If you read Nick’s post, The Rt Hon The Baronness Rowling of Killiechassie, you know that Rowling was already given an Order of the British Empire award and been inducted to the much more exclusive Order of Merit (Companions of Honour) of whom there are only sixty-five in the UK and Commonwealth nations. A life peerage, though, is a whole different matter because it would make Rowling a Baroness, someone referred to properly as Mi’lady, has a coat of arms, sit in the House of Lords, etc. P. D. James, the Baronness James of Holland Park, was a life peer and I’m guessing that Agatha Christie, though a Dame Commander of the Order of the Empire (DBE), two ranks above Rowling’s OBE and known as Lady Mallowan, was not.
You’ll recall that Albus Dumbledore discusses his turning down the position of Minister for Magic three times in his testy exchange with the newly styled ‘Lord Voldemort,’ who returned to Hogwarts to apply for the Defense Against the Dark Arts teaching position.
He raised his glass as though toasting Voldemort, whose face remained expressionless. Nevertheless, Harry felt the atmosphere in the room change subtly: Dumbledore’s refusal to use Voldemort’s chosen name was a refusal to allow Voldemort to dictate the terms of the meeting, and Harry could tell that Voldemort took it as such.
‘I am surprised you have remained here so long,’ said Voldemort after a short pause. ‘I always wondered why a wizard such as yourself never wished to leave school.’
‘Well,’ said Dumbledore, still smiling, ‘to a wizard such as myself, there can be nothing more important than passing on ancient skills, helping hone young minds. If I remember correctly, you once saw the attraction of teaching, too.’
‘Well,’ said Dumbledore, still smiling, ‘to a wizard such as myself, there can be nothing more important than passing on ancient skills, helping hone young minds. If I remember correctly, you once saw the attraction of teaching, too.’
‘I see it still,’ said Voldemort. ‘I merely wondered why you – who is so often asked for advice by the Ministry, and who has twice, I think, been offered the post of Minister –’
‘Three times at the last count, actually,’ said Dumbledore. ‘But the Ministry never attracted me as a career. Again, something we have in common, I think.’
Voldemort inclined his head, unsmiling, and took another sip of wine. Dumbledore did not break the silence that stretched between them now, but waited, with a look of pleasant expectancy, for Voldemort to talk first. (442-443)
Half-Blood Prince was published in 2005 and Rowling had received her OBE in 2001, so it is possible that she had been offered a life peerage by Tony Blair before Rowling wrote this scene. I doubt it, though. I’d guess that her friend, Gordon Brown, was the Labour PM and David Cameron was the Conservative PM who offered her the honor, both of whose terms at 10 Downing Street are well after Half-Blood Prince’s publication.
Troubled Blood is largely the tale of Cormoran Strike advancing a la the Red Crosse Knight in Faerie Queen from a position of unworthiness to being a proper man of honor, even a knight. This was a large part of my doctoral dissertation, believe it or not, and it is a fascinating subject for reasons beyond the psychomachia of Strike and Ellacott as Una and the Red Crosse Knight, reasons I didn’t explore in that thesis.
For one thing, there are brothers surnamed ‘Knight’ in Lethal White. Billy, the younger brother, is mentally unstable but virtuous. Jimmy, the older brother, is a progressive political activist, serial abuser of women, and a hyper-litigious cad. I think we are meant to reflect on these two ‘Knights,’ which of the two have any sense of sacrificial service or chivalry, and the oddity of Medieval honors in the postmodern era. (I know little to nothing beyond what I have read about the Knights Bachelor in the UK in Wikipedia and do hope that friends ‘over there’ will discuss this point to save me from further embarrassment).
For another, Strike repeatedly references the idea of ‘knighthood’ as a point of disdain that he feels for his father, Jonny Rokeby. Strike thinks dear old dad is gunning for a peerage or at least ‘Sir’ status via the Knights Bachelor.
He read Prudence’s text a second time. What confidential reason could be behind the party, other than his father’s new album? Had Rokeby finally been given his knighthood, or was he making a fuss over the Deadbeats’ fiftieth anniversary in an attempt to remind those who gave out honors that he hadn’t yet had one? Strike tried to imagine Lucy’s reaction, if he told her he was off to meet a host of new half-siblings, when her small stock of relatives was about to be diminished by one. He tried to picture this Prudence, of whom he knew nothing at all, except that her mother had been a well-known actress. (Troubled Blood Part 4: chapter 34)
“Who’s sticking two fingers up? I haven’t said a word about him publicly, unlike him, who can’t give a fucking interview without mentioning me these days—”
“He’s trying to put things right, and you can’t give an inch!”
