In 2012 I was in Cambridge, newly enthroned as the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy. The town had a new Duke and Duchess that year, too, in William and Kate. When they announced they were expecting their first child, I wrote a piece for The Conversation. Welcome as Baby Cambridge would be, I said, she or he was entitled to normal choices in life.
I followed up with a second piece, after George’s birth. I pointed out that if we moved quickly, he could be allowed a comparatively normal childhood, with the opportunity to choose his own path. Like the then Prince of Wales, I became a grandfather that year. I congratulated him, but said that his grandson should not be denied freedoms that mine would take for granted.
I didn’t get much traction at the time, but the window has been shifting. In the wake of Harry’s book Spare, several writers made similar points. In the Guardian, for example, Jonathan Freedland compared the Windsors to the Truman Show. Kate Williams argued we don’t need a spare, and that Windsor children except the heir should be allowed a normal life. And Catherine Bennett said, “If the country can’t do without the family entirely, we could surely ration ourselves to one child victim per generation.”
This is progress, by my lights, especially Bennett’s use of the phrase ‘child victim’. But even she doesn’t spell out the important point. Chosen by birth, these individuals never have the opportunity to say yes or no to the role, as consenting adults. That would be unthinkable, of course, for any other public office.
My arguments provoked two main objections. Many people said that there is no compulsion involved. The heir could simply step down, if he or she didn’t want the job. Others said that the Windsors were no different from many other families, in which children were encouraged to follow in their parents’ footsteps—the Murdochs were often mentioned.
Since then, Harry’s case has made nonsense of the first objection, though he was only the spare, not the heir—since George, in fact, not even that. More choice for the heir would mean less for the spare, in the present system. The state gets its victim, one way or the other. “Come with us, Your Highness, or we’ll take your sister instead.” Some choice.
In any case, a cage one can force open when one grows up is still a cage. The heir is still denied a normal childhood, with the normal options for considering his or her own future, at that point.
As for the Murdochs, it would be vastly easier for Lachlan to step away from the family business than it was for Harry, let alone William. (I’m told Lachlan’s siblings have already done so.) No one outside the family would care, either way.
What a family does is a private matter, within limits. What we do to the Windsor children is a public matter. If the Murdochs choose to restrict their children’s options, that’s a matter for them (within limits, again). If we do it to the Windsor children, it is a matter for all of us—Australians as well as Britons, under present arrangements. And the constraints we presently impose on those children go well beyond what we would regard as acceptable, in a private case.
These points seem as obvious to me now as they did in 2012—more so, if anything, now that Queen Elizabeth is no longer with us. We can admire her lifetime of public service, while at the same time feeling that it was cruelly unfair that it wasn’t voluntary. The issue is in plain sight, with no hidden details, yet it is almost invisible in public consciousness. It is an elephant, in other words, comfortably ensconced in the throne rooms of London, and the other liberal democracies that still rely on hereditary monarchies. (Again, Canberra doesn’t get a free pass, just because we make do with someone else’s children.)
Why does the elephant go unseen? Sheer familiarity is part of it, combined with the fact that most people who care strongly about the monarchy, for or against, have a vested interest in looking the other way. For most monarchists it would be a huge embarrassment, to say the least, to allow that their favoured system has child conscription at its heart.
True, some monarchists will admit that it is conscription, but insist that it is worth it, for the benefits of the system. That seems callous to me, though I admire their honesty. And I welcome the argument. It would end, where it belongs, in a court of human rights.
For republicans, the elephant is an embarrassment for a different reason. Their usual argument is that the monarchy rests on unearned privilege, out of place in a modern democracy. This sits uncomfortably with the admission that royal children are in some ways underprivileged, denied freedoms that other children enjoy. Republicans thus deny themselves a more forceful objection, with real potential to trouble their monarchist opponents. (The CEO of the British Republic movement spends his time grumbling about privilege on X, and won’t answer my emails.)
Many of us hope that we’ll have another chance to make Australia a republic—within our lifetimes, if we’re lucky. In pressing for that change, let’s remember that it is not just about our right to govern ourselves. It’s also about the rights of a few British children, presently conscripted to do the job.