melvyn Bragg
  Hodder, 220 pp, £12.95, June 1990, ISBN 0 340 52911 3

Deference to royalty in this country is enforced by a judicial and popular savagery which is always there but only occasionally glimpsed. The glimpses are instructive. In 1937 the diplomat Geoffrey Dennis wrote a Coronation Commentary for Heinemann. This was a reasoned defence of the monarchy – then in a very rocky state. Dennis repeated, and deprecated, the widespread gossip that Mrs Simpson had been the Duke of Windsor’s mistress before marriage and that England’s recently abdicated king sometimes drank too much. A writ was served and the action heard before the Lord Chief Justice, who declared in court that ‘these particular libels, a jury might think, appear almost to invite a thoroughly efficient horse-whipping.’ Author and publisher escaped the lash and merely had to pulp their book and pay huge damages. The episode served notice on the book trade to tread very carefully in matters royal, which they duly did.