british royal family essay

The Royal Family in the 1980s

A decade of highs and lows for the monarchy.

A staff writer National Library of Scotland

'How are you enjoying married life, Madam?' yelled one of many gathered reporters, 'It's highly recommended' responded Princess Diana coyly during her extended honeymoon at Balmoral.

A nation swept up in the fairy-tale courtship and marriage of the young Princess and Prince Charles could not imagine the hardship and difficulties the marriage would be facing by the end of the decade. The British royal family during the 1980s in many ways became the nation's favourite soap opera, aided by their intense exposure in the emerging battle between tabloid media outlets to gain the latest royal scoop. The casting was perfectly set, with Charles and Diana as the leading couple; would they get their happily ever after?

The Queen remained the formidable matriarch in charge of the family firm. The Duke of Edinburgh, the gaffe-prone father figure, provided the occasional comedy moment. There was a cast of younger siblings to add spice and variety to the sub-plots, and an occasional guest appearance by the eccentric extended family. With an international audience, the exploits of the royal family were followed as eagerly as the soap opera 'Dynasty'.

The 1980s is a difficult decade to summarise in terms of key royal events as there were so many. The list includes: two royal weddings, four royal births, one marriage breakdown and one palace break-in. However, one shall endeavour to do one's best! Let us rewind to the very start of 1980s and take a tour through the decade of the most noteworthy royal moments.

The Royal Wedding — 29 July 1981

The year 1980 dawned with an overhanging sadness in the royal family. The previous year Lord Louis Mountbatten, uncle of Prince Philip and mentor to Prince Charles, had been assassinated. This left a large gap in the Prince Charles' life at a time when the pressure placed upon him to settle down was at a peak. Now in his early 30s, there was an increasing expectation from his family, the media and the public to find a suitable wife. He had formed an attachment in the early 1970s to Camilla Parker-Bowles but she was deemed an unsuitable consort given that she had previous relationships.

Charles met Diana at a house party in 1980 (they had met briefly in 1977 when Charles had been dating her older sister). It was Diana's apparent sympathy at the recent death of Lord Mountbatten that caught his attention and he asked her on a date. The couple began dating and apparently met on around a dozen occasions before Prince Charles asked Diana to marry him. This was despite the fact that he was 32, she was 19, and they had very little in common. Nevertheless, their engagement was made public on 24 February 1981 with the wedding date set for 29 July 1981, a quick turnaround for any wedding let alone a royal one.

Diana's engagement ring was a 12-carat Ceylon sapphire surrounded by diamonds, and it quickly became the most copied engagement ring in the world. The couple's engagement interview when watched today looks distinctly awkward, certainly compared to the interviews given by William and Kate, and Harry and Meghan. When the question was asked if they were in love, Diana replied 'of course,' whereas Prince Charles replied with the now infamous 'whatever in love means'. Diana looked downcast and when reflecting on it later she admitted to being very confused and hurt by the comment.

The wedding itself was billed as the wedding of the century. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury was swept along by the mood, remarking during the ceremony, 'here is the stuff of which fairy-tales are made', increasing the sense of expectation on the royal couple. The wedding was watched by a global audience estimated at 750 million, providing a great lift for national morale at a point marked by high unemployment and inner-city riots. The wedding was often voted one of the most memorable moments of the 1980s, and for good reason. The pomp and pageantry were excessive, with Diana arriving at St Paul's Cathedral in a horse drawn carriage to reveal one of the most eagerly anticipated wedding dresses. It was a fairy-tale dress for the fairy-tale wedding, made from ivory silk taffeta with a 25-foot train. The dress was also atypical of early 1980s fashion, voluminous with puffy sleeves and sadly very crushed from the carriage ride to St Paul's.

For her vows Diana had controversially decided not to 'obey' Charles, going against royal protocol, perhaps the first indication of her later reluctance to follow tradition. She also fumbled her vows calling Charles 'Philip', which was one of his middle names. The most famous moment of the day was the kiss on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, a royal first. The kiss was not only demanded by the assembled crowd, but also happened because Charles had forgotten to kiss Diana during the ceremony. He also asked the Queen for permission to do so before planting the briefest possible kiss upon Diana's lips.

Not only has the visual aspect of the royal wedding become so embedded in the collective memory, there was also the nationwide frenzy for 'Royal Wedding' merchandise ranging from the cheap and tacky to luxurious. Within the National Library of Scotland's Moving Image Archive catalogue, there is a record describing a film of china being made in Scotland for the Royal Wedding . While we all know the marriage did not work out in the end, the wedding itself remains an iconic moment in British history.

Threats against the Queen — 1981 and 1982

Potential threats against the Queen and the monarchy increased during the 1980s. Luckily there were no serious incidents but there were a few near misses.

In June 1981 during the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony, six shots were fired at the Queen as she rode down the Mall on her way to Horseguards parade. The shots were fortunately blanks fired by 17-year-old Marcus Sarjeant who had planned an assassination, but was unable to get a licence for a real gun. He was charged under the 1848 Treason Act and jailed for five years. The Queen was unharmed in the incident and was widely praised for her calm demeanour and superb control of her startled horse.

The following year, on the morning of 9 July 1982, the Queen woke up to a nasty surprise when she found an intruder, Michael Fagan, in her bed chamber. This was not the first time that he had broken into the palace. A month earlier he had climbed up a drainpipe into a maid's bedroom. The maid ran for help, but when they were unable to locate an intruder, palace security assumed she had been mistaken. It had left Fagan to wander around the palace freely. On the second occasion in July he managed to make it all the way to the Queen's bedchamber despite tripping several alarms on the way, which were disabled by police believing them to have been set off in error.

There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. Contemporary accounts stated that the Queen chatted to Fagan in an attempt to distract him while waiting for help to arrive. However, Fagan has said in interviews that she actually ran from the room to get help and did not mention that a lengthy conversation took place. Palace security was heavily criticised in the aftermath of the event and the Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw was so horrified that he offered to resign. The break-in led not only to increases in palace security, but the security of all the royal residence was improved. Fagan had previous criminal convictions and was sent for psychiatric observation. The details that emerged after the event through interviews with Fagan allowed the public to glimpse a little deeper into the private lives of the royals and increased press and public appetite for royal gossip and scandal.

The 'Other' Royal Wedding — 23 July 1986

'What' I hear you ask, 'another royal wedding in the 1980s?' Given the amount of attention allocated in the history books to his brother Prince Charles' wedding, it is perhaps not surprising that Prince Andrew's wedding is often forgotten about. Prince Andrew was under a lot less pressure to marry than his elder brother, given that he was the 'spare'.

He had known Sarah Ferguson since childhood, but met her again at a party in 1985 after which they began dating. They had a relatively short courtship and Andrew proposed to Sarah on his 26th birthday in February 1986. Their engagement was announced on St Patrick's Day and the wedding was set for 23 July 1986. The engagement ring was unusual, featuring a ruby centrepiece surrounded by diamonds. There was not quite the same level of public enthusiasm for the wedding or Sarah Ferguson as there had been for Diana. However there were some reports in the press of 'Fergie Fever' and an interest in learning more about the future Duchess of York. She was older than Diana with more life experience, and she was also a working woman. Unusually, she had vowed to continue to work as the editor of a graphic arts firm even after her marriage.

The wedding was held in Westminster Abbey with a smaller guest list than the other royal wedding but still there were around 1,800 guests. There were fewer people on the street for the ceremony and the global audience for the television broadcast was around 500 million, still a significant number.

On the day itself, the reveal of the bride's wedding dress was once again one of the major moments of the day. The new Duchess of York had opted for a more classic style of dress, embroidered ivory satin with a 17.5 foot train. There were still hints of the 1980s in style of the shoulders, but far less puffy and frothy than her sister-in-law Diana's dress. The Duchess caused some controversy by promising to 'obey' Andrew which seemed to contrast her otherwise modern approach to her future royal life. In common with Diana she also fumbled Andrew's name during her vows, but otherwise the 45-minute ceremony ran smoothly. The couple undertook the newly created tradition of sharing a kiss on the balcony though it was a far less awkward moment than it had been for Charles and Diana. The marriage however was not successful and they separated after six years in 1992. The couple managed to remain good friends and shared custody of their daughters.

'It's a Royal Knockout' 1987

The participation of some of the family in the gameshow 'It's a Royal Knockout' proved to be a public relations disaster. 'It's a Knockout' was a game show where towns competed against each other often dressed in strange outfits in a variety of different outdoor games. Inflatable obstacles often featured.

The royal version of the show was a charity event organised by Prince Edward, who was keen to move into a career in theatre and television. He tried to recruit the Prince and Princess of Wales for the show but they refused. Instead the Duke and Duchess of York, Princess Anne, and Prince Edward headed up teams of celebrities who played for different charities.

Although they did not take part in the events and were merely team captains, the Royals dressed up in medieval costumes and encouraged their team from the side-lines, with varying degrees of success.Ironically when announcing the programme, Prince Edward had remarked it would be similar to the original game show but with a sense of decorum. Unfortunately for him, decorum was entirely absent from the proceedings and the behaviour of Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, was seen as especially embarrassing. Although the programme had huge audience figures of more than 18 million and raised £1.5 million for charity, it was widely criticised as damaging the dignity of the royal family. The media was especially savage in their criticism of both the show and of Prince Edward. The Queen and Prince Philip had thought the show sounded a bad idea, but they were not forceful enough in expressing their opinion or convincing their youngest son to cancel the project. Royal correspondents and biographers often trace a decrease in public and media deference towards the family to this event.

Royal births

With two royal weddings taking place in the 1980s it was inevitable that there would soon follow the birth of the next generation of Windsors. The Queen was delighted to welcome her second grandchild on 15 May 1981, Zara Phillips, the daughter of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips (her first grandchild was Zara's older brother, Peter). Her less-than-traditional royal name was suggested to her mother by Prince Charles after the Greek name for bright dawn. Princess Anne had not wanted to give her children any royal title, believing it was a difficult enough life for the granddaughter of the monarch.

Zara's more muted arrival into the world was a direct contrast with her cousins William and Harry. Given the public and media interest in Charles and Diana, the pending arrival of another future monarch was covered endlessly. From the minute it was clear Diana was pregnant the media documented every second of her pregnancy. At the 12 week stage of pregnancy the Princess fell down some stairs at Sandringham which caused a scare, but luckily the baby was unharmed. Diana later revealed through biographers that she intentionally threw herself down the stairs in order to get Prince Charles' attention. Their marriage was already in trouble after barely a year.

Prince William was born on 21 June 1982, although his name was not announced for a week afterwards. He was one of the few royals to be born in a hospital and it did unfortunately allow the world's media to camp outside the Lindo Wing ward of St Mary's Hospital in London for days awaiting the Prince's arrival. It was a similar situation when his younger brother Harry arrived on 15 September 1984. He was christened Henry but it was announced from the beginning that they intended to name him Harry.

The final royal birth of the 1980s was the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York, Princess Beatrice, who was born on 8 August 1988. Her name was not revealed for two weeks after her birth and was seen as a surprising choice; the favourite names had been considered to be Victoria or Elizabeth. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh began the 1980s with only one grandchild and by the end of the decade they would have five with a sixth on the way: the Yorks' other daughter Princess Eugenie (born in March 1990).

