England’s “Red Rose Revolution”

The Red Rose Revolution brought about by Princess Diana’s tragic death was a triumph of sentimentality over reality. In the intervening twenty-five years, that sentimentality has prevailed in England, sweeping away the sterling values that had been the hallmark of English character.

I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I have watched the most recent installment of the lavish royal soap opera The Crown. I reviewed earlier series here, here and here, and decided to watch the final series to see how the producers handled the dramatic events of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

The series is billed as a drama based on historical events. That is a fair description, and viewers should not be deluded into thinking it is more than that. After all, Shakespeare himself was adept in adopting royal history and adapting it to his dramatic purposes. The main difference is that film replicates reality so much more effectively than a stage production. When we attend the theater we corporately and consciously suspend our disbelief. When we watch television it is easier and more tempting not to.

The first four episodes of season six deal with Princess Diana’s friendship with the Egyptian film producer Dodi Fayed, their doomed romance and tragic death. They also portray the stoic response of the rest of the royal family to Diana’s demise. Were the Royals really so coldhearted, devoted to duty, and dead-set on maintaining palace protocol in the face of such a public tragedy?

Peter Morgan, the writer of the series, already explored this tantalizingly complex drama in his film The Queen starring Helen Mirren. This time he plunges too explicitly into the quicksand of psychological motivations and recriminations, and does so with the cloying and annoying dramatic trick of Diana and Dodi’s ghosts having after life conversations with the Queen, Prince Charles, and Dodi’s dad, Mohammed Al Fayed.

It was too “on the nose.” A screen writer of Morgan’s intelligence and experience should have known better. While the writers, directors, and actors should be aware of deeper desires and hidden motivations, they should be kept below the surface—being revealed through actions and events, and allowing perceptive viewers to make the necessary connections through thoughtful observation and cathartic emotions, not through explicit statements.

Curiously, this explicit treatment of emotion connects with one of the underlying themes that the drama of Diana revealed. It is something I have dubbed “England’s Red Rose Revolution.” When Diana died in Paris, the royal family were on vacation at Balmoral Castle in the Scottish highlands. At one point in the film, Prince Charles (Dominic West) informs the Queen and Prince Philip about the huge surge of emotions pouring out across England while they are ensconced in Scotland.

We were living in England at the time, and I remember the astonishing outpouring of grief. Multitudes were in the streets, thronging royal palaces and laying oceans of floral tributes at their gates. As a former royal, Diana did not warrant a state funeral, and the first plans were for the Spencer family to hold a private funeral service.

Eventually a lavish state funeral took place in Westminster Abbey, replete with Elton John weeping as he sang a maudlin version of his elegy to Marilyn Monroe hastily re-written as a tribute to Diana. The massive crowds packed the streets of London were openly sobbing in scenes that were totally unprecedented.

What on earth was happening in the land of the Blitz Spirit and the stiff upper lip? In The Crown, the Prince Charles character called it a revolution. It was as if the English had bottled up all their emotion from two catastrophic world wars, the deprivations of the immediate post-war period, and the economic and political rumblings of the seventies and eighties. The Queen’s steady spirit and Margaret Thatcher’s strong backbone took them through, and the steely resolve of the English people seemed to hold steady. They could stand solid in any storm.

Meanwhile, Diana Princess of Wales became the figurehead of a new, kinder, tender-hearted England. She embraced AIDS victims, was a happy and hearty mother to her two adorable princes, and was the victim of a heartless and unfaithful husband. She wanted to be the “Queen of Hearts” and so won the hearts of the English. When she died, those hearts were broken and so was the solid, stoical, stiff English society. A dam was broken, and the flood of emotion was astonishing and disturbing.

It was a Red Rose Revolution because red roses are the archetypal symbol of sentimental romance. The facts of the matter are perhaps more sobering. While Diana was a tender-hearted, kind, and compassionate person, she was also an immature, manipulative, entitled, spoiled, and promiscuous woman. She may have been a good mother, but she was also a woman who displayed her amorous friendships not only to the public, but also before her own children. Her behavior was no worse than that of her husband and other royals and celebrities, but her carefully cultivated “shy Di” persona sheltered her from a harsher assessment of her behavior.

The Red Rose Revolution brought about by her tragic death was a triumph of sentimentality over reality. In the intervening twenty-five years, that sentimentality has prevailed in England, sweeping away the sterling values that had been the hallmark of English character.

The sentimentality that prevails in England today has taken the form of a kind of compulsive sensitivity to everyone’s feelings, but without any objective moral standard or authority. An easy tenderness accompanied by an aggressive tendency to prosecute anyone who appears, even slightly, to be “hateful” or “phobic” dominates the social conversation.

Flannery O’Connor famously quipped that “tenderness leads to the gas chambers.” Here’s why: The triumph of sentimentality is the triumph of subjective individual emotions over objective truth and values. Once sentimentality triumphs, the sentimentalist feels his own emotions to be good and therefore perceives himself as a good person for having those fine emotions.

What the sentimentalist overlooks is the fact that there are many kinds of emotions. While he is awash in the nice, sweet, tender-hearted, and compassionate emotions, he is blind to the emotions of rage, resentment, and revenge that also lurk in the human heart, and when those bitter emotions emerge (as they most certainly will), having already accepted that his emotions are worthy and virtuous, he accepts the ignoble emotions as also worthy and virtuous.

Furthermore, in his self-righteousness he will consider it his duty to act on those emotions, and if those emotions demand action against others who do not share those emotions he will take action against them—and that action is eventually the action to persecute, exclude, and ultimately eliminate the “enemy”.

The English successfully resisted the various Marxist revolutions that brought bloodshed, war, and disaster to Europe in the twentieth century. The stiff resolve of the English held firm. It is a historical co-incidence that just three months before the death of Diana, the leader of the Labor Party—Tony Blair—was elected as Prime Minister. The symbol of Blair’s leftist “New Labor” was a Red Rose.

Red had always been the color of the communist/socialist revolutionaries. The rose provided the oleaginous Mr Blair a sentimental symbol for the revolution that has transformed England, and Diana’s death was the earthquake that produced the tsunami of sentimentality that swept England into its present morass.

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The featured image is a photograph of the “Royal Visit of Prince Charles and Princess Diana to Edmonton, Alberta – Welcoming Address by Premier Peter Lougheed at the Alberta Legislature, 30 June 1983.” This image has no known copyright restrictions, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.