263. Tragedy at home, ethics abroad

Divorce, contrary to what many believe, was not permitted by the Church of England. Henry VIII didn’t divorce two wives, he had the marriages annulled, declaring in effect that they’d never happened. The Church itself remained as opposed to divorce as the Catholics. That’s why Edward VIII had abdicated in the 1930s, so he could marry the divorcee he loved. It’s also why Queen Elizabeth II, as head of the Church of England – just as Henry VIII had been – forbade her sister Princess Margaret’s marriage to a divorcee, a decision that blackened the rest of Margaret’s life.

That’s why it’s such an irony that three of Elizabeth’s four children had marriages that led to divorce. Indeed, her eldest son Charles, now king himself and head of the Church, not only divorced his wife, Princess Diana, but married the love of his life, Camilla, herself divorced and happily settled as queen.

His strained marriage and ultimate divorce caused great pain to Diana. That led to her rather wild last years, culminating in the terrible car crash in Paris that caused her death. That turned into a real crisis for the British monarchy, when the queen and royal family reacted with apparently complete tone deafness to the sorrow that swept across Britain and indeed into other countries too.

It was a crisis from which the Blair government helped the monarchy emerge and get back to on the road to a return to its traditional popularity, which enjoys again today.

Just as he helped modernise, a very little, one traditional British institution, Blair also worked on another, the British army. He adopted what he called an ethical foreign policy but his foreign secretary, Robin Cook, referred to less ambitiously as a foreign policy with an ethical dimension. The way it worked was shown in the NATO operation in Kosovo, presented by its supporters as essentially a humanitarian mission, though its detractors wouldn’t agree.

What the operation certainly did do, however, was provide a telling example of the principle that military men sometimes achieve their goals most effectively by not opening fire, rather than provoking a violent confrontation. That’s a great story, well worth the telling.

Illustration: Diana, the people’s princess. Photo credit: Ron Sachs/picture-alliance/Cover Images

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License