Epilogue Three (Part One)
The Succession
"Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he crafted was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable personages burst with laughter,
And when he cried, little children died in the streets."
- "Epitaph on a Tyrant"
W.H. Auden
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The funeral procession for King-Emperor Edward VIII winds through London, June 1972.
His Majesty Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, King of the Dominions of the British Empire, Emperor of India, and Defender of the Faith, died on 28th May 1972 at Chateau Laurier, the grandiose palace complex at the heart of Ottawa, the Imperial city he had done so much to aggrandize. He was 77 years old and died less than a month before his 78th birthday. His reign had lasted exactly 36 years and 129 days.
Official photograph of Edward, c.1968. The King-Emperor’s fading health was an open secret among the Imperial elite and foreign intelligence services.
The King-Emperor’s health began to fail in the mid-1960s, and he’d become increasingly detached from the imperial power structures that had once passed directly through Chateau Laurier’s halls and ballrooms. In December 1964, he was successfully operated on for an aneurysm of the abdominal aorta, and in February 1965, received treatment for a detached retina in his left eye. In late 1971, Edward, who was a smoker from an early age, was diagnosed with throat cancer and underwent cobalt therapy. (His brother, Albert, Duke of York, had already died from smoking-related lung cancer in 1962.) Though still the central figure of the imperial mythos, the King-Emperor retreated gradually from public view, his portraits increasingly ageless and his presence increasingly abstracted. His public duties were delegated to his photogenic nieces, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, and other popular members of the royal family, like the glamorous Duke and Duchess of Kent. The grueling schedule of travel, by which the royal court moved annually between the Dominions, was taken over by Elizabeth and her husband in 1966. Outfitted with a supersonic royal jet, Elizabeth and her young family became globetrotting icons of Imperial prestige, even as the Empire continued to ail at home.
Princess-Imperial Elizabeth arrives in Transarabia for an official visit, April 1970. As Edward's health failed, Elizabeth increasingly represented the Empire abroad.
Meanwhile, Edward’s travel shrunk to circulations between Balmoral, the Windsors’ private Scottish castle, which had been used as an agricultural college during the Union of Britain period before restoration by Edward and his siblings following the Liberation; Chateau Laurier, Edward’s glamorous urban headquarters; and Payne Lodge, the rustic lakeside estate Queen-Empress Barbara had constructed for herself in her native Alberta. Gradually, the King-Emperor’s social circle fell away too, as first generation of Bright ‘Young’ Things succumbed to the inevitable passage of time, deeply affecting the sentimental King-Emperor. Edward was shocked by the death of his brother, Albert, drawing him closer to his nieces. Sheila Chisholm, a former girlfriend and one of Edward’s closest emotional confidantes, died in 1967. Sir Douglas Gracey, his intimately trusted military advisor and Churchill’s nemesis on the subject of India, had died in June 1964. Churchill himself died in January 1965, leaving the King without the service and guidance of his longtime consigliere. Their relationship had always been complex; Edward’s iconoclasm and modernizing instincts clashed with Churchill’s instinctive conservatism, and the disaster of Gallipoli prevented Churchill, who only narrowly escaped purging as a Gerontocrat, from ever returning to a frontline political role, much to his resentment. As Edward’s advisor and author of some of the King-Emperor’s most famous speeches, Churchill was opinionated, sometimes leading to explosive quarrels with the King and months long banishments from the Court, but he always managed to find his way back into Edward’s good graces. Following his death, Edward showered Churchill with honors, including the rare privilege of a glowing royal eulogy (written by Churchill’s one hand, of course).
Churchill and the King-Emperor conferring, 1938. The relationship between the two men was complex, but Churchill remained one of Edward's closest advisers until his death in 1965.
The King-Emperor’s fading health was well-known by foreign intelligence services, and openly commented on in the international media by the end of the decade. Edward appeared frail and distracted at the signing of the Treaty of Havana in 1969, and a 1970 state visit with King Aleksander of Iceland was cut short due to unspecified health issues. This proved to be Edward’s last foreign trip, and foreign attention and internal intrigue increasingly turned to trying to decipher the intentions and ambitions of Edward’s designated heir, Elizabeth. Despite spending almost her entire life in the public eye, and being one of the most famous and celebrities in the world, the Princess Imperial remained a puzzling enigma to all but her closest circle.
A 1962 Canadian stamp depicting Princess-Imperial Elizabeth alongside typically futurist BYT propaganda symbols: an ocean freighter, a jet, a transport truck, a bus, a high-speed train, and a satellite communications tower. Despite her long period in the public eyes, Elizabeth's views remained a puzzling enigma to all but her closest circle.