“He’s trying to tidy up a messy bit of his public image,” said Strike harshly. “Tell him to pay his fucking taxes if he wants his knighthood. I’m not his pet fucking black sheep.”
He hung up, angrier than he’d expected, his heart thumping uncomfortably hard beneath his coat. Flicking his cigarette butt into the road, his thoughts traveled inescapably back to Joan, with her headscarf hiding her baldness, and Ted weeping into his tea. Why, he thought, furiously, couldn’t it have been Rokeby who lay dying, and his aunt who was well and happy, confident she’d reach her next birthday, striding through St. Mawes, chatting to lifelong friends, planning dinners for Ted, nagging Strike over the phone about coming to visit? (Troubled Blood 4:24)
I think I am not unusual among Serious Strikers in recalling these passages of an angry Strike believing his biological father, anything but a man of honour to his long-neglected son, was ‘running’ for the office (which should of course be an immediate disqualification for the distinction) when reading Rowling’s tweet about deflecting in anticipation attacks on her consequent to being nominated for a life peerage. Countering the presumed attack of “JKR really wants a life peerage and is disappointed she can’t get one because of her evil bigotry,” Rowling simultaneously defangs it by tweeting any new nomination will be her third and reinforces that both ends of the political spectrum today do not think of her as an “evil bigot.’
Meanwhile, Strike could barely open a newspaper or switch on the TV without seeing Brian Tucker, who was giving interviews to anybody who’d speak to him. In a cracked voice he wept, exulted, praised Strike and Robin, told the world they deserved knighthoods (“Or the other thing, what is it for women?” “Damehood,” murmured the sympathetic blonde presenter, who was holding the emotional Tucker’s hand), cried as he reminisced about his daughter, described the preparations for her funeral, criticized the police and informed the world that he’d suspected all along that Louise was hidden in the well. Strike, who was happy for the old man, nevertheless wished, both for his own sake and for Tucker’s, that he’d go and grieve quietly somewhere, rather than taking up space on an endless succession of daytime television sofas. (Troubled Blood 7:72)
As embarrassed as Strike is by Tucker’s gratitude, for himself and for the father, I think it likely that Rowling would prefer this kind of nomination, one from a grateful parent of children rescued by Lumos, of a daughter served in her women’s safe space in Edinburgh, or of a child saved from chemical castration or surgical mutilation by the “gender services community,” to a knighthood from a Prime Minister wanting to benefit from association with Rowling, now a Gender Critical heroine rather than TERF pariah.
(3) Speculation About Rowling’s Reluctance to Accept Life Peerage
Dumbledore’s conversation with the newly minted Lord Voldemort at Hogwarts was not the only time he discussed turning down the Minister for Magic position. In his explanation to Harry at their meeting post mortem at King’s Cross in Deathly Hallows, he revealed that he had been less than honest with Tom Riddle, Jr., in his office years before about why he refused to be the Minister.
‘Well, Grindelwald fled, [Dumbledore told Harry,] as anyone but I could have predicted. He vanished, with his plans for seizing power, and his schemes for Muggle torture, and his dreams of the Deathly Hallows, dreams in which I had encouraged him and helped him. He ran, while I was left to bury my sister and learn to live with my guilt, and my terrible grief, the price of my shame.‘Years passed. There were rumours about him. They said he had procured a wand of immense power. I, meanwhile, was offered the post of Minister for Magic, not once, but several times. Naturally, I refused. I had learned that I was not to be trusted with power.’
‘But you’d have been better, much better, than Fudge or Scrimgeour!’ burst out Harry.
‘Would I?’ asked Dumbledore heavily. ‘I am not so sure. I had proven, as a very young man, that power was my weakness and my temptation. It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.
‘I was safer at Hogwarts. I think I was a good teacher –’
‘You were the best –’
‘You are very kind, Harry. But while I busied myself with the training of young wizards, Grindelwald was raising an army. They say he feared me, and perhaps he did, but less, I think, than I feared him.