The Royals' marital issues

While the spate of royal separations and divorces did not happen until the 1990s, the marital troubles for several royal couples began and continued during the 1980s. The first royal couple to publically announce their marriage was beyond repair was Princess Anne and her first husband Mark Philips, father of her two children. They had been married for 15 years when they announced their separation in 1989.

The announcement came in the wake of a scandal when letters to the Princess from the Queen's equerry, Commander Timothy Lawrence, were stolen from the palace and given to 'The Sun' newspaper. Given the illicit manner in which the paper received the letters, it was not able to publish them. Instead they handed them over to the police and in an uncharacteristic move chose not to reveal the contents to the public. Even more surprisingly, Buckingham Palace made the announcement about the sender of the letters, but not the contents. The gaps were quickly filled in by the media, given the Princess' marital issues, and the story soon broke about the Princess being in love with her mother's equerry.

The Princess and her husband eventually divorced in 1992, and she married Timothy Lawrence later that year. Their marriage breakdown, while not pleasant for all involved, gave Anne the opportunity for a happier situation than either of her siblings. The marriages of both Prince Charles and Prince Andrew became increasingly difficult towards the end of the decade.

The marital troubles of the Prince and Princess of Wales became notoriously difficult and were well-documented by the media. Their relationship experienced issues from the outset as Diana felt overwhelmed by the attention she received but felt she got little support in adapting to her role. In taped conversations which were made into a documentary 'Diana in her Own Words', released in the UK in 2017, Diana revealed her deepest secrets and admitted that she and Charles quickly drifted apart after the birth of Prince Harry. Charles was reported to have rekindled his affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles in 1986. The press increasingly reported on the slow crumbling of the marriage, especially the decreasing number of public events the couple attended together.

The Duke and Duchess of York's marriage also ran into trouble very quickly. The Duchess claimed through biographers that the Duke's naval career kept them apart and quickly put a strain on the marriage. The Duchess was said to have been quite alone during her pregnancies and this led her to feel increasingly isolated. Their marriage did not end until 1992, but the seeds of discontent and difficulty were certainly sown during the 1980s. The collapse of three royal marriages over the course of the 1980s was seen as another way in which royalty was becoming less distant and more relatable although perhaps a little less respected by the public.

Princess Diana fever

'How can anyone, let alone a 21 year old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazed attention unscathed? … the media's fixation frightens me and I know for a fact that it petrifies Diana.' Prince Charles wrote to a friend during the tour of Australia in 1983. When you think about the Royal family in the 1980s, it is undeniable that the first person who comes to mind is Princess Diana. She overshadowed all the other members of the family as her every move, royal engagement and private life were scrutinised by the press. She was seen to have a more human touch than the other members of the family.

The attention quickly became frightening. One of the worst occasions was the couple's visit to Australia in 1983; the crowds were unbelievable and the only person they wanted to see was Diana. She said in Andrew Morton's biography 'Diana: Her True Story' that the public were clamouring to see her and that this made Prince Charles very jealous. Members of the public would be visibly disappointed when the Prince would appear alone and it was clearly difficult for him to accept the loss of the limelight. Princess Diana was untrained and had very little idea of how intense the media focus would be. She found it an ordeal and one which over the years she would learn to tolerate.

Her own natural instinct to help people and her charm made the public ever more desperate to meet her and read about her life. The circulation war in the tabloid press encouraged photographers to become ruthless in order to take a picture of the Princess which could make their career. The Library holds a vast collection of newspapers, and you would be hard-pressed to find a day from 1981-1989 where the Princess was not on the cover, or a story about her did not feature somewhere in a British newspaper or magazine. It was an immense strain which took a toll on her physical and mental health. There is no denying that to some extent the Princess courted the press and made sure they were aware of her intentions. She was a global celebrity and by the end of the 1980s, 'Princess Diana fever' showed no signs of abating, indeed it appeared to be increasing.

A reflection of the decade?

There we have it, the royal family of the 1980s, a period dominated by high drama, spectacular royal weddings and eagerly anticipated royal births which generated a huge amount of media attention. However, this attention was not always favourable. At the start of the 1980s there was an enormous amount of affection and reasonable levels of public respect for the royal family and its traditions. This was certainly diminished by the end of the decade as the reporting of royal gossip became increasingly salacious and more intrusive. Rather than making the royals more relatable, the disastrous 'It's a Royal Knockout' turned them into a laughing stock and damaged their respectability. Only one member of the family really seemed to understand the way branding worked in that decade.

It was a testing time for the royal family who had to adapt to changes in public expectations of them. Yet as the decade closed, the royal soap opera was still a hit with each episode leaving a gasping public begging for more.

Video of Princess Diana visiting Dundee
Video of Prince Charles at Trooping of the Colour

Role of modern UK monarchy explained in new report

26 April 2023

Ahead of King Charles III’s coronation, experts at the UCL Constitution Unit and the UK in a Changing Europe initiative, have released a major new report on the monarchy. This is the latest in a series of reports on the monarchy by the UCL Constitution Unit.

A crowd watches the royal carriage pass by during the royal wedding in 2018

The report, The British Monarchy, explains what the institution does and how it does it, and places the monarchy in its wider historical and comparative context. It should prove an indispensable guide ahead of the coronation, with more than a dozen leading experts delving into a broad range of issues and topics.

Professor Robert Hazell (UCL Constitution Unit), editor of the report, said: “The monarchy is a source of endless fascination for the public and the media, but also subject to countless myths and misunderstandings. I was honoured to co-edit this report, in which 16 experts explode the myths and explore the paradoxes of modern monarchy.”

The report includes chapters on the significance of the coronation, the King’s constitutional and political roles, the ceremony’s religious significance, the funding of the Royal Family, the relationship between the media and the monarchy, public opinion, and the future of the British monarchy.

The report is being released just days ahead of the coronation of King Charles III, the 40th monarch to be crowned in Westminster Abbey since 1066. Given the high levels of interest in the monarchy since the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the report will help to explain the role of the modern monarchy and its place in the UK’s constitutional system.

The British Monarchy
Future Challenges for the Monarchy
The Coronation of Charles III
Swearing in the new King
UCL Constitution Unit resources on the Monarchy
UK in a Changing Europe

Credit: matthewleesdixon via iStock Image

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E: m.lucibella [at] ucl.ac.uk

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The Family Firm: Monarchy, Mass Media and the British Public, 1932-53

2019, (PDF Edition)

https://www.history.ac.uk/publications/ihr-books-series/new-historical-perspectives/family-firm-monarchy-media-and-british-public-1932-53 The Family Firm presents the first major analysis of the public projection and reception of the British monarchy’s media image in the period 1932-1953. Beginning with King George V’s first Christmas broadcast in 1932, the royal household worked with the Church of England and the media to initiate a new phase in the House of Windsor’s public relations strategy. Together they elevated the royal family’s domesticity as a focal point for popular identification and this strengthened the emotional connections that members of the public forged with royalty. The Family Firm shows how the tightening of these bonds had a unifying effect on British national life in the unstable years during and either side of the Second World War and helped to restore public confidence in a Crown that was profoundly shaken by the 1936 Abdication Crisis.

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The New York Times

The learning network | marriage and the monarchy: lessons from the british royal family.

Marriage and the Monarchy: Lessons From the British Royal Family

Current Events

Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.

See all in Current Events »
See all lesson plans »

Prince William, second in line to the British throne, announced his engagement this week, immediately sparking a media frenzy, especially in the United Kingdom . We think the news brings up some interesting possibilities for teaching and learning across the curriculum, in history, media studies and economics.

Here are some key questions Prince William’s engagement raises, along with 15 suggested activities for seizing on the news as a teachable moment.

Key Questions:

Role of the Monarchy: What role does the sovereign – currently, Queen Elizabeth II – and members of the British royal family play, both officially and unofficially, today? What kind of government does Britain have, and what is the monarchy’s function in it? What is the purpose and function of any monarchy in the contemporary world?

Status of the Monarchy: Why did people around the world take note of the news of Prince William’s engagement to Kate Middleton? What does it mean and represent to the British people and to others? Why? What does the royal family signify in British culture ? What attitudes do people have toward the royal family?

Sovereignty and Etiquette: What is royalty ? What does it mean to be sovereign? What etiquette and other rules apply to interactions with the queen ? How does the couple’s relationship, and now engagement, defy royal tradition ? How does it conform ?

Iconography: What is interesting about Miss Middleton , Prince William and the rest of the royal family? Do you think the couple will become international icons, like Prince William’s mother, Princess Diana ? Should the betrothed couple be “fair game” to the paparazzi who follow other celebrities? What has been said by some about Miss Middleton’s middle-class background and her education in terms of her compatibility with her future in-laws?

Monarchies in History: What other countries have royal families ? How do their role and image compare with that of the Windsors? How does Prince William, and his upcoming nuptials, fit into the history of the monarchy, including notable royal weddings, both in Britain and elsewhere ? Why do you think William chose to give Kate his mother’s engagement ring ?

The Economy: As the British government cuts funding for social services and many Britons face financial struggles, is a royal wedding likely to reflect the economic times or depart from them? Will the money spent by the British government on the royal wedding become an investment that results in a boon for the economy?

Activity Ideas:

Famous Children: Do our 6 Q’s About the News installment “A Royal Engagement .” Compare and contrast the focus on the weddings of Prince William with those of Chelsea Clinton , Jenna Bush and any other child of famous parents whose personal milestone events have garnered much media attention and who might be considered, to some, the rough equivalent of royalty.

Rules of Engagement: Read accounts of how William proposed and the official engagement announcement from the royal family . Compare this process to the typical engagement process in various cultures and social spheres. What mores and rituals surround engagement?

Meet the Family: Make a list of five interesting and historically important facts about Kate Middleton ; Prince William ; his father, Prince Charles; his mother, the late Princess Diana ; his brother, Prince Harry ; and his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II . Present your facts in a family tree; you might compare it with the trees of other famous families, like the Kennedys , or with your own family tree .

Power Play: Research the official powers of the ruling British monarch and the ceremonies she participates in as part of her official duties. Role-play a typical function presided over by the queen, with classmates playing key roles. Or, write a first-person prose poem or short story about how you imagine it would be to meet the queen privately or at a public event .

It’s the Economy: Learn about Britain’s austerity measures and watch the video in which Europeans talk about their lives as their nations face economic struggles, paying particular attention to the British people. Draw up a wedding plan and budget for the engaged couple. Should the wedding and related events be modest to reflect the times, or should they provide gloss and glamour, and a respite from reality?

Footing the Bill: Consider the calls for the royal family to pay for the wedding expenses instead of the ailing British government, along with the anticipated rise in tourism and sales of memorabilia , which are expected to boost the economy. Who should pay? Hold a debate.

Royal Efforts: Learn about Prince Charles’ s charitable efforts , which include promoting local-sourced, sustainable fibers like wool , among many other things. What other charitable works are undertaken by the royal family? Choose one of these efforts to research and present.

