By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
That’s us
One of the many virtues of my late seventh cousin that has been twice dismissed (on the left side of the blanket, past the Second Duke of Portland) is His Majesty’s seven decades of devoted silence. A constitutional monarch, like a child, should be seen and not heard, and should follow the old Chinese proverb for the effect “The one who speaks does not know: the one who knows does not speak”.
With suitable reluctance, the Queen was asked by the Johnson administration to attend the 26 . festivalorder Gabfest of the Party in Glasgow last winter (interestingly, Glasgow hasn’t been as warm for several decades). There, she gave a rare hint of her thinking, as she pointed to the hypocrisy of those who preach the imaginary catastrophe of unabated but unrelenting global warming. about it personally. Think Gore and his private jet.
Personally, the Queen is known for her sense of humour (which she needs – just look at her last few Prime Ministers). At Balmoral, her favorite royal residence deep in the Aberdeenshire countryside at the foot of the Highland Mountains below Lochnagar, she often drives around in a Land Rover herself. She once told a story about a tourist who got lost on the hill. The tourist banged on her window to ask for directions.
Balmorale, as His Majesty loves and calls it
His Majesty smashed the window down and the tourist, who suddenly recognized her, jumped to his feet and gave a cry of astonishment. When guests visiting Balmoral (or “Balmorale,” as she called it, as it cheered her to be in her beloved Scotland) asked the Queen to tell the story, she would perform the jump and the sound of voices. bloody screams for them at the dinner table.
Her Majesty’s humor – a gentle and always kind implementation of the legislation – has earned her the adoration of all those close to her. Below are a few examples.
Traditionally, a regiment of Guardsmen was always stationed at Victoria Barracks, just below Windsor Castle. Each night, one of the young officers was the Captain of the Guard at Windsor Castle, and was obliged to take up residence in the Captain’s Quarters just to the left of the main gate.
In the late 1970s, the Irish Guards were on duty. Occasionally, if an extra man was needed to make up the number at the Royal dinner table, the Queen’s Equerry would phone the watchtower and order the Captain of the Guard to attend. So all the young officers were invited to dinner at least once, except for one who – due to a coincidence of statistics – never received the call, and was known to be very upset. about that.
My old friend the late Captain Nigel (Nosher) Morgan, aka Football-Face, a Boris Johnson lookalike, was a regimental joker. He was extremely good at imitating voices, including the lisp of the then-Equerry to the Queen song. One evening, the officer had not had time to have dinner with the Queen as he entered the Captain’s room when the telephone rang.
Equerry, in his customary aristocratic voice, said that His Majesty did not have a man for dinner that night; that the officer should enter his mess kit at once, and should appear at the door of the Maiden Tower, where a servant would wait to take him to the Drawing Room. “Otherwise, just go up the spiral staircase to the living room and have a drink.”
[Architectural footnote: The Royal Household does not perpetrate the transatlantic solecism of describing a helical stair as a “spiral stair”].
The officer enjoyed wrestling with his Gilbert & Sullivan mess kit and headed for the Woman’s Tower. With no pedestrians in sight, he ascended the spiral staircase to the parlor, where Her Majesty’s guests had not yet begun to gather. After a few minutes, Prince Edward arrived with a catapult and started playing Ping the Ming, a longtime favorite of young Royals.
Soon after, the Duke of Edinburgh arrives and sends Ginge away. He saw the policeman and said, “What *!? = What are you doing here?” The policeman explained that he was ordered by Equerry to make up for dinner. By then, guests had already begun to gather.
The Duke hissed: “Well, you’re not on the list. Someone (I can guess who, and so can you) played a practical joke. So let’s go. Distant. The current!”
Faced with that direct order, the disgruntled Guards Captain returned to his quarters, where a large number of his fellow officers were waiting to comfort him by helping them drink. his whiskey.
A few days later, the officer was again made Captain of the Guard. The phone rang. Equerry’s cut-glass timbre made the fiddle shudder: “A short man… Gilbert & Sullivan… Maiden’s tower… servant… spiral staircase.”
The policeman replied, “Morgan, you son of a bitch, you can’t do the same trick twice!”
There was a curtly cold silence on the other end, then the over-stressed Bakelite shattering as the phone disintegrated. [the Royal Household does not use plastic]. “Here To be Your Majesty’s Equerry. Friend will attend, or you will face Court Martial! “
The officer duly attended as ordered, and found that he was not there merely to make up the numbers. The Duke of Edinburgh, who told the Queen the story, personally introduced him to the Queen, who placed him at her right hand at dinner and honored him with a string of anecdotes, and he told as well as he had. She enjoyed his company so much that she went on to invite him and his sweetheart to the annual summer ball at Buckingham Palace. None of his brother officers had ever entered that huge multi-billion dollar competition.
