(continued)

Now have come two novels. The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett, describes what happens when the queen, a functional illiterate, is forced by her yapping corgis into contact with a traveling library. She begins to read. And reads increasingly serious stuff. She begins to get "ideas," somewhat to the dismay of politicians and the dereliction of her duties. Indeed, she plans to become a writer.

A month later, the novelist Emma Tennant published Autobiography of the Queen. In it, the queen sneaks out of the royal Scots seat, Balmoral, escaping scandals and scrutiny for a retreat to the Caribbean island Santa Lucia. And somehow the woman whom Annie Leibovitz describes as "probably the most photographed person in the world" does all of this unobserved.

But these fictions are cream puffs compared with the cannonball that just hurtled in from the world of fact.

On Boxing Day, as Brits call the day after Christmas, the popular historian David Starkey ended his 17-part Channel 4 series on the British monarchy with an examination of the Queen's family, the House of Windsor. About the queen herself, Starkey, who has been characterized as "the rudest man in Britain," is fairly brutal.

He has described the queen as poorly educated. "I think in many ways she has found her role often very frightening, often bewildering, and requiring her to do things in which she has absolutely no interest, and to meet people she finds deeply unsympathetic, like me," he told Guardian interviewer Aida Edemariam. Why him, she asked?

"Well, I don't think she's at all comfortable with anybody—I would hesitate to use the word intellectual, but it's useful. I think she's got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude to culture—you remember: 'Every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.' I think the queen reaches for her mask."

Starkey is drawing on personal memories here. He curated a museum show on Elizabeth I in 2003 and lunched with the queen. By his description it wasn't much fun. He said she was annoyed that her gin and Dubonnet was slow in arriving and that her interest in royal history—including his show—extended no further back that her own grandfather. And so forth.

Still, Starkey finds some hope for the future of the monarchy in Prince Charles. This has startled those (many, many) for whom the prince has been a cartoon figure for too long, but perhaps he's right. Charles clearly has an inquisitive nature, and it would be useful for the UK to continue to have some sort of settling counterforce to short-term globalized business interests in an increasingly threatening world. But the ship of state is fragile, no question.

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