Meanwhile, the internal politics and political structures of the Empire continued to develop and mature, despite (or sometimes because of) the King-Emperor’s greater absence from day to day administration and decreased ability to personally balance between the various factions and Dominion leaders. Since the Dominions had committed themselves to ‘ever closer union’ at the Imperial Conference of 1948, the Imperial Parliament and cross-Empire legislative structures had continued to accrue powers. Supranational executive functions, which had initially principally dealt with the management and regulation of the Imperial Dollar, intra-Imperial commerce, and military coordination, also continued to expand. By the time of Edward’s death, successive agreements had expanded the Imperial Government to encompass five distinct institutions.
- The Imperial Council, a form of collective presidency, which determined the general political agenda and strategic priorities of the Empire by gathering together the Dominion Prime Ministers, the Imperial General Staff, and the Monarch or his advisors for quarterly Imperial Conferences, rotating by location, with decision making by consensus;
- The Imperial Cabinet, an executive body of technocratic officials, led by a royally-appointed Chief Secretary, and headquartered in London. This Cabinet managed and controlled the Empire’s permanent civil service, the pan-Imperial agencies such as the Imperial Board of Labor (IBOL) and the Imperial Economic Office (IEO), and sought to translate the consensus objectives of the Council into draft legislation and royal writs;
- The Imperial Parliament, a bicameral legislative body sitting at Navy Island, Ontario. The Parliament consisted of the Lords Imperial and the Imperial Commons. Although titled and styled in a manner reminiscent of the old gerontocratic aristocracy, the Lords Imperial were ‘elected’ officials, whose titles and honors were held for life but not heritable. After the Glasgow Imperial Conference of 1962, their numbers were set at five per Dominion, serving staggered and non-renewable ten year terms. The final approval of the Lords was required for the passage of any legislation approved by the Commons. Despite the name, the Commons were not particularly common. Members of the Imperial Parliament (MIPs) were ‘elected’ from a pre-approved list, usually drawn from decorated veterans and other icons of Imperial service, and the position was largely honorific - a reward given out to heroes of the regime. During Edward’s reign, the Parliament was largely ceremonial; although it held the theoretical power to amend, approve or reject the proposals of the Cabinet and Council, in practice the Lords and Cabinet merely rubber-stamped the actions of the oligarchic bodies.
- The Imperial Supreme Court, sitting in Canberra. Established as the highest court in the Empire for civil and criminal proceedings at the Cape Town Imperial Conference of 1966, the court comprised 7 judges, including a Chief Justice and Deputy Chief Justice, appointed by the monarch on the recommendation of the Dominion Prime Ministers. By convention, the Crown sought to equally apportion the 7 positions on the Court between the 7 Dominions of the Empire. Justices served for life and were granted the title Lord Justice or Lady Justice. Like the Parliament, the Court was largely ceremonial during Edward’s reign; from 1966 to 1972, it decided almost all of its cases unanimously; and,
- The Imperial Central Bank, which issued and controlled the Imperial Dollar, managing the monetary stability of the Empire’s common currency and market. It also advised the Council, the economic agencies of the Cabinet, and the individual Dominion governments, on overall economic policy. Headed by a technocratic Governor and Court of Directors, the Bank was formally headquartered in London, but also had a large presence in New York, the other principal Entente currency market and stock exchange. This was because the ICB was also an important institution to the countries of the New American Order, whose various ‘tame dollar’ currencies were pegged to the Imperial Dollar’s value.
A meeting of the Imperial Parliament, c.1968. Since the Dominions had committed themselves to ‘ever closer union’ at the Imperial Conference of 1948, the Imperial Parliament and cross-Empire legislative structures had continued to accrue powers.
The development of these institutions, and the formalization of the Imperial power structures in the later years of Edward’s reign, went hand-in-hand with the dying off of the first generation of Bright Young Thing leaders that founded the renewed Empire and came to power alongside the King-Emperor. In place of personal cabals and Edward’s ‘palace cabinet’, rose a new era of ‘codified oligarchy’ as increasing numbers of Imperial officials were well-educated technocrats in the Pioneer School mould. This new generation were far more factional, as divides emerged within the Imperial power structure regarding the correct response to the ongoing Imperial malaise. Broadly, Reformists favored liberalization of the Imperial economy, including increased foreign trade and investment, the privatization and contracting out of much state-owned industry and the lifting of price controls, protectionist policies, and regulations. Some Reformists also favored corresponding political liberalization, including relaxations on political discourse and coercive social controls in line with the preferences of the Empire’s increasingly independently-minded middle class, although this sentiment was far from universal and other Reformists hoped to achieve economic reform without fundamentally challenging the precepts of Authoritarian Democracy. Hardliners, on the other hand, opposed reform, either because they were wedded to the status quo or because they saw the route through the Malaise as doubling down on coercive strategies. Within the Imperial Parliament, the delegations of Australasia and Canada were generally Hardliners, while Britain and India favored Reformists. The smaller Dominions - South Africa, Ireland and the Caribbean Federation - tended to balance between the larger blocs.
