The Church of Scotland is one of the most sin-conscious state churches in the world. The root ideology of Calvinism, by which the kirk has lived, is that God divided humanity into an elect, who would be saved, and the sinful, irrecoverably damned. In the extreme version, this meant that the saved could never sin and the sinful could never do right.
Extreme self-righteousness coupled with disciplinary zeal – until the 19th century, kirks tried sinners and punished them by forcing them to appear before the congregation in sackcloth – made the Scots minister and kirk far more terrifying than the English curate and church. The aura of vengeful purity hung over the kirk till well after the Second World War, as I remember from my own childhood, during which I was sent to one of the eight churches in a village of 2,000 souls. My mother divorced and married a Catholic; a man spat on the ground at her feet as he passed her. Such was village moralism the world over; in Scotland’s case, it was infused with a strain of vicious smugness that still, in memory, sets my teeth on edge and starts the guilty juices flowing.
Few can leave such an atmosphere without an overactive sense of shame. Is it possible that this explains the tortured soul of the heir to the throne, that this is why Charles, Prince of Wales, sees himself (or so it is widely reported) as a “miserable sinner”? Certainly, the phrase conjures up a Presbyterian state of dark brooding on oats sewn too widely and too long after the season. It suggests a self-lacerating guilt about a life whose middle years dipped into a long public abasement, composed of the themes of coldness, cruelty and adultery, which were so sharply highlighted by the endless emotional upstaging by the Princess of Wales and, finally, by her death four years ago on 31 August 1997.
Charles, like me, is in his early fifties. He, too, attended the kirk throughout his childhood, at least during the summer months, and, unlike me, has continued to do so. What, I wondered, were Sunday mornings like at Crathie, the kirk that stands a few hundred metres from the gates of Balmoral Castle? I asked a royal correspondent I knew, himself a Scot, if it was possible to go into Crathie kirk while the royal family was in residence. “I don’t know,” he said. “When we go there, we stand at the foot of the hill and wait. But if you dress up and take a woman with you, you might get in. A kilt would be good.”
In the event, I went alone, casually dressed, unkilted. A crowd of about 300 was waiting in the car park opposite, with about a dozen policemen. I parked, and walked up the hill. “Good morning, sir,” said a policeman as I passed. I went through the door and sat down in a pew about halfway up, unchallenged. A bust of Victoria looked down from the right-hand side of the pulpit. The minister, Robert Sloan, a short, handsome man with a fine head of white hair, came round, greeting the regulars and asking each of those he didn’t know the same question: “Where are you from?” The church was more than two-thirds full, with around 300 in the congregation.
A little before 11.30, the royal family came in, from a side door, to the short section of the church to the right, partly hidden from general view. They filed into the first pew: the Queen and Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and his two sons, William and Harry – tall, blond, exotic amid the greying Windsors. The boys are already priceless media properties: both had recently been photographed by Hello! magazine, wandering the corridors of Highgrove with the model Claudia Schiffer, in what turned out to be a thinly disguised promotion for a Spanish company that had donated tiles and other ornaments to Highgrove’s garden. These photographs, intermingling the two dinner-jacketed princelings with the bare-shouldered model, were a glimpse into their future – a future composed of endless such couplings, as the Windsors dangle for prices sure to be higher than a few Spanish tiles, two male copies of Diana before the image banks of the world. Crathie, as befits a congregation of the Godly, was getting a free look. There was a certain amount of respectful craning.
Though Sloan officiated, the preacher was a guest – a thin, composed man in early middle age called Gordon Savage, whose parish is Dumfries. He took a service much truncated from the one-and-a-half to two-hour monsters I remembered: it was over in 50 minutes, with just ten minutes for the sermon. Ten minutes! We had 40.
The first prayer, though, hit the traditional spot. It was about guilt before a Lord whose service we neglected. “We have let Him down,” Savage said, and paused dramatically. The Windsor heads were down, with the rest of the flock. For a few minutes, you could feel the old weight of the unforgiving creed descend. Reverend Savage was briefly at one with his forebears in a kirk that had burned the papists out of Scotland, torn down their cathedrals, destroyed their graven and painted images – and whose ministers, righteous in their zeal, set out to put the fear of God in their congregations. A God all-seeing – “without whose will not a hair falls from a head”, as Reverend Savage put it – who was there at the first lie, the first cruelty, the first masturbation, the first drunken wallow, the first adultery, as he will be at the last.
