« Per Astroturf ad astra | Home | Playing the race card »
Let them sift sugar
The question is again raised: what is the Royal Family for?
N O one can envy the Poet Laureate as he struggles to compose an epithalamium for the marriage of Prince Edward and Miss Sophie Rhys-Jones on Saturday; there is absolutely nothing of interest to say about it, still less anything uplifting. Fortunately for Andrew Motion, the office of Poet Laureate no longer carries any actual duties, so he may be able to abandon the unequal struggle before long, if he has not already done so, and stick to promoting his own image.
Anyone who remembers the romance of Princess Anne's first wedding, or the magic of the Prince of Wales's, or the fun of Prince Andrew's, and the fiascos that followed, can only contemplate this royal wedding with deepest apathy, if nothing worse; quite apart from those with republican tendencies, there must surely be many conservatives and royalists who feel something closer to Royal Family fatigue. It is a great pity that the unfortunate pair were not able to keep the occasion entirely private, as we were told they had originally intended. They ought, like the Conservative Party, to keep their heads well down until (or in case) things improve.
Like most people who claim not to have followed the mind-numbingly dull story of Edward and Sophie, I have in fact taken in rather a lot of details. I know of the long and and depressingly cautious courtship. I have heard speculation about Prince Edward's inability to make up his mind. I have read gossip about his bride's steely determination to make it up for him. I saw the descriptions of their wedding list at Thomas Goode. If there is one thing that drives me back to the socialism of my youth it is wedding lists. The news of the happy pair solemnly, and publicly, asking for some hot-water jugs at pounds 10,000 each or a sugar-sifter at pounds 6,135, makes one wonder, yet again, about the survival instincts of the House of Windsor.
I learnt that Miss Rhys-Jones wants to keep her own name and carry on working, an admirable idea rather at odds with her decision to marry into an organisation in which both would be quite impossible; strictly speaking she should become Princess Edward and turn into a public institution. I read that although at first keen on privacy, Prince Edward then actually proposed to have the wedding filmed by his own television company, thus depriving himself of the mystic and democratic endorsement of the BBC, and displaying a complete confusion about his own role in life. Neither seems to understand that you cannot combine commercial life with the extreme privileges and duties of royal life; to fail to see that is to drift in the direction of Marie Antoinette. Well, let them sift sugar. Nobody would wish to deny them an enormous wedding, or as many expensive presents as they want - certainly I wouldn't - but it ought to take place in private.
Presumably the Royal Family and its advisers think that there are some serious public relations gains to be made from going public; presumably they take the well-worn view that the magic of a wedding, of almost any wedding, will leave a little residue of stardust behind on the House of Windsor. However, surrounded by public relations people though they may be - Miss Rhys-Jones is one herself - I think they are mistaken. What this wedding really does is to raise again the question of what the Royal Family is for, a question always hovering somewhere in British consciousness. Curiously enough it is the question that royal pageantry and ceremonial were invented only recently, in the past 100 years, to silence, or to muffle, as Professor David Cannadine pointed out on Radio 4 last week. So too was the Windsor mystique of blameless bourgeois domesticity, before the present Queen's children blasted it to kingdom come. But times have changed, feelings about ceremony have changed, and about domesticity and we are surrounded by all sorts of other awkward questions, great and small.
What is marriage for? What is the Conservative Party for? What is the House of Commons for? What are judges for? What is the United Kingdom for? And, of course, what is the Poet Laureate for, his pointlessness being the most obvious symptom of the malaise of all the rest? A little half-hearted, pared-back ceremonial in Windsor - a shadow of its former self - will not, even for a minute, distract people from the painful uncertainties surrounding most of this country's institutions. It stands as a reminder of them.
These are very gloomy thoughts for a wedding to inspire, and perhaps they are excessive. Institutions that really have a function - such as marriage - have a way of adapting and surviving. Great change rarely comes in the way, or at the time predicted. We may not in fact see the break up of the United Kingdom, or the loss of national sovereignty, or not as people fear, or hope. I cannot guess whether the Royal Family can long survive the abolition of the hereditary principle in the House of Lords, however it may be that Prince Charles is beginning to rally support. It does seem that he has finally found a voice and a role, and commands increasing respect, and - oddly enough - increasingly as the voice of the people.
He is a man who was born not only to be King but to be middle-aged; now that he found his proper age he seems much more at ease with himself, and the public with him. Besides, he has Prince William, the People's Prince-in-Waiting and the future Prince of Hearts, who loves his father. Perhaps there is some public poetry to be found somewhere in all this after all.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, June 13, 1999
