I recall hearing it once in real-life conversation, when I was a child; then recently I read the word in what is probably the definitive Princess Diana biography -- Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles.
So I decided, this morning, that I was going to have Whigs in the blog.
Whigs in the blog.
(Yes -- and no drugs invented yet, to address that!)
[from The Diana Chronicles -- Chapter 3, "Difficult Women."]
> > > > The Spencers could trace themselves back to 1469, when they were a respected clan of prospering sheep farmers in Warwickshire, already in a position to lend money to the monarchy. In 1603, [King] James I repaid the royal debts with...a barony, conferred on the prosperous Robert Spencer... .
In 1699, the Spencers entwined their lustrous family tree with that of the Churchill family when the daughter of the first Duke of Marlborough...married Charles Spencer.
...
...The Spencers' glory days were the eighteenth century.
They became powerful forces in the Whig party, dedicated to restraining the power of the monarchy and supporters of the Protestant succession; in the nineteenth century, they became Parliamentary Liberals, rivals to the Tories. They were behind-the-scenes power brokers.
They helped smooth the ascension to the throne of the Hanoverian prince who became King George I. There was no paradox in the fact that seven or eight generations of Spencers had been loyal courtiers and servants of the crown. They were servants of the monarchy they chose. They saw themselves not as courtiers but -- literally -- as kingmakers, in touch with the populace but aloof from the merely rich. < < <
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I look at that, & it kind of sets the record straight compared to something I remember reading in a Diana biography written back in the 80s by an American. The author wrote that Diana came from a long line of "royal groupies."
Kingmakers may be many things, but they are hardly groupies. The person who wrote that, didn't "get it."
-30-
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