History of the Monarchy: Research the history of the British monarchy . Create a timeline that shows important events in the monarchy, alongside historic events in the United Kingdom and around the world. When and how has the monarchy participated in historic moments?

Ever After: Investigate how divorce and scandal in the British royal family has affected public opinion about the Windsors and the institution of the monarchy itself. Write an informed, persuasive essay predicting how the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton might fit into that narrative and affect how the British citizenry views the House of Windsor.

Royals Around the World: Research two other countries that have royal families . Write a compare-and-contrast essay about the two royal families and the role they play in their respective countries.

Media Figures: Watch all of part of the official news conference given by Prince William and Miss Middleton to announce their engagement. What do you observe about their reactions to the constant flash photography? Should they be expected to endure such media attention at nonofficial events, too? Research Prince Charles’s attempts to shield his children from the paparazzi and the recent hacking of William and Harry’s cellphones by a British reporter. Make a podcast in which you discuss whether members of the royal family, by virtue of their fame, should be given a measure of privacy.

Class Consciousness: Research the interests and experiences the newly engaged couple share , and explore the public fascination with Miss Middleton’s social class, including rumors about the couple’s brief breakup and the behavior of Miss Middleton’s mother . Contrast your findings with your understanding of social class in America and the popular interest in class differences, evidenced in the popularity of shows like the “Real Housewives” franchise . Present your findings in a simulated television news report.

A Familiar Ring : Given the attention paid to Kate’s engagement ring , research its history and put the choice into the context of the current economic crisis in Britain . In a persuasive paragraph, tell why you think William gave his fiancée this particular ring. What does it symbolize? How does it fit in with established symbols of the British monarchy ?

Word on the Street: Take a poll of people’s attitudes toward and knowledge of the royal family. Questions might include: What does the royal family symbolize? Should its members continue to receive public funding? Do they inspire pride and interest in England? Do you think people care about the royal family as much today as in the past? How do you think the royal family generates revenue for England (tourism, commemorative items and so on)? Make a chart or graph to show your findings.

Golden Crowns, Silver Screens: Watch one or more film depictions of the royal family, like “The Queen” (2006) or “The King’s Speech” (2010). Write a review that includes an assessment of the film’s historical accuracy.

Relevant Learning Network Lessons

A lesson from May 2010 gives background on the debt crisis in Europe .

Though it focuses primarily on Nepal, our lesson “Royal Treatment” gives students the opportunity to research existing monarchies around the world.

The qualities that make a good marriage are part of the discussion in “Untying the Knot .”

“A Personal Journey” and “Classes for the Masses ” are related lessons that take on issues of social class.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

I trust that, under the heading “Footing the Bill” it’s been announced that the costs of the wedding of Prince William with Catherine Middleton will be shared between the Queen (his grandmother), his father (the Prince of Wales) and the Middleton family. This has always been the case with British royal weddings.

The costs of security and policing for the day are borne by the Metropolitan Police of London. Members of the British Army (especially the House Division) will be on duty in ceremonial dress; they do not receive extra pay for doing so.

So we the public are to believe that it okay for william to remain monarchy when he broke majority of royal monarchy law to be with kate middleton,she is not birth born monarchy to be term duchess ,who do we go a see that this woman who is not birth born ,isn’t costing the public and humanity money to be by the monarchy for whom she married none royal side….She is workingclass and not monarchy like william mother which didn’t put a hurt on society’s income because of it….She followed all the rules unlike william, william should abicate like his father for marrying workingclass…they have not with royal heritage rights to incurr titles.Both men are to be workingclass life and term ,this is the price they will have to pay for such chioces…

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Royal Bodies

Hilary mantel.

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L ast summer at the festival in Hay-on-Wye, I was asked to name a famous person and choose a book to give them. I hate the leaden repetitiveness of these little quizzes: who would be the guests at your ideal dinner party, what book has changed your life, which fictional character do you most resemble? I had to come up with an answer, however, so I chose Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, and I chose to give her a book published in 2006, by the cultural historian Caroline Weber; it’s called Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution . It’s not that I think we’re heading for a revolution. It’s rather that I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung. In those days she was a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore. These days she is a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions. Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant. They will find that this young woman’s life until now was nothing, her only point and purpose being to give birth.

Marie Antoinette was a woman eaten alive by her frocks. She was transfixed by appearances, stigmatised by her fashion choices. Politics were made personal in her. Her greed for self-gratification, her half-educated dabbling in public affairs, were adduced as a reason the French were bankrupt and miserable. It was ridiculous, of course. She was one individual with limited power and influence, who focused the rays of misogyny. She was a woman who couldn’t win. If she wore fine fabrics she was said to be extravagant. If she wore simple fabrics, she was accused of plotting to ruin the Lyon silk trade. But in truth she was all body and no soul: no soul, no sense, no sensitivity. She was so wedded to her appearance that when the royal family, in disguise, made its desperate escape from Paris, dashing for the border, she not only had several trunk loads of new clothes sent on in advance, but took her hairdresser along on the trip. Despite the weight of her mountainous hairdos, she didn’t feel her head wobbling on her shoulders. When she returned from that trip, to the prison Paris would become for her, it was said that her hair had turned grey overnight.

Antoinette as a royal consort was a gliding, smiling disaster, much like Diana in another time and another country. But Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished. When it was announced that Diana was to join the royal family, the Duke of Edinburgh is said to have given her his approval because she would ‘breed in some height’. Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners. She looks like a nicely brought up young lady, with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ part of her vocabulary. But in her first official portrait by Paul Emsley, unveiled in January, her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One critic said perceptively that she appeared ‘weary of being looked at’. Another that the portrait might pass muster as the cover of a Catherine Cookson novel: an opinion I find thought-provoking, as Cookson’s simple tales of poor women extricating themselves from adverse circumstances were for twenty years, according to the Public Lending Right statistics, the nation’s favourite reading. Sue Townsend said of Diana that she was ‘a fatal non-reader’. She didn’t know the end of her own story. She enjoyed only the romances of Barbara Cartland. I’m far too snobbish to have read one, but I assume they are stories in which a wedding takes place and they all live happily ever after. Diana didn’t see the possible twists in the narrative. What does Kate read? It’s a question.

Paul Emsley’s portrait of Kate Middleton is unveiled.

Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture. Diana was capable of transforming herself from galumphing schoolgirl to ice queen, from wraith to Amazon. Kate seems capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation. When her pregnancy became public she had been visiting her old school, and had picked up a hockey stick and run a few paces for the camera. BBC News devoted a discussion to whether a pregnant woman could safely put on a turn of speed while wearing high heels. It is sad to think that intelligent people could devote themselves to this topic with earnest furrowings of the brow, but that’s what discourse about royals comes to: a compulsion to comment, a discourse empty of content, mouthed rather than spoken. And in the same way one is compelled to look at them: to ask what they are made of, and is their substance the same as ours.

I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not? Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.

A few years ago I saw the Prince of Wales at a public award ceremony. I had never seen him before, and at once I thought: what a beautiful suit! What sublime tailoring! It’s for Shakespeare to penetrate the heart of a prince, and for me to study his cuff buttons. I found it hard to see the man inside the clothes; and like Thomas Cromwell in my novels, I couldn’t help winding the fabric back onto the bolt and pricing him by the yard. At this ceremony, which was formal and carefully orchestrated, the prince gave an award to a young author who came up on stage in shirtsleeves to receive his cheque. He no doubt wished to show that he was a free spirit, despite taking money from the establishment. For a moment I was ashamed of my trade. I thought, this is what the royals have to contend with today: not real, principled opposition, but self-congratulatory chippiness.

And then as we drifted away from the stage I saw something else. I glanced sideways into a room off the main hall, and saw that it was full of stacking chairs. It was a depressing, institutional, impersonal sight. I thought, Charles must see this all the time. Glance sideways, into the wings, and you see the tacky preparations for the triumphant public event. You see your beautiful suit deconstructed, the tailor’s chalk lines, the unsecured seams. You see that your life is a charade, that the scenery is cardboard, that the paint is peeling, the red carpet fraying, and if you linger you will notice the oily devotion fade from the faces of your subjects, and you will see their retreating backs as they turn up their collars and button their coats and walk away into real life.

Then a little later I went to Buckingham Palace for a book trade event, a large evening party. I had expected to see people pushing themselves into the queen’s path, but the opposite was true. The queen walked through the reception areas at an even pace, hoping to meet someone, and you would see a set of guests, as if swept by the tide, parting before her or welling ahead of her into the next room. They acted as if they feared excruciating embarrassment should they be caught and obliged to converse. The self-possessed became gauche and the eloquent were struck dumb. The guests studied the walls, the floor, they looked everywhere except at Her Majesty. They studied exhibits in glass cases and the paintings on the walls, which were of course worth looking at, but they studied them with great intentness, as if their eyes had been glued. Vermeer was just then ‘having a moment’, as they say, and the guests congregated around a small example, huddled with their backs to the room. I pushed through to see the painting along with the others but I can’t remember now which Vermeer it was. It’s safe to say there would have been a luminous face, round or oval, there would have been a woman gazing entranced at some household object, or perhaps reading a letter with a half-smile; there may have been a curtain, suggestive of veiled meaning; there would have been an enigma. We concentrated on it at the expense of the enigma moving among us, smiling with gallant determination.

And then the queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones. I felt that such was the force of my devouring curiosity that the party had dematerialised and the walls melted and there were only two of us in the vast room, and such was the hard power of my stare that Her Majesty turned and looked back at me, as if she had been jabbed in the shoulder; and for a split second her face expressed not anger but hurt bewilderment. She looked young: for a moment she had turned back from a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.

And I felt sorry then. I wanted to apologise. I wanted to say: it’s nothing personal, it’s monarchy I’m staring at. I rejoined, mentally, the rest of the guests. Now flunkeys were moving among us with trays and on them were canapés, and these snacks were the queen’s revenge. They were pieces of gristly meat on skewers. Let’s not put too fine a point on it: they were kebabs. It took some time to chew through one of them, and then the guests were left with the little sticks in their hands. They tried to give them back to the flunkeys, but the flunkeys smiled and sadly shook their heads, and moved away, so the guests had to carry on the evening holding them out, like children with sparklers on Guy Fawkes night.

At this point the evening became all too much for me. It was violently interesting. I went behind a sofa and sat on the floor and enjoyed the rest of the party that way, seeking privacy as my sympathies shifted. And as the guests ebbed away and the rooms emptied, I joined them, and on the threshold I looked back, and what I saw, placed precisely at the base of every pillar, was a forest of little sticks: gnawed and abandoned. So if the queen’s glance had swept the room, that is what she would have seen: what we had left in our wake. It was the stacking chairs all over again; the scaffolding of reality too nakedly displayed, the daylight let in on magic.

