Story by Jacob O’Gara
Illustration by Julia Rogers
First things first: What the hell is an American student at a university in the Pacific Northwest doing, griping about modern British royalty? Oregon is a rather comfortable distance from Buckingham Palace, and the United States isn’t exactly concerned about British rule anymore (we seemed to have settled that question some two hundred years ago). However, the United States and the United Kingdom have had a “special relationship,” the slightly worn phrase describing the close diplomatic, historical, political, and cultural ties between the two nations, for decades, and even though we (the U.S.) did indeed remove ourselves from English jurisdiction, we ought to cast our gaze across the Atlantic from time to time and check in on the fog-bound Sceptered Isle.
On November 16, a charming and handsome Englishman named William announced to the world that he plans on marrying his girlfriend of seven years, the equally charming and fetching Kate Middleton. Of course, this engagement announcement would have almost zero significance beyond the couple’s circle of relatives and friends if it wasn’t for the fact that William is Prince William of Wales and his wife-to-be will someday be known as Queen Catherine.
The announcement set loose a freshet of press ink that doused the front pages in a warm bath of mawkishness and veneration. Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic fawned over the royal couple; BBC America produced a documentary about the “storied history” of their relationship called William & Kate: Modern Monarchy that aired on December 11 along with programs about the Art of Diana and the Royal Windsor Horse Show. Watch the Fox News Channel late enough into the night (during the 11pm Glenn Beck rerun) and you’ll inevitably bump into an advertisement selling facsimiles of Middleton’s engagement ring, previously worn by William’s mother, Diana Spencer, in 1981.
Known as the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until 1917, when King George V decided that the heavily Teutonic name sent the wrong message to a nation fighting Germany and needed a makeover, the House of Windsor and its very public-yet-private affairs have loomed large as subjects of fascination in the press and the public imagination. Since the rise of People magazine and the 24-hour news cycle, the House of Windsor has become more than a mere curio from a bygone age of crowns, thrones, and golden scepters. It is now an industry.
And oddly enough, it is an industry that thrives in the United States. In 1981, millions of TV sets were tuned to the “fairytale wedding” of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. When she gave birth to two sons – William and Henry – people in living rooms around the world cooed and pretended that the baby Britons were their own. Over two billion people – around a third of the world population – watched Lady Spencer’s funeral in 1997, and Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a rather saccharine moment, dubbed her the “people’s princess.” In the U.S., the phrase “Princess Diana” can dragoon an unsuspecting person into a state of genuflection, and if said person doesn’t stop his train of thought to pay the proper respects, he’s vilified as a hard-hearted jackass.
Since the end of World War II, members of the House of Windsor have lived their lives behind a glass wall of press and public scrutiny, responsible only for the preservation of their legacy and for serving as publicity for the ancient and quaint splendor of Britannia – a family of shop-window mannequins. Their joys (like weddings) and their sorrows (funerals) aren’t just events that punctuate a family’s private narrative; they are state functions. However, no person or family can continuously maintain the poise necessary to serve as a living work of propaganda. When the Windsor clan inevitably stumbled into dysfunction in the 1990s, the string of embarrassments weren’t just domestic hiccups, they were national disasters. The real crime of keeping the lights on in Buckingham Palace isn’t against those who yearn to see a “Republic of Great Britain” in their lifetimes or against those who find the Windsors exceptionally boring people. It’s against the Windsors themselves, whose history has become something quite like a slow-motion, publicly financed car wreck.
However, their days as breathing wax statues, living in comfortable irrelevance, might soon be over. See, when Queen Elizabeth II’s heart slows to a stop, a man with a somber, orotund voice will declare, “The Queen is dead. Long live the King.” At that exact moment, Prince Charles will become King Charles III, and he has no intention of being a figurehead like his mother. In 2008, through a spokesman, Prince Charles expressed interest in being a “presidential king” who would “speak for the nation and to the nation” on a number of issues, much like the heads of state of Ireland and Germany; after all, it would be a shame if the “responsibility” and “wisdom” he accrued as Prince of Wales went to waste.
“Responsibility”? The only job Prince Charles has had in his life is the grim chore of waiting for his mom to die (a “responsibility” that highlights a gruesome fundamental particular to the monarchical state: it is one fixated on death). And as for “wisdom,” Prince Charles is a maundering and fatuous New Ager who used his position to bully the National Health Service into paying for “alternative medicine” (a literally meaningless phrase) and was, despite receiving the best education a royal could buy, an astonishingly bad student at Cambridge University and was equally terrible in the Navy. If he hadn’t had the tremendous fortune of emerging from a queenly womb, Prince Charles would have zero “responsibility” or “wisdom” to speak of.
Though it couldn’t be led by a more unimpressive individual, Prince Charles’s desire to grace and tilt the political discourse of Britain with his regal musings amounts to an abrogation of the current, Parliament-led order, a sort of second Restoration if you prefer. The last Restoration began in 1660 and as the name suggests, it restored the monarchy to England after a bitter, decade-long experiment with republicanism. That king’s name was Charles II.
While citizens of the U.K. (who are technically subjects of the Crown) contemplate the prospect of a King Charles barging onto the political stage and barking his pronouncements, effectively a king who would both reign and rule, we Americans across the pond are busy coronating the sort of folk who appear on Vanity Fair covers – mostly dead or dying politicians and entertainers who were big deals during the Kennedy ’60s, and Angelina Jolie and Bono.
Even though the Constitution expressly forbids public officials from holding or granting titles of nobility, and despite our war for independence from British monarchy, American society and culture isn’t entirely immune to pangs of royal impulses. After all, unlike our turbulent republican system, monarchy is stable. In the United States nowadays, the transition between presidents takes two full months. When Queen Elizabeth dies, the transition from her to King Charles III will take as long as it takes for that guy with the somber, orotund voice to say, “The Queen is dead. Long live the King.”
Since American society is a meager two-hundred-something years old, our pool of history and memory is shallow compared to the Isles from which most of our Founders sprung. As such, we draw from the history of our British progenitors. We look across the Atlantic and see an island of folk who look like us, dress like us, and talk like us, and live with history vibrating all around them. They have a queen who wears crowns and lives in palaces and will celebrate a Diamond Jubilee if she lives long enough. There are trees in the English countryside that the first Queen Elizabeth used for shade. A sense of history creates a sense of identity and purpose. They, the British, have a sense of history. By rifling through our past, we’ve created a kind of roster of American royalty, a sense of history: the Founders…Lincoln…the Roosevelts…the Kennedys (“Camelot”)…Jolie…Pitt…
Our desire to alchemize celebrity into royalty, to make something more out of “mere” politicians, business leaders, athletes, and entertainers, isn’t a crazy one. It’s natural. As a species we’re drawn to spectacle, and nothing’s more spectacular than rich people with tiaras and problems.