The Imperial Prime Ministers at the time of Edward's death (L-R):
Robert Stanfield (Canada), Mervyn Brogan (Australasia), Villiers Graaf (South Africa), J. R. D. Tata (India).
Peter Carington (Britain), Patrick Hillery (Ireland), Doris Sands Johnson (Carribean Fed.)
Despite these tensions, Edward’s death triggered a unifying outpouring of mourning in the Empire and beyond its borders. Even the Empire’s foes had to acknowledge the passing of a titanic figure, and the great uncertainty his departure left behind. Like a medieval saint of old, Edward’s remains were divided: his heart interred beneath the colossal Imperial Veterans Monument in Ottawa, and his body entombed in Britain. (In a final fit of pique, Edward had his tomb constructed beside, and some might say overshadowing, that of his father.)
Coronation portrait of Elizabeth II. As a 50 year old mother and wife, born in Canada at the lowest ebb of British power, educated as a commoner and married to an Irish-American, Elizabeth’s background couldn’t be more different than that of her uncle.
The King-Emperor’s funeral took place in London in June, 1972. After arriving from Canada aboard the royal jet, repainted in black, a solemn military column accompanied the monarch’s body (minus heart) to the Palace of Westminster, where it stood in state for several days in the reconstructed splendor of Westminster Hall, its ancient stones bearing the bullet scars and battle wounds of the Liberation. The casket, hewn from Australasian jarrah wood and inlaid with Indian ivory, stood in state for four days, during which an estimated 900,000 mourners filed past the coffin. Edward’s funeral took place in New St Paul’s Cathedral, beneath the cavernous bulk of Lutyens’ massive dome. In attendance were not only the Queen-Empress and the massed Imperial elite, but also dignitaries from an unprecedented number of countries, including nine monarchs, six presidents and 18 prime ministers. Having made a decision to attend the funeral personally, Kaiser Friedrich IV arrived in London aboard the atomic-powered German cruiser
SMS Kaiserin Cecilie, which moored off Portsmouth for the duration of his visit, much to the curiosity of local people.
The German atomic-powered missile cruiser SMS Kaiserin Cecilie moored off Portsmouth during the funeral of Edward VIII. The high-level German delegation was seen as a sign of Anglo-German detente.
At the center of this maelstrom stood, implacably, Elizabeth. A 50 year old mother of two, born in Canada at the lowest ebb of British power, educated as a commoner and married to an Irish-American, Elizabeth’s background couldn’t be more different than that of her uncle, a playboy prince turned Weltkrieg veteran and political radical. Prognosticators urgently attempted to divine the Queen-Empress’s intentions, but they remained mysterious. Outside observers, and some hopeful Imperial dissidents, had long felt that Elizabeth’s late father, Albert, Duke of York, maintained democratic sympathies. They hoped that his daughter might prove amenable to the growing Reformist Bloc in the Imperial institutions. Hardliners, however, saw Elizabeth as one of their own, given her dutiful loyalty to her uncle and her stoical conservatism. Moreover, the influence of her husband, a committed champion of the New American Order and one of the driving forces behind the Treaty of Havana, remained an unknown quality. (Behind the scenes, the Duke of Vancouver had already aligned himself with those who argued in favor of a new ‘Anglophone Community’ over the Empire’s traditional alliance with the French Empire and the so-called ‘Meditente’.)
Elizabeth II and Lord Louis Mountbatten, 1972. An intimate of Edward VIII and the Queen-Empress' late father, Prince Albert, Mountbatten had also served as the Viceroy of Britain and was seen as a trusted and unifying figure by the various Imperial factions and governments.
Whatever lay ahead, Elizabeth began her reign in accordance with her uncle’s precedents. One of her first actions was to call her second-cousin Louis Mountbatten, Viceroy of Britain during the post-Liberation years and a reassuring figure to the various Imperial factions, back to service. Mountbatten was appointed the Queen-Empress’ chief interlocutor and Chairman of the Imperial Council, a
de facto Imperial Prime Minister. Elizabeth’s coronation took place on the 29th May 1973; like Edward, she was crowned atop the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in be presence of the Imperial Council, nobility, and massed soldiers and veterans. An estimated television audience of 600 million watched the new Queen-Empress, her husband and her heir, Prince-Imperial John, swear allegiance to the principles of the Bright Young Things. For the first time since the death of Queen Victoria some 70 years before, rang out the anthem and the invocation: God Save the Queen.