We can be sure the queen was not traumatised by my staring, as when next we met she gave me a medal. As I prepared to go to the palace, people would say: ‘Will it be the actual queen, the queen herself?’ Did they think contact with the anointed hand would change you? Was that what the guests at the palace feared: to be changed by powerful royal magic, without knowing how? The faculty of awe remains intact, for all that the royal story in recent years has taken a sordid turn. There were scandals enough in centuries past, from the sneaky little adulteries of Katherine Howard to the junketings of the Prince Regent to the modern-day mischief of Mrs Simpson. But a new world began, I think, in 1980, with the discovery that Diana, the future Princess of Wales, had legs. You will remember how the young Diana taught for a few hours a week at a kindergarten called Young England, and when it was first known that she was Charles’s choice of bride, the press photographed her, infants touchingly gathered around; but they induced her to stand against the light, so in the resulting photograph the nation could see straight through her skirt. A sort of licentiousness took hold, a national lip-smacking. Those gangling limbs were artlessly exposed, without her permission. It was the first violation.

When Diana drove to St Paul’s she was a blur of virginal white behind glass. The public was waiting to see the dress, but this was more than a fashion moment. An everyday sort of girl had been squashed into the coach, but a goddess came out. She didn’t get out of the coach in any ordinary way: she hatched. The extraordinary dress came first, like a flow of liquid, like ectoplasm emerging from the orifices of a medium. It was a long moment before she solidified. Indeed the coach was a medium, a method of conveyance and communication between two spheres, the private and the public, the common and the royal. The dress’s first effect was dismaying. I could hear a nation of women catching their breath as one, not in awe but in horror: it’s creased to glory, how did they let that happen? I heard the squeak as a million ironing-boards unfolded, a sigh and shudder as a collective nightmare came true: that dream we all have, that we are incorrectly dressed or not dressed at all, that we are naked in the street. But as the dress resolved about her, the princess was born and the world breathed out.

Diana was more royal than the family she joined. That had nothing to do with family trees. Something in her personality, her receptivity, her passivity, fitted her to be the carrier of myth. She came near to claiming that she had a healing touch, the ancient attribute of royal persons. The healing touch can’t be felt through white gloves. Diana walked bare-handed among the multitude, and unarmed: unfortified by irony, uninformed by history. Her tragedy was located in the gap between her human capacities and the demands of the superhuman role she was required to fulfil. When I think of Diana, I remember Stevie Smith’s poem about the Lorelei:

There, on a rock majestical, A girl with smile equivocal, Painted, young and damned and fair, Sits and combs her yellow hair.

Soon Diana’s hairstyles were as consequential as Marie Antoinette’s, and a great deal cheaper to copy.

In the next stage of her story, she passed through trials, through ordeals at the world’s hands. For a time the public refrained from demanding her blood so she shed it herself, cutting her arms and legs. Her death still makes me shudder because although I know it was an accident, it wasn’t just an accident. It was fate showing her hand, fate with her twisted grin. Diana visited the most feminine of cities to meet her end as a woman: to move on, from the City of Light to the place beyond black. She went into the underpass to be reborn, but reborn this time without a physical body: the airy subject of a hundred thousand photographs, a flicker at the corner of the eye, a sigh on the breeze.

For a time it was hoped, and it was feared, that Diana had changed the nation. Her funeral was a pagan outpouring, a lawless fiesta of grief. We are bad at mourning our dead. We don’t make time or space for grief. The world tugs us along, back into its harsh rhythm before we are ready for it, and for the pain of loss doctors can prescribe a pill. We are at war with our nature, and nature will win; all the bottled anguish, the grief dammed up, burst the barriers of politeness and formality and restraint, and broke down the divide between private and public, so that strangers wailed in the street, people who had never met Diana lamented her with maladjusted fervour, and we all remembered our secret pain and unleashed it in one huge carnival of mass mourning. But in the end, nothing changed. We were soon back to the prosaic: shirtsleeves, stacking chairs, little sticks. And yet none of us who lived through it will forget that dislocating time, when the skin came off the surface of the world, and our inner vision cleared, and we saw the archetypes clear and plain, and we saw the collective psyche at work, and the gods pulling our strings. To quote Stevie Smith again:

An antique story comes to me And fills me with anxiety, I wonder why I fear so much What surely has no modern touch?

In looking at royalty we are always looking at what is archaic, what is mysterious by its nature, and my feeling is that it will only ever half-reveal itself. This poses a challenge to historians and to those of us who work imaginatively with the past. Royal persons are both gods and beasts. They are persons but they are supra-personal, carriers of a blood line: at the most basic, they are breeding stock, collections of organs.

T his brings me to the royal bodies with whom I have been most concerned recently, those of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII. Long before Kate’s big news was announced, the tabloids wanted to look inside her to see if she was pregnant. Historians are still trying to peer inside the Tudors. Are they healthy, are they sick, can they breed? The story of Henry and his wives is peculiar to its time and place, but also timeless and universally understood; it is highly political and also highly personal. It is about body parts, about what slots in where, and when: are they body parts fit for purpose, or are they diseased? It’s no surprise that so much fiction constellates around the subject of Henry and his wives. Often, if you want to write about women in history, you have to distort history to do it, or substitute fantasy for facts; you have to pretend that individual women were more important than they were or that we know more about them than we do.

But with the reign of King Bluebeard, you don’t have to pretend. Women, their bodies, their reproductive capacities, their animal nature, are central to the story. The history of the reign is so graphically gynaecological that in the past it enabled lady novelists to write about sex when they were only supposed to write about love; and readers could take an avid interest in what went on in royal bedrooms by dignifying it as history, therefore instructive, edifying. Popular fiction about the Tudors has also been a form of moral teaching about women’s lives, though what is taught varies with moral fashion. It used to be that Anne Boleyn was a man-stealer who got paid out. Often, now, the lesson is that if Katherine of Aragon had been a bit more foxy, she could have hung on to her husband. Anne as opportunist and sexual predator finds herself recruited to the cause of feminism. Always, the writers point to the fact that a man who marries his mistress creates a job vacancy. ‘Women beware women’ is a teaching that never falls out of fashion.

Anne Boleyn, in particular, is a figure who elicits a deep response, born out of ignorance often enough but also out of empathy. The internet is abuzz with stories about her, as if everything were happening today. Her real self is hidden within the dramas into which we co-opt her. There is a prurient curiosity around her, of the kind that gathered around Wallis Simpson. Henry didn’t give up the throne to marry her, but he did reshape his nation’s history. So what was her particular attraction? Did she have a sexual secret? A special trick? Was she beautiful, or ugly? The six fingers with which she was credited were not seen during her lifetime, and the warts and wens and extra nipple that supposedly disfigured her were witches’ marks produced by the black fantasy of Catholic propagandists. Her contemporaries didn’t think she was a great beauty. ‘She is of middling stature’, a Venetian diplomat reported. A ‘swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the English king’s great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful’. It was said, though not by unbiased observers, that after her marriage she aged rapidly and grew thin. If this is true, and we put it together with reports of a swelling in her throat, and with the description of her by one contemporary as ‘a goggle-eyed whore’, then we’re looking, possibly, at a woman with a hyperthyroid condition, a woman of frayed temper who lives on the end of her nerves. It often surprises people that there is no attested contemporary portrait. Just because an unknown hand has written ‘Anne Boleyn’ on a picture, it doesn’t mean it’s an image from the life or even an image of Anne at all. The most familiar image, in which she wears a letter ‘B’ hanging from a pearl necklace, exists in many forms and variants and originates at least fifty years after Anne’s death.

So much close scrutiny, and none of it much help to posterity. Anne was a mercurial woman, still shaped by the projections of those who read and write about her. Royal bodies do change after death, and not just as a consequence of the universal post-mortem changes. Now we know the body in the Leicester car park is indeed that of Richard III, we have to concede the curved spine was not Tudor propaganda, but we need not believe the chronicler who claimed Richard was the product of a two-year pregnancy and was born with teeth. Why are we all so pleased about digging up a king? Perhaps because the present is paying some of the debt it owes to the past, and science has come to the aid of history. The king stripped by the victors has been reclothed in his true identity. This is the essential process of history, neatly illustrated: loss, retrieval.

To return to Henry VIII: almost the first thirty years of his reign were shaped by his need for a male heir. Religious and political activity cluster around the subject. Not all the intelligence and diligence of his ministers could give Henry what he most needed. Only a woman could: but which woman? Neither of Henry’s first two wives had trouble conceiving. Royal pregnancies were not announced in those days; the news generally crept out, and public anticipation was aroused only when the child quickened. We know Katherine of Aragon had at least six pregnancies, most of them ending in late miscarriages or neonatal deaths. She had a son who survived for seven weeks, but only one child made it past early infancy, and that was a daughter, the Princess Mary. Anne’s first pregnancy was successful, and produced another girl, the Princess Elizabeth. Then she miscarried at least twice. It was not until his third marriage that Henry had a son who lived. Both those daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, were women of great ability, and in their very different ways were capable of ruling; but I don’t think this means that Henry was wrong in his construction of his situation. What he feared was that his bloodline would end. Elizabeth found the puzzle of whom she could marry too difficult to solve, so that her reign was dominated by succession crises, and she was indeed the last of the Tudors. The line did end: just a lot later than Henry had imagined.

Anne Boleyn wasn’t royal by birth. Her family were city merchants dignified into gentlefolk, and her father had married into the powerful and noble Howard family. She became royal, exalted, at her coronation when, six months pregnant, she walked the length of Westminster Abbey on a cloth of heaven-blue. It was said she had won Henry by promising him a son. Anne was a power player, a clever and determined woman. But in the end she was valued for her body parts, not her intellect or her soul; it was her womb that was central to her story. The question is whether she could ever win the battle for an heir: or was biology against her? At his trial Anne’s brother, George Boleyn, entertained the court by telling them that Henry was no good in bed. Conception was thought to be tied to female orgasm, so the implication was that what George called Henry’s lack of ‘skill’ was the problem.

Yet clearly he was able to make his wives pregnant. Was something else wrong? The old notion that Henry had syphilis has been discarded. There never was any contemporary evidence for it. The theory was constructed in the 19th century, as part of a narrative that showed Henry as a sexual beast justly punished for his promiscuity. In fact Henry constrained his sexual appetites. He had few mistresses compared to other grandees of his time. I think it was more important to him to be good, to be seen to be good, than to be gratified in this particular way. In fact I think we can say that the old monster was a bit of a romantic. Later in life, when he married Anne of Cleves, he didn’t want to have sex with a woman with whom he wasn’t in love; it was a scruple that baffled his contemporaries.

Recently a new hypothesis about Henry has emerged. In 2010 a paper by Catrina Banks Whitley and Kyra Cornelius Kramer appeared in the Historical Journal , called ‘A New Explanation of the Reproductive Woes and Midlife Decline of Henry VIII’. It suggested that Henry had a blood type called Kells positive. People who are Kells positive carry an extra antibody on the surface of their red blood cells. The blood type is rare, so we can assume Henry’s wives were Kells negative, and that their lack of compatibility was the reason for the multiple reproductive failures. When a woman who is Kells negative conceives by a man who is Kells positive, she will, if the foetus itself is Kells positive, become sensitised; her immune system will try to reject the foetus. The first pregnancy will go well, other things being equal. As with rhesus incompatibility, it takes one pregnancy for the woman to develop the sensitisation. But later children will die before or just after birth.

To a certain point this fits Henry’s story. He had a healthy illegitimate son by Elizabeth Blount: that was a first pregnancy. His first child with Anne Boleyn was a healthy girl, and his first child with Jane Seymour a healthy boy; Jane died soon after Edward’s birth, so we don’t know what would have happened thereafter. With Katherine of Aragon the pattern is more blurred. Mystery surrounds her first pregnancy, much of it made by the queen herself, who perhaps didn’t want to admit that she had miscarried; so we know the pregnancy didn’t work out, but we don’t know what happened. One of Katherine’s doctors thought it was a twin pregnancy and it may have failed for any number of reasons. So Katherine’s healthy child, Mary, was not her first. But every child fathered by Henry had a chance of being Kells negative, and the paper’s authors suggest that this is how Mary survived.

If this is true, it makes the history of Henry’s reign a different sort of tragedy: not a moral but a biological tragedy, inscribed on the body. The efforts of the wives and the politicians and the churchmen didn’t avail because a genetic lottery was in operation. What makes the hypothesis persuasive, to some minds, is Henry’s later medical history. Some individuals who are Kells positive go on to develop a collection of symptoms called McLeod syndrome. In early life Henry was, by all contemporary accounts, a creature of great beauty. He excelled in every sport. We wonder, of course, did his opponents let the king win? But Henry was not a fool and though he was susceptible to flattery he didn’t need flattery of that simple kind; and besides, in a dangerous pursuit like jousting, where one armoured man on an armoured horse is charging at another headlong, the outcome is difficult to control. I think we can take it that he was a star. He collected a number of injuries that stopped him jousting, and then in middle age became stout, eventually gross. He developed a weakness in his legs, and by the end of his life was virtually immobile. It also seems to some authorities that he underwent personality changes in mid-life. It was said that as a young man he was sweet-natured; though the claim would have had a hollow ring if you were Richard Empson or Edmund Dudley, ministers to his father, whom he executed as soon as he came to the throne. But it’s incontrovertible that as Henry aged he became increasingly angry, irrational, wilful and out of control. He fits the picture for McLeod syndrome: progressive muscular weakness and nerve deterioration in the lower body, depression, paranoia, an erosion of personality.

Some historians see the year 1536 as a turning point for Henry, personally and politically: that was the year in which Anne Boleyn was beheaded. Certainly his later years were very sad ones for a man who had been so magnificent and imposing. Pathology is at work, but of what kind? It seems to me that there are more obvious explanations for his poor health and the deterioration of his character, and the authors of the original paper didn’t really understand the external pressures on the king later in his reign. Henry had suffered accidents in the tiltyard and one of his legs was permanently ulcerated. He probably had osteomyelitis, an infection in the bone. His leg caused him chronic pain and historians – and, I’m afraid, doctors – underestimate what chronic pain can do to sour the temper and wear away both the personality and the intellect. When we call him paranoid, we must acknowledge he was right to think his enemies were everywhere, though he was increasingly bad at working out who they were.

As for depression, he had a great deal to be depressed about: not just his isolation on the world stage, but his own decay and deterioration. He had magnificent portraits created, and left them as his surrogates to stare down at his courtiers while he retreated into smaller, more intimate spaces. Yet he was quite unable to keep private what was happening to his own body. The royal body exists to be looked at. The world’s focus on body parts was most acute and searching in the case of Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife. No one understood what Henry saw in Jane, who was not pretty and not young. The imperial ambassador sneered that ‘no doubt she has a very fine enigme ’: which is to say, secret part. We have arrived at the crux of the matter: a royal lady is a royal vagina. Along with the reverence and awe accorded to royal persons goes the conviction that the body of the monarch is public property. We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all.

Is monarchy a suitable institution for a grown-up nation? I don’t know. I have described how my own sympathies were activated and my simple ideas altered. The debate is not high on our agenda. We are happy to allow monarchy to be an entertainment, in the same way that we license strip joints and lap-dancing clubs. Adulation can swing to persecution, within hours, within the same press report: this is what happened to Prince Harry recently. You can understand that anybody treated this way can be destabilised, and that Harry doesn’t know which he is, a person or a prince. Diana was spared, at least, the prospect of growing old under the flashbulbs, a crime for which the media would have made her suffer. It may be that the whole phenomenon of monarchy is irrational, but that doesn’t mean that when we look at it we should behave like spectators at Bedlam. Cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty. It can easily become fatal. We don’t cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago. History makes fools of us, makes puppets of us, often enough. But it doesn’t have to repeat itself. In the current case, much lies within our control. I’m not asking for censorship. I’m not asking for pious humbug and smarmy reverence. I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes. Get your pink frilly frocks out, zhuzh up your platinum locks. We are all Barbara Cartland now. The pen is in our hands. A happy ending is ours to write.

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Vol. 35 No. 6 · 21 March 2013

Hilary Mantel appears to endorse the postulate of Catrina Banks Whitley and Kyra Cornelius Kramer that the ‘reproductive woes and midlife decline of Henry VIII’ can be explained by his Kell blood group and the McLeod syndrome ( LRB , 21 February ). Their clinical analysis is well argued but they make a significant error in stating that the McLeod syndrome ‘is exclusive to Kell positive individuals’. The McLeod syndrome is associated with a rare X-linked genetic variant of the XK blood group system. The XK gene is inherited independently of the Kell blood group system. Therefore, had Henry suffered from the McLeod syndrome, there would still have been an 80 per cent probability of his being genetically K-negative.

Any speculative differential diagnosis to account for the unfortunate obstetric histories of Henry’s wives might well include haemolytic disease of the foetus and newborn (HDFN) due to maternal alloimmunisation by a foetal red cell antigen. However, prior to the introduction of blood transfusion, HDFN due to anti-K (Kell) would have occurred less frequently than it does today. Furthermore, the natural history of the disorder makes it unlikely that all of Henry’s conceiving wives and mistresses, had he been K-positive, would have been afflicted in the way the historical record seems to demand. Without the certainty that Henry was K-positive, the argument is further weakened.

A medical maxim aimed at curbing fanciful diagnoses reminds the clinician that common disorders account for the vast majority of ailments. The McLeod syndrome is extremely rare. Henry’s several problems as described by Whitley and Kramer would not put this diagnosis near the top of my list.

Gerald Smith London W4

Vol. 35 No. 7 · 11 April 2013

I’m indebted to Gerald Smith for his expert take on the health of Henry VIII ( Letters, 21 March ). I don’t in fact endorse the Whitley-Kramer postulate that Henry was Kell positive and went on to develop McLeod syndrome; I just throw it on the table, because it’s an interesting idea that encourages us to think again about the unhappy pregnancies of Henry’s first two wives and his own late-life afflictions. If biology was working against him, his striving for a healthy male heir, which conditioned so much of the history of his reign, was an even sadder enterprise than we have imagined.

If Henry had been the lecher of legend, and had slept with more women and sired more children, we would have more to go on. I think the Whitley-Kramer explanation is maybe overelaborate. As Smith says, the McLeod syndrome is very rare. There are more common conditions that could have led the later Henry to be obese, immobile, suspicious and miserable. And, as I said in my lecture, we should not underestimate the way that chronic pain (in his case from a leg ulcer) afflicts not just the body but the personality and the intellect.

As for the two unhappy wives, there’s no reason to suppose that their pregnancies failed for a shared reason. Henry may have thought so – in each case, God was not pleased with him – but we don’t have to think the same. Again, we don’t have all the information. We can’t be sure how many babies were lost, because the Tudors didn’t ring the bells for a royal miscarriage. Katherine of Aragon’s long history of multiple miscarriages and neo-natal deaths suggests more than common misfortune, but Anne Boleyn’s pattern of two or possibly three miscarriages is harder to read. The third wife, Jane Seymour, died after giving birth to her first child, so we don’t know what pattern might have emerged. And none of Henry’s later wives conceived. It’s interesting that Katherine’s surviving daughter, Mary, was an undergrown child and suffered poor health through her life, while Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth, enjoyed a glowing girlhood and proved to be a tough old bird.

People do tend to believe the worst of Henry, and it’s taken years to shake off the old notion that he had syphilis. So any new ideas are worth airing. And – I speak feelingly, as a person of expanding girth and diverse afflictions – a bit of posthumous sympathy doesn’t go amiss.

Hilary Mantel Budleigh Salterton, Devon

Vol. 35 No. 9 · 9 May 2013

Some of Hilary Mantel’s assertions about the two daughters of Henry VIII reiterate the conventional but increasingly suspect dichotomy between them ( Letters, 11 April ). Although an ambassador’s report did describe Mary as ‘not tall’, that does not endorse Mantel’s view of her as an ‘undergrown child’, and I am unaware of any evidence that does. Mary’s health, like that of most of her contemporaries, varied considerably, but from her own accounts her ailments were often due to seasonal allergies. The many ways that Mary was an admired ornament of Henry’s court were described by ambassadors at the time.

We know much less about the early years of Anne Boleyn’s daughter, but Mantel’s version of Elizabeth’s ‘glowing girlhood’ apparently ignores her consistent relegation to the status of the king’s least important child. Indeed, at one point he barred his younger daughter from his court and from communication with him for the better part of a year.

Judith Richards Melbourne

Vol. 35 No. 5 · 7 March 2013

Hilary Mantel urged the media, when dealing with royal stories, not to ‘behave like spectators at Bedlam’ ( LRB , 21 February ). They have behaved like the inmates instead.

Walter Hemmens Knockholt, Kent

Will the duchess be given a right of reply?

Yvonne Smith Leura, New South Wales

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82 Monarchy Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best monarchy topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 simple & easy monarchy essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on monarchy, ❓ questions about monarchy.