‘Oh, not death,’ said Dumbledore, in answer to Harry’s questioning look. ‘Not what he could do to me magically. I knew that we were evenly matched, perhaps that I was a shade more skilful. It was the truth I feared. You see, I never knew which of us, in that last, horrific fight, had actually cast the curse that killed my sister. You may call me cowardly: you would be right. Harry, I dreaded beyond all things the knowledge that it had been I who brought about her death, not merely through my arrogance and stupidity, but that I actually struck the blow that snuffed out her life.
‘I think he knew it, I think he knew what frightened me. I delayed meeting him until, finally, it would have been too shameful to resist any longer. People were dying and he seemed unstoppable, and I had to do what I could. (717-718)
When Rowling tweeted last week that her refusal of previous life peerage offers and of any possible one in the future, she said that this was not because the nomination would be from a Tory or a woman she did not admire. “It’s not her, it’s me.”
Dumbledore had the revelatory trauma of Grindelwald’s naked lust for power and his remorse about Ariana’s death to make him aware of his unfitness for the Minister for Magic post. What is it about Rowling’s past that makes her think becoming involved with politics — and the ‘life peerage’ seems to this American a distinctly political honor in contrast with her OBE and her Order of Merit (CH) — would be harmful to her or to the community at large, a la Dumbledore?Here are three guesses:
- She says “it’s me” because she is an artist and does not think that receiving this kind of honor would serve her in her artistic efforts. If that seems a stretch to you, please note of the sixty five Companions of Honour only twelve are without titles — and five of them are authors, to include Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan. FWIW;
- She says “It’s me” because her relationship with Gordon Brown, to include overnights at 10 Downing Street with Dr Murray, was a friendship that revealed to her the intoxication of political influence and power within her, something from which she chose to distance and protect herself and her family from in the future (see the reflections of Casual Vacancy’s Parminder Jawanda, the wife of a doctor and someone who had a ‘crush’ of sorts on Barry Fairbrother and a shared obsession about the Pagford City Council’s business with them, something that created problems within her and her neglect of family);
- She says “It’s me” because, like Dumbledore, she has a personal trauma akin to PTSD from her childhood or early adulthood, about which she feels great remorse, which event might be revealed in the course of the publicity attendant to a life peerage. The three possibilities on this front judging from their inordinate appearances in her work are an abortion consequent to a pregnancy trap or her having been sexually abused by a near relation as a child or adolescent.
Rowling and her friend from her Comprehensive days, Sean Harris, have both received an OBE. The Presence jokingly referred to this in The Silkworm’s Acknowledgement Page, in which she referred to Harris without naming him as “SOBE,” the added ‘S’ denoting, I think, that they refer to themselves as the ‘Son of a Bitch Entries’ in the fourth class ‘Order of the British Empire’ awards denoted as OBE, i.e., as lower middle class imposters in a room of posh and privileged plutocrats.
So perhaps the best guess is just that, unlike P. D. James and Agatha Christie, she never wants to be styled Baroness This or Lady That. {I do not mean any slight to Baroness James in this; she labored on a Hospital Board for fifteen years before publishing her first work and served in various government positions in addition to that for the bulk of her writing career.} The source of this self-deprecatory humility, I suspect, will only be revealed by Rowling’s authorized critical biographer before her death or years afterward.
I for one am delighted, regardless, that Kemi Badenoch thought it the right time to signal that the Tories at least believe that Rowling’s sacrificial courage as a Gender Critical feminist facing down the mob of “transgenderists” is worthy of honor rather than continued approbation. Whatever Rowling’s reasons for refusing a life peerage, it is the sign of a her near total victory that a politician would think it the right and smart thing to do to associate herself with JKR’s stand. Three cheers for all that.
John generously ask me to post any corrections in the comments, and I find he has (perhaps unwittingly) corrected me on the British honours system! Rowling was awarded the Companion of Honour, not the more senior Order of Merit, which is restricted to only 24 members.
That passage between Dumbledore and Harry very much reminds me of Gandalf’s reasons for entrusting Frodo with the ring of power.
‘But I have so little of any of these things! You are wise and powerful. Will you not take the Ring?’
‘No!’ cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. ‘With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.’ His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. ‘Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great, for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.’