The second story also concerns the regimental clown. Football-Face wrote a fake article for The Soldier, Monthly military magazine for the army. His men, who admired him, chose the four most beautiful to attend a local barbershop, where they sat in rows on chairs to trim their bearskin hats, while a photographer to take a photo.
The article duly appeared in the April issue of The Soldier, authored by “Colonel IA Prylle”, who scientifically explains that bear skins contain so much natural sebum that the fur on the Guard’s bearskin hats continues to grow for 25 years. Therefore, before every State occasion, it is necessary to arrange for those on duty not only to have their own keys, but also to have their bear skin trimmed, each Guard receives a special allowance, elected by the National Assembly every day. year, to pay the barber’s extra fee. .
The commanding officer of the Irish Guards, affectionately known to his subordinates as Plank (two feet thick), immediately upon seeing the article, included Football-Face in Order part one (actions). disciplinary action, to use).
When Sergeant Major-Major of the Football-Face Operations Regiment entered, Plank, his face red and seething with rage, shouted: “Billy Bunter’s latest jape is vewwy’s last pounce. You put on weight, didn’t you, that His Majesty personally understood the problem Soldiers fwom cover to cover last month, and she will BE SERIOUS! “
At that moment (that’s the end of the story, and who are we to not be there to argue with Tradition?), the phone on Plank’s desk shattered to pieces. Plank picked up the stethoscope from among the pieces, got down on one knee (because it was actually the Queen’s Equerry), and his face turned even redder.
“Yes, sir, I have caught the killer who will not fear me. Yes, Part One Orders. I told him His Majesty… Eh… Huh? What? Your Majesty happy? Indeed, is there goodwill? She said it was the funniest finger she’d read in a long time? And which bally is good for mowing the lawn? Yes, yes, I gathered with Captain Morgan. Yes he is. “
I have tasted the humor of the Queen myself. On the 25thorder Celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee, I wrote a top article for Yorkshire Post recalls Queen Elizabeth I’s last speech to the President and members of Parliament, all of whom she had invited to Whitehall Palace a few months before her death:
Speaker, We recognize your coming to thank Us. So know that I receive them with as much joy as your love could wish to give such a gift, and treasure it above any treasure or riches; for those we know how to award, but their loyalty, love and thanks, I consider them priceless.
“And though God has exalted me, this I tell of the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your love. This makes me very unhappy because God has made me a Queen, a Queen for the grateful nation, and a means under God to keep you safe and protect you from danger. dangerous.
“I do not wish to live or reign longer than my life and my reign shall be for your sake. And though you have, and may have, many more powerful and wiser princes in this chair, you have never had, nor ever will, any king love you more. “
The first article ends with the heartfelt statement that the second Elizabeth, like the first, can only say that she reigns with our love. BBC World Service cited it in its review in the British Press. The Queen’s Equerry heard the broadcast and brought the leader before the Queen, who ordered him to invite the Editor of the Queen. Yorkshire Post lunch tete-a-tete at Buckingham Palace.
The Editor made his way through the pieces of plastic where his cell phone had left and came to find me at the writer-leader. He plopped down in his chair and groaned, “Oh, my God, Monckton! Now look what you’ve dropped me into. “
“Don’t worry, boss,” I replied cheerfully, “I’ll take your place.”
Editors don’t have that. He mutters darkly about the need to preserve the last crumbs of Yorkshire Post’s reputation. He sighed and said that he was summoned and it was his duty to go.
He thought for a moment and said, “Christopher, here’s the point. You just know what to say, but we, tough boys with big hands, don’t. What if we were looking at the weather and we were playing cricket and she looked at me and I looked at her and neither of us could think of anything to say to the other? “
“Oh,” I said cheerfully, “Easy. Just explain to her that your lead writer is her seventh cousin who has been removed twice” [I thought it tactful not to mention the wrong side of the blanket].
He groaned and staggered to catch the train to King’s Cross.
That evening, he returned and sat down in a chair. “Oh, my God, Monckton!”
“How does it happen? Say it all!”
“Well, we did about the weather and we played cricket, which she knows a lot about. But then she looked at me and I looked at her and we couldn’t think of anything to say to each other. So I blurted out something I swore I wouldn’t say. I said, ‘Ma’am, did you know that my lead writer is your second cousin who has been removed twice? “
He swore that His Majesty answered: “Oh, is that so? Well, please let him get rid of the third time! “
And who are we that we are not there to argue with Tradition? How we will miss her dearly, and we will remember the feast of innocent joy she placed before us, as the reign of the King of Climate began.
Heirs, King of Climates and Spare Parts in Balmoral
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