Queen Elizabeth I as the Greatest Monarch in England Queen Elizabeth, I was a pragmatic leader and she knew that if she married a foreigner she would put England’s future in jeopardy by relinquishing her power to her husband.
In a Democratic Britain, the Monarchy Is an Anachronism The presence of the queen as the head of state instils a sense of responsibility and ethics among the political leaders. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
Deuteronomistic History: The Rise and Fall of Israelite Monarchy A monarch can fix it by always having the copy of God’s law on him to “read it all the days of his life” and follow God’s word.
Critique of Thomas Hobbes’ Views on Monarchy According to him, man is naturally violent, and thus, there is a need for the establishment of an authoritative government in the form of a monarchy to check and contain the violent nature of man.
Absolute Monarchy: Pro- and Counterarguments in the 17th Century The ideas of absolute monarchy in the 17th century were reinforced by the belief that rulers’ right to govern was given by the power of God.
Editorial on British Monarchy Abolishment The editorial by Alaeddini takes the view that before taking the radical decision of abolishing the system, there is a need to change it to ensure that it reflects the current socio-political and economic environment […]
Elizabeth I of England as a Very Successful Monarch The achievements of her rule are very important for solving a row of difficult problems existing in the country those days and for leading the country on a new level of the world supremacy both […]
The History of Queen Lydia Liliuokalani: The Last Monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii Queen Lydia Liliuokalani was the last monarch to rule the Kingdom of Hawaii before it was annexed to the United States of America.
Absolute and Constitutional Monarchy A constitutional monarchy, as the name shows, is a regime based on the division of powers between the king and the legislative body like the Parliament with the supreme power of the Constitution.
George III and the Role of Monarchy Though the role of monarchy in the society is often underrated, monarchy, in fact, defines a range of features of the society in question, including its economic and financial status; it defines the national identity […]
The Downfall of Pentheus: The Clash of a Monarch and a God Although it is traditionally considered that the key reason behind Pentheus’s death was his denial of Dionysos as a god, it can also be argued that Pentheus’s non-acceptance of Dionysos was only the factor, while […]
Monarchy in Canada The first reason why the monarchy in Canada should not be abolished is that it creates stability and continuity in the country.
The Origin of the Disagreements Between the Spanish Monarchy and the Castilian Cortes
The Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy: France From Old Regime to Revolution
The Development of a Limited Monarchy in England
What Characteristics of Monarchy Emerge From A Study of the English History Plays of William Shakespeare
The English Parliament and the French Monarchy
The American Revolution: Monarchy to Democracy
The Monarchy of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile
The Idea of Monarchy in Common Sense, a Book by Thomas Paine
Stature and Nutrition in the Habsburg Monarchy: The Standard of Living and Economic Development
The Development of Italian Monarchy from 1861 up to 1870
The Concept of Absolute Monarchy in King Lear by William Shakespeare
King Lear’s Self-Awareness Riding High Upon the Wave of Power Associated With the Monarchy
Turbulence in Politics and Government: Absolute Monarchy
Princess Diana’s Effect on the United Kingdom and the Monarchy
William Shakespeares View on Monarchy Expressed Through His Play Macbeth
The Monarchy Challenged the Papal’s Authority by the End of the Middle Ages
The Issues within the Monarchy That Sparked the French Revolution
The Loss and Restoration of French Monarchy
To What Degree Did the Battle of Actium Mark the Establishment of a Monarchy
The Absolute Monarchy of Austria During the 17th and 18th Centuries
The Democracy Monarchy Cycle, An Essay on the Theories of Hobbes
The Articles of Confederation and the British Monarchy During the Coloni
Monarchy vs. Self : Government, the Morality of the Monarchy
Religious Interests and Political Interests in the Spanish Monarchy
The Irresponsibility of European Monarchy
The Benefits of the UK Having a Constitutional Monarchy
The Benefits and Consequences of the Past and Present Monarchy Government
The Abolition of the Monarchy Affect New Zealand’s
The Failure of Monarchy in King Lear, a Play by William Shakespeare
The Constitutional Monarchy: The Beginning of Liberalism
The Development of Constitutional Monarchy in England
The Impact of Spanish American Revolutions on the Spanish Monarchy
The Responsibility of the Monarchy for Their Own Downfall in 1793
The Coevolution of Economic and Political Development From Monarchy to Democracy
The Life and Times of Victoria Ka’iulani, Member of Hawaiian Monarchy
To What Extent Did The Valois-Habsburg Conflict Weaken the French Monarchy During the Period of 1519-1529
The Relationship of the American Colonists and the British Monarchy
Roles of the British Monarchy: Existent, Relevant, and Important
The Greeks and Non-Greeks Under the Ptolomeic Monarchy
Terminating Hyperinflation in the Dismembered Habsburg Monarchy
Valois-Habsburg Wars and Its Contribution to the Weakening of the French Monarchy During the 1519-1529
The Best Form of Government Between Monarchy, Dictatorship, and Democracy
The English Bill of Rights: The Role Change for the Monarchy
The Key Points of the Concept, Role and Challenges of a Constitutional Monarchy
Why Did The Restored Bourbon Monarchy Fail in France
What Is a Monarchy in Government?
What Country Is a Monarchy Today?
Is the UK a Monarchy?
How Does a Monarchy Take Power?
Which Countries Use Monarchy?
How Many Countries Have a Monarchy?
Who Is the Most Famous Monarch in the World?
What Are the Benefits of Monarchy?
What Is the Best Example of Monarchy?
What Are the Laws of Monarchy?
What Countries No Longer Have a Monarchy?
Is Japan a Monarchy Country?
Which Country Abolished Monarchy?
Who Is the Longest Monarchy in the World?
Who Is the Oldest Monarchy in the World?
Is Monarchy Good for a Country?
Who Started Monarchy?
How Does Monarchy Treat the Citizens?
Why Does Monarchy Fail?
Why Is a Monarchy Weak?
How Does a Monarchy Gain Power?
Do People Have Rights in a Monarchy?
Will England Ever Get Rid of the Monarchy?
What Is It Called When You Go Against the Monarchy?
Is North Korea a Monarchy?
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Guest Essay

What ‘The Crown’ Teaches Us About Power and How to Wield It

An extreme close-up of Queen Elizabeth II's portrait. The Queen is wearing a crown and her eye is staring out from the corner of the frame.

By Arianne Chernock

Dr. Chernock is a professor of history at Boston University.

The final six episodes of “The Crown” were released this week, bringing Peter Morgan’s engrossing saga of the Windsors — bookended by the marriages of Elizabeth and Philip in 1947 and Charles and Camilla in 2005 — to an end. The Netflix series had all the appeal of a classic prime-time soap, and sure enough, tens of millions of people have tuned in, escaping reality to dwell for an hour in a bubble of fashion, money, gossip, intrigue and betrayal.

To many, escape is the whole point of royal watching — which is why royal mania is so often dismissed as a frivolous distraction. The royals are no longer as powerful as when they oversaw the rise of modern Britain and its empire. But the world of the Windsors is still intimately, and sometimes painfully, connected to our own. In that sense, the saga of the royal family, as captured in “The Crown,” offers supreme lessons in resilience, demonstrating that even the most traditional leaders can change with the times, relinquishing old roles to find new ways of exerting power and influence.

It may be easy to look at the monarchy today and assume its role is almost entirely ceremonial, but kings and queens — and their extended families — still exert tremendous social influence, especially as exemplars of morality. That was a role that King George III and his advisers pioneered way back in the 18th century when, to maintain their relevance, the royal family was expected to establish standards of proper behavior and stand by them. For better and worse, that expectation persists.

In the most favorable instances, royals have used this soft power to engage in cultural repair and provide moral leadership. Queen Victoria, for example, served as the first patron of the British Red Cross, helping to reform the kind of care received by those injured during conflicts. On the eve of World War II, King George VI met with Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park, N.Y. In eating hot dogs together, the king and president telegraphed Anglo-American solidarity in the face of rising fascism.

Over time, such stories have helped us understand that the actions of the royals affect not just their world but also our own, which may explain both our perpetual curiosity about the family and the intensity of our emotions as we litigate their choices. Many prestige cable shows have insightfully examined the dynamics of a marriage — take Tony and Carmela Soprano — but when “The Crown” dissects Charles and Diana’s doomed marriage, it is re-enacting a pivotal moment in history that informed how many modern couples think about marital obligation and what we owe our partners and ourselves.

The final season of “The Crown” — and, in many ways, the modern story of the Windsors — has been haunted by the ghost of Diana, a figure who perhaps understood this dynamic between perception and obligation better than anyone. We may remember Diana first for her outfits and her sudden renown, but she went on to do humanitarian work that benefited people with AIDS, spoke openly about her bulimia, pursued solutions to homelessness and campaigned for land mine removal in Bosnia and Angola.

In different but no less powerful ways, King Charles III is currently trying to use his influence to help mitigate the impact of climate change. At the core of these efforts is an acknowledgment that, whatever their political role, royals can, and should, have consequence. But their actions also reflect a recognizable human urge to shape the world around us and take control of our circumstances. That’s why we can see so much of ourselves in the royals when they strive for control — and often fail to achieve it.

Of course, the royals can still seem clueless and out of touch. Take their halting and awkward attempts to reckon with the role their ancestors played in shoring up a brutal empire. Centuries ago, monarchs funded the slave trade and Queen Victoria and her descendants provided symbolic glue for the British Empire and Commonwealth realms. The royal family is still tethered to that imperial past. The Prince and Princess of Wales, William and Kate, received significant public criticism during a 2022 royal tour of the Caribbean when some suggested they failed to adopt a sufficiently apologetic stance toward Britain’s colonial past. King Charles fared better on his recent visit to Kenya by acknowledging Britain’s violent response to the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s . Even so, the royals are navigating what the British journalist Afua Hirsch described last year as “a clamoring chorus of global trauma” led by “those colonized in the name of the British crown.”

But what history teaches us — and “ The Crown” artfully conveys — is that the royal family can embrace change when forced to. The show has always been most successful when it’s not just penetrating the royal bubble but puncturing it. Yes, we’ve followed the Windsors, but we’ve also entered the homes of the grieving mining families of Aberfan following the sudden collapse of a colliery spoil tip. We’ve observed the Bahamian-born valet Sydney Johnson lovingly care for the exiled Duke of Windsor. And in the final seasons we’ve watched the Egyptian businessman Mohamed al-Fayed and his son Dodi make tragic efforts to recast themselves as British elites. The exploits of the monarch are never just about the monarch. They are also, inevitably, about us. When the queen encounters her subjects, she often comes away changed. Though it could still be improved and modernized, the monarchy we see now, under King Charles, is a far cry from the one in 1947 captured on “The Crown” when it began.

We might thrill to be escorted inside Balmoral Castle and Buckingham Palace, where we keep close company with Queen Elizabeth II and her restless brood. There’s certainly pleasure in listening in to the imagined private conversations of a queen so famously tight-lipped that her unofficial mantra was reportedly “Never complain, never explain.” But all of these stories, from the young Elizabeth to Charles and Diana to William and Harry, have reverberated precisely because they offer more than simply voyeuristic escapism. They help us understand our world a little better — and the way that we have shaped the royals’ rarefied realm.

Arianne Chernock is a professor of history at Boston University and the author, most recently, of “The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women.”

Source photograph by ullstein bild, via Getty Images.

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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1946/24432

The Royal Family TM: An Analysis of the Modernization of the British Royal Family During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth II
Guðný Ósk Laxdal 1993-
Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir 1970-

This essay discusses the British monarchy and how under the reign of Queen Elizabeth II it has developed and adapted to modern times. The British monarchy has been a very important part of British history and it has been around for hundreds of years, and even though the institution itself is old fashioned, the monarchy today is far from being so. Queen Elizabeth II has during her reign seen the rise of the media and a changed relationship between the Royal Family and the public. She has managed to adapt to those changes and still remain a stoic British symbol, not only for Britain itself, but also for the entire world. The essay also discusses how the protection of the royal image is important and how the Royal Family has worked to do just this. It looks closely at major events during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, most notably the death of Diana, as this proved to be one of the most critical times for the British Royal Family. Further, it looks into how the Royal Family has given the public a look into their private lives, in particular in relation to their use of social media to control their image online. The spotlight is now on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The next generation is proving to be immensely popular and is taking advantage of that popularity. By examining how the next generation is combining old traditions with modern ways, the essay outlines how the monarchy is still going strong and how its abolishment is unlikely in the near future. As long as the British Royal Family protects its image and has a reason to be celebrated, it will thrive in modern society.