But then we came into light, and stayed there. The readings included 1 Cor 13 – “then remains these three: Faith, Hope and Love; but the greatest of these is Love”. The hymns were jaunty: one, even, was not from the Church of Scotland’s hymnary and mentioned that Jesus was “Mary’s son”, a piece of papistry that, in former times, would never have been allowed. Another was “Tell me the old, old story/ Of Jesus and his love!” – and, towards its end, William drew his hand under his left eye, as if brushing away a tear, and the craning grew decorously frantic. Had he wept? Was this the ham actor gene at work, the one that had impelled his mother to put herself between the Taj Mahal and 50 photographers? I wished my friend, the royal correspondent, had been there to make something of it; I could not say if it was a tear or an itch.
Savage took his text from the loaves and the fishes, and said that its true meaning was that the meagre gifts we brought to Christ were transformed by Him. He told the story of John, a criminal he had met in prison, who had found Christ and pulled himself away from sin. He praised the organisations that had not been afraid of the vast task of feeding the world’s hungry children with slender resources and had grown into Oxfam and Save the Children. He noted that our world had changed in the past 50 years: a man joining a good company once had a job for life, but not now, and an unemployed man in his fifties was a sad sight.
Across from Reverend Savage, four unemployed men, all princes, looked up at his pulpit with their bland public faces. I remembered how Norman (now Lord) Tebbit had once sneered, after Charles had voiced concern about the inner cities, that “I suppose the Prince of Wales feels extra sympathy for those who’ve got no job because, in a way, he’s got no job”.
The decades of formal, cosseted, busy idleness may have prompted the midnight thoughts of miserable sinning. His pleasures – polo, shooting, retro architecture – might well seem slight to offer the judgemental almighty as evidence of virtue. He had wanted a role very badly: he had pleaded with Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s for the governorship of Australia (the Australian government vetoed it); had asked to give the Queen’s Speech when his mother was abroad; had aspired to be the last viceroy in Hong Kong. Nothing. He created Business in the Community and the Prince’s Trust, which did good work; but then Diana came and, with a demure glance or a shy smile, opened a thousand millionaires’ hoards. She seduced the most militant of feminists – “Diana,” wrote Bea Campbell, “did transform the space in which the public could contemplate their feelings about royalty and republicanism through the filter of her experience as a woman.” She prompted an intellectual “personality” to fall publicly in love with her: Clive James, writing for the New Yorker soon after her death (and conscious that he was plunging into cringe-making territory for the sophisticates), confessed that: “I wish I had never met her at all. Then I would not have loved her.”
And Charles? Nothing but sneers (though not from James). Who cares about old-fashioned noblesse oblige after Diana? Who does not think how plain he and his likely second wife are, after Diana? Which critic worth his seat in a Radio 3 studio has not lashed him for his reactionary views on architecture, and decried the model village he had caused to be built?
Most importantly, English elite opinion is that the Queen can keep the show together because of the affection in which she is held, but Charles cannot. His rehabilitation over the past four years has been too tentative and too shallow to survive the absurdities he must inherit – not least in the white Commonwealth, where Canada, for example, now has a population in which Catholics outnumber Protestants and in which those of British, Irish or French origin account for less than 50 per cent.
The Queen has kept an iron grip on the monarchy: discipline, duty and concealment of scandal were the rules by which she, at least, lived. She came to the throne when it was revered, and she has kept what she can of it dry, as the waters have risen. But Charles, who has been swimming in these waters, simply cannot repeat the act. We are watching the last scene of the last great western monarchy. Who can know this better than Charles? Now, as his sins whirl about his head like Hitchcock’s birds, he must indeed be miserable. The job for which his life has been sacrificed no longer, in effect, exists.
The service over, the princely tear (if it was that) wiped away, we sang, lustily, “God Save the Queen”. The two ministers bowed in unison to the royal pews, and walked down the aisle to shake hands with the departing congregation in the bright sunlight. To the side, the great humped-back limousine with the glass roof slid past, the Queen and Philip waving; a Range Rover with the Prince and his precious boys followed on.
What Reverend Savage had not noted, in his brisk resume of the past half-century, was what had happened to his kirk. It has passed from promising sinners a hard time to offering redemption on easy terms. It has forsaken fear; and it was fear that kept the pews full, the heads bowed, the ministers and elders respected (and hated), the adulterers punished. The cry “We have let Him down” is as retro as the Prince’s village, a kind of tic, like anti-Catholicism. The kirk now wants to be associated with good – with Oxfam, with John the reformed con, with “the greatest of these is love”. Charles heard of sin in his youth, but he has lived to maturity in the great Presbyterian collapse. Crathie, now, is merely balm. It gave him the concept of miserable sinning. But it is not God the Father that he and his children – as they rush to their own sins and miseries – need now fear. It is God the Sun, and all its legions.
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