May 10, 2016
http://hdl.handle.net/1946/24432

I Hope You All Feel Terrible Now

How the internet—and Stephen Colbert—hounded Kate Middleton into revealing her diagnosis

Updated at 4:04 p.m ET on March 22, 2024

For many years, the most-complained-about cover of the British satirical magazine Private Eye was the one it published in the week after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. At the time, many people in Britain were loudly revolted by the tabloid newspapers that had hounded Diana after her divorce from Charles, and by the paparazzi whose quest for profitable pictures of the princess ended in an underpass in Paris.

Under the headline “Media to Blame,” the Eye cover carried a photograph of a crowd outside Buckingham Palace, with three speech bubbles. The first was: “The papers are a disgrace.” The next two said: “Yeah, I couldn’t get one anywhere” and “Borrow mine, it’s got a picture of the car.” People were furious. Sacks of angry, defensive mail arrived for days afterward, and several outlets withdrew the magazine from sale. (I am an Eye contributor, and these events have passed into office legend.) But with the benefit of hindsight, the implication was accurate: Intruding on the private lives of the royals is close to a British tradition. We Britons might have the occasional fit of remorse, but that doesn’t stop us. And now, because of the internet, everyone else can join in too.

Read: Just asking questions about Kate Middleton

That cover instantly sprang to mind when, earlier today, the current Princess of Wales announced that she has cancer. In a video recorded on Wednesday in Windsor, the former Kate Middleton outlined her diagnosis in order to put an end to weeks of speculation, largely incubated online but amplified and echoed by mainstream media outlets, about the state of her health and marriage.

Kate has effectively been bullied into this statement, because the alternative—a wildfire of gossip and conspiracy theories—was worse. So please, let’s not immediately switch into maudlin recriminations about how this happened. It happened because people felt they had the right to know Kate’s private medical information. The culprits may include three staff members at the London hospital that treated her, who have been accused of accessing her medical records, perhaps driven by the same curiosity that has lit up my WhatsApp inbox for weeks. Everyone hates the tabloid papers, until they become them.

In her statement, Kate said that after her abdominal surgery earlier in the year, which the press was told at the time was “planned”—a word designed to minimize its seriousness—later tests revealed an unspecified cancer. She is now undergoing “preventative chemotherapy,” but has not revealed the progression of the disease, or her exact prognosis. “I am well,” she said, promising that she is getting stronger every day. “I hope you will understand that as a family, we now need some time, space and privacy while I complete my treatment.”

This news will surely make many people feel bad. The massive online guessing game about the reasons for Kate’s invisibility seems far less fun now. Stephen Colbert’s “spilling the tea” monologue , which declared open season on the princess’s marriage, should probably be quietly interred somewhere. The sad simplicity of today’s statement, filmed on a bench with Kate in casual jeans and a striped sweater, certainly gave me pause. She mentioned the difficulty of having to “process” the news, as well as explaining her condition to her three young children in terms they could understand. The reference to the importance of “having William by my side” was pointed, given how much of the speculation has gleefully dwelt on the possibility that she was leaving him or vice versa.

Read: The eternal scrutiny of Kate Middleton

However, the statement also reveals that the online commentators who suggested that the royal household was keeping something from the public weren’t entirely wrong. Kate’s condition was described as noncancerous when her break from public life was announced in late January . The updated diagnosis appears to have been delivered in February, around the time her husband, Prince William, abruptly pulled out of speaking at a memorial service for the former king of Greece. Today’s statement represents a failure of Kensington Palace to control the narrative: first, by publishing a photograph of Kate and her children that was so obviously edited that photo agencies retracted it, and second, by giving its implicit permission for the publication of a grainy video of the couple shopping in Windsor over the weekend. Neither of those decisions quenched the inferno raging online—in fact, they fed it.

Some will say that Kate has finally done what she should have done much earlier: directly address the rumors in an official video, rather than drip-feed images that raised more questions than they answered. King Charles III has taken a different approach to his own (also unspecified) cancer, allowing footage to be filmed of him working from home. But then again, Kate has cancer at 42, is having chemo, and has three young children. Do you really have it in you to grade her media strategy and find it wanting?

Ironically, Britain’s tabloid papers have shown remarkable restraint; as I wrote earlier this month , they declined to publish the first paparazzi pictures of Kate taken after her withdrawal from public life. They have weighted their decisions toward respect and dignity—more so than the Meghan stans, royal tea-spillers, and KateGate theorists, who have generated such an unstoppable wave of interest in this story that its final destination was a woman with cancer being forced to reveal her diagnosis. If you ever wanted proof that the “mainstream media” are less powerful than ever before, this video of Kate Middleton sitting on a bench is it.

International edition
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Standing in their best outfits on the Buckingham Palace balcony

Royal family’s cancer diagnoses echo the ‘annus horribilis’

Traumas and revelations of the past 12 months bring to mind the late queen’s speech from 1992

Princess of Wales receiving chemotherapy
Live reactions: Princess of Wales’s diagnosis

When the late queen stood up to give a speech marking 40 years on the throne, in November 1992, she conceded to the assembled dignitaries, and the watching nation, that her family had had an “annus horribilis”.

The phrase came to be remembered as an acknowledgment that even the staunchly dutiful monarch, who rarely betrayed emotion, had felt the cumulative effects of a series of blows.

Yet the past 12 months have surely been marked out as ranking among the most traumatic for the royal family in living memory.

In 1992, the revelations included the release of salacious details about the troubled private lives of Diana and Charles, the Prince and Princess of Wales; the separation of the queen’s son Prince Andrew , and the divorce of the queen’s daughter, Princess Anne; and the fire that had raged through Windsor Castle.

The queen’s unusually frank admission was followed by a yet more tumultuous period: five years later, Diana died in a car crash, casting a deep shadow over the lives of Prince William and his brother, Prince Harry.

Recent months have brought a furore about the manipulation of a picture of Catherine with her children, which set social media aflame with outlandish conspiracy theories after weeks of speculation about the much-loved princess’s health.

Catherine’s admission to hospital was announced in January, on the same day as King Charles III’s own diagnosis with an unspecified cancer.

The lack of detail about either’s condition, and the royal family’s silence during the ensuing weeks and then months, fed a sense that the public had not been told the whole story.

Friday’s statement addresses the legitimate concerns about transparency head on, explaining that her condition was initially believed not to be cancerous, and that she and Prince William wanted time to explain the news to their children.

Catherine’s diagnosis, and the king’s, came less than a year after the lavish ceremony at Westminster Abbey in which Charles III was anointed, at the age of 74, by the archbishop of Canterbury, and which the family may have hoped would usher in a new era of stability.

A few months earlier, Charles had led mourners at his mother’s funeral, after hundreds of thousands of members of the public queued through the night and around the block to pay homage to her coffin, amid an outpouring of grief.

Family tensions and troubles were evident even at the time of the funeral. Prince Andrew did not wear military uniform as he walked behind his mother’s coffin, after having been stripped of his royal duties in the wake of claims of sexual abuse made in a US court case, which the prince has always denied.

Harry returned for the funeral of his beloved grandmother; but his presence only served to underline his semi-detached status.

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Just a few months later, in January, he had published a brutally revealing memoir, Spare, which included allegations that he and his brother had once come to blows, as well as less-than-edifying details about losing his virginity.

Harry has also continued to fight a series of very public court cases against the British press, which serve to remind the public of his fraught status. He has also been battling the government in court – unsuccessfully – over whether the taxpayer should foot the bill for his personal security when he visits the UK.

King Charles’s brother, Prince Andrew, continues to be an ongoing source of humiliation, with a forthcoming Netflix drama set to rehash the devastating Emily Maitlis interview in which he was questioned about his friendship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

And Charles had barely had time to establish himself as reigning monarch, the post he had waited his life to occupy, before his own diagnosis forced him to reduce his public duties.

For William and Catherine, however, all these tribulations, which have chipped away at the monarchy’s air of unflappable majesty, are likely to pale into insignificance alongside the daunting family drama they now face, in the glare of the public eye.

Catherine, Princess of Wales
King Charles III
Prince William
Prince Andrew

More on this story

Conspiracy theories tagged #kategate grow despite Kensington Palace video

Speculation about Princess of Wales was worst I’ve seen, says former adviser

Princess of Wales’ diagnosis: cancers in young are rising, but so are survival rates

I had cancer when my children were young. This is what Kate should know

Apologies for Kategate – but will the spirit of restraint on social media last?

On a garden bench, amid a sea of daffodils: how Kate dropped her bombshell news

Britain’s slimmed-down monarchy has been left vulnerable in wake of cancer diagnoses

Burden falls on Prince William to steer monarchy through next few months

‘Hardest conversation’: how to tell children about a cancer diagnosis

Cancer charities praise ‘brave’ Princess of Wales for speaking about her diagnosis

The British Royal Family

The british royal family - essay example.

Subject: English
Type: Essay
Level: High School
Pages: 5 (1250 words)
Downloads: 2
Author: domenick17

Extract of sample "The British Royal Family"

The Queen Elizabeth II alone is the patron of 600 charity organizations. Many members of the Royal Family are engaged in official relations with Force Units. The Queen promotes national unity and support overseas economic and diplomatic ties. Introduction: The grandeur of the British Royal Family continues to fascinate people around the world. Regardless of the fact that the Royal Family is a burden on the national treasury, as British citizens have to pay an exorbitant cost for their maintenance, no one in England has the power to abolish the British Crown.

Such is the power and the influence of the Royal Family. One of the primary reasons why no one has the authority to overthrow the monarchy is the fact that the British system has evolved in such a way that its sovereign authority flows through the Royal Family. The members of the British Royal Family are close relatives of the United Kingdom’s monarch. The Queen and the other members of the British Royal Family conduct their activities in strict accordance with the British Law. In overseas British territories, Governors, Commissioners and Administrators, represent the Queen and the other members of the British Royal family.

The Queen is the Head of the association of 53 independent countries known as the Commonwealth. Moreover, 15 Commonwealth Realms have the Queen as the Head of State. (PERKIN, L.1992). Role and Effectiveness of the Royal Family: The picture perfect Royal Family displays an immaculate attitude which is vital for earning respect from the Britain citizens and this is the very reason why The Queen and her family members exhibit a royalty behavior. It is absolutely essential to behave aristocratically in an effort to earn national and international respect.

The effectiveness of the Royal Family is mirrored by the fact that if the Royal members bring shame to themselves, then inevitably the respect for Britain and its citizens would diminish worldwide. Through out the British history, the monarch has been represented by the Royal Family members in many ways including as viceroys. In modern England, the British Royal Family performs ceremonial and social duties both inside and outside England. (RABLEY, S.1990). Apart from these duties, the Royal Family has no substantial role in the constitutional matters of England.

The primary objective of the Royal Family members is to support The Queen in carrying out numerous duties for the State and attending important charitable and public services. Over the years, the impeccable and influential attitude of The Queen has played an important role in strengthening national unity. Moreover, The Queen together with the members of her family performs essential roles for national stability of Britain. The Queen’s children and their spouses are responsible to undertake official duties.

On the other hand, the younger members of The Queen’s family are not burdened with the responsibilities of performing official duties but are trained to represent the Royal Family on official events, State events and important commemorations. (Macmillan 1991). According to the official list in the Court Circular, the Monarch and other Commonwealth Realms conduct more than 2000 official events each year, both in the UK and around the world. The Queen is regarded as the Head of the State and her presence is vital in Royal events and ceremonies both on national and international levels.

Occasions such as the State Opening of Parliament and Garter

Royal Family
uneasy lies the head that wears the crown
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The British royal family learns that if you don’t fill an information vacuum, someone else will

The Associated Press

March 27, 2024, 10:46 AM

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NEW YORK (AP) — A media frenzy was born on Feb. 27, when the hashtag #WhereIsKate exploded online with speculation about the whereabouts of Britain’s Princess of Wales. It opened a rabbit hole of amateur detective work, memes, bizarre theories and jokes — mixed with genuine concern about Kate’s health — into which thousands of people descended until her announcement last week that she was recovering from cancer.

The episode offered the royal family — and everyone else — a lesson in the modern world of online media: If your silence leaves an information vacuum, others will rush to fill it. And the results may be messy.

“The royal family’s mantra is never complain, never explain,” said Ellie Hall, a journalist who specializes in covering Britain’s king and his court. “That really doesn’t work in a digital age. It doesn’t take much to get the crazy things going.”

It was, in part, entertainment for some people with too much time on their hands. Except it involved real people with real lives — and, it turns out, real medical challenges.

ANATOMY OF AN INFORMATION VACUUM

On Jan. 17, Kensington Palace announced that Kate was in the hospital recovering from a planned abdominal surgery and would not be doing any public events until after Easter. There was relatively little online chatter, or official updates, until it was announced on Feb. 27 that her husband, Prince William, would not be attending his godfather’s memorial service due to a “personal matter.”

That’s when the theorizing really began, noted Ryan Broderick, who writes the Garbage Day newsletter about the online environment.

Where was Kate? Was she seriously ill — in a coma, perhaps? Did she travel abroad to undergo plastic surgery? Had she been replaced by a body double? Was there trouble in her marriage? Did she leave William? Had she been abused? Unsubstantiated rumors made it all the way to American talk show host Stephen Colbert. Memes appeared that included putting Kate’s picture on the face of an actress in “Gone Girl,” a 2014 film about a missing wife.

After two decades in which people have uploaded their lives to a system of platforms run by algorithms that make money off our worst impulses, “we have wondered what the world might look like when we crossed the threshold into a fully online world,” Broderick wrote on Garbage Day. “Well, we did. We crossed it.”

“Conspiracy is the Internet’s favorite sport,” Sarah Frier, author of “No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram,” posted on X, formerly Twitter. “It starts here and becomes mainstream. At one point last week, MOST of the content on my (X) feed was about her. None of it was right. This is just what people do for fun and followers now.”

Then came the grand, unforced error — the palace releasing a photo on March 10 of Kate and her children that it later admitted had been digitally manipulated , without leaving clear exactly what was done.

Even before that, a ham-fisted public relations strategy by the royal family’s handlers had lost control of the narrative, said Peter Mancusi, a journalism professor at Northeastern University and a lawyer with his own business in crisis counseling.

Providing some proof of life, some morsels of information — even a staged shot of Kate waving from a balcony — would have filled the vacuum, he said. Mancusi contrasted the strategy with that surrounding King Charles , where it was quickly announced around the same time that he was fighting cancer. It has never been made clear exactly what kind of cancer the king has, but people are inclined to grant some degree of privacy with that diagnosis, Mancusi said.

Mancusi frequently deals with clients who resist releasing damaging or uncomfortable information that usually winds up getting out anyway. Best to be pro-active or, as Hall said, “feed the beast.”

“It’s just human nature, and it’s the nature of a lot of companies when bad news hits, to go into a defensive crouch,” Mancusi said. “But hope isn’t a strategy anymore.”

CLEAR AND VERIFIABLE INFORMATION CAN HELP MATTERS

Despite the temptation to ignore rumors and conspiracy theories, it’s best to respond quickly with clear and verifiable information, said Daniel Allington, a social scientist at King’s College in London who studies disinformation. “Once people start speculating that you are lying to them,” Allington said, “it’s very hard to get them back on board.”

In an article published on vulture.com 12 days before Kate announced she had cancer, author Kathryn VanArendonk seemed to anticipate that truth in a discussion about how the monarchy is not built for the modern information era.

“Catherine may be going through some private experiences she does not want to share widely,” she wrote, “and the internet has broken everyone’s ability to assess what’s a supervillain-level coverup and what’s more likely to be something sad and mundane.”

Cancer is something too many people can relate to. They understand how hard it is to speak those words to loved ones, much less the entire world. Kate’s video was a candid, emotional and effective way of sharing very personal information, said Matthew Hitzik, a veteran in crisis communications from New York.

It didn’t end wild online speculation, though. Almost immediately, suggestions popped up that the speech was generated by artificial intelligence or, in an unholy alliance of conspiracy theories, that her cancer was caused by the COVID-19 vaccine.

But that was nonsense, and felt churlish. A corner had been turned. The Sun in London now runs daily stories with “Brave Kate” in the headline. Trolls “should hang their heads in shame,” the newspaper editorialized. The Atlantic magazine headlined : “I Hope You All Feel Terrible Now.”

What shouldn’t be lost, however, is how preventable it all was.

“You cannot blame British newspapers for the miseries heaped on the Prince and Princess of Wales,” columnist Hugo Rifkind wrote in The Times of London. “Certainly we didn’t help, if only because a princess releasing doctored photographs to the public, for reasons at that point unclear, is an objectively grabby and fascinating story. But the conspiracy theories? The juggernauts of dirty speculation? You could argue, I suppose, that papers should have simply pretended none of this was happening.

“But it was, and it wasn’t driven by us,” he wrote. “It was driven by you.”

#WhereIsKate? Now we know.

Associated Press correspondents Sylvia Hui and Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report. David Bauder writes about media for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder

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Britain's royal family should follow the lead of major CEOs when it comes to transparency, says expert

Kate Middleton's photo editing saga has sparked a debate about the royal family's transparency.
The royals are exempt from UK freedom of information laws, keeping personal details undisclosed.
Commentators suggest the monarchy should behave more like a business.

Kate Middleton's photo editing scandal has ignited a wider conversation about the royal family and whether it should be held to the same standard of openness as CEOs.

The royal household is exempt from freedom of information laws in the UK since it isn't a public authority. This means details about the family's health, private assets, and wills are not usually disclosed to the public.

But there's no denying that the work of the royal family directly affects the UK economy. One recent estimate by Brand Finance suggested they could make £958 million during the 2023-24 financial year.

Tourism is a major factor. Windsor Castle and Frogmore House welcomed just under 1.1 million visitors during the 2022-23 financial year, according to data gathering platform Statista . And Reuters reported that tens of thousands of people visited London for the king's coronation in May.

"In some senses, the latest uproar underscores the value of the royal brand, which helps lure millions of tourists to Britain every year," George Hay, an associate editor at Reuters , wrote on Wednesday.

Hay suggested that the monarchy should follow the lead of major companies that have been transparent when a CEO becomes unwell.

One recent example is C.S. Venkatakrishnan, group chief executive of Barclays, who was diagnosed with non-hodgkin lymphoma in November 2022. The bank promptly released a statement confirming the details of his condition, how it would affect his daily routine, and a subsequent update on his recovery.

In 2020, JP Morgan Chase informed staff when CEO Jamie Dimon was admitted to the hospital for emergency heart surgery, CNBC reported at the time.

António Horta-Osório, former group chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, took a temporary leave from his position in 2011 due to illness, the bank said at the time . Speaking to BBC News in 2020, Horta-Osório said he had been dealing with poor mental health and exhaustion.

"The monarchy may not be a company, but maybe it should think more like one," Hay said.

Shrouded in secrecy

Kate spent more than two months away from the public eye after receiving planned abdominal surgery in January. While Kensington Palace was clear that it wouldn't provide a "running commentary" on the princess' well-being, that didn't stop conspiracy theories on her whereabouts.

The monarchy should treat the public like its stakeholders

The strategy of transparency is essential for a company's survival. When a business' stakeholders aren't happy, it usually fails. And the same goes for monarchies.

There have been calls in recent years for the UK to follow the lead of Greece and Bulgaria, which abolished their respective monarchies after public referendums. Recent polls, including a poll commissioned by YouGov and Republic, the UK's anti-monarchy group, suggest that support for the monarchy is lower among young people.

In the YouGov and Republic poll , half of the British adults between the ages of 18 and 24 said they would prefer an elected head of state to a monarch.

Republic has launched a campaign to end royal secrecy, focusing on the Freedom of Information Act. Anyone in the UK can request information from publicly-owned companies and government departments, but not the monarchy since it isn't a business or a branch of government.

The group's CEO, Graham Smith, told Business Insider that Kate's lengthy absence and subsequent photo scandal "throws a spotlight on the culture of secrecy" within the royal institution.

"It highlighted what a lot of people have known. This is not an institution that is known for its openness and honesty," he said.

"They will always maintain they have the right to keep health issues private," Jack Royston, a royal commentator, told BI.

"However, the big issue here for them is that their secrecy has made the situation so much worse and it's now at a point where the doctored photo scandal has destroyed Kensington Palace's reputation as a trusted source," he said.

"The palace needs to realize that principles that they hold dear often go completely over the heads of ordinary people," Royston said.

He added that the palace's allies in government and the freedom of information exemption "cannot save them if the public mood turns against them."

Buckingham Palace declined to comment. Kensington Palace did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Watch: How much does the British royal family cost?

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World News | The British royal family learns that if you…

World News | The British royal family learns that if you don’t fill an information vacuum, someone else will

A montage of the front pages of some of Britain’s Sunday newspapers pictured in London, Sunday, March 24, 2024. Support has poured in from around the world for Kate, the Princess of Wales, after she revealed in a candid video message that she is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer following major abdominal surgery. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Newspaper front-pages are seen at a newsagent in London, Saturday, March 23, 2024. Britain’s Kate, Princess of Wales’s revelation she is undergoing treatment for cancer has sparked an outpouring of support and well wishes from around the world. (AP Photo/David Cliff)

FILE – Britain’s Prince William and Kate, Princess of Wales leave after they paid their respects to Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Hall for the Lying-in State, in London, Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti, File)

Britain’s Kate, Duchess of Cambridge stands on centre court during the trophy presentation after Serbia’s Novak Djokovic defeated Switzerland’s Roger Federer during the men’s singles final match of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Sunday, July 14, 2019. (Laurence Griffiths/Pool Photo via AP, File)

Britain’s Kate, Duchess of Cambridge attends a reception for parents of users of a Centre for Early Childhood, on the day of the launch of the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood at Kensington Palace in London, Friday, June 18, 2021. (Tolga Akmen/Pool Photo via AP, File)

Britain’s Prince William, right, and his wife Kate, left, the Duchess of Cambridge, wave to the crowd. Wednesday, April 23, 2014, in Adelaide, Australia. (AP Photo/David Mariuz, File)

NEW YORK — A media frenzy was born on Feb. 27, when the hashtag #WhereIsKate exploded online with speculation about the whereabouts of Britain’s Princess of Wales. It opened a rabbit hole of amateur detective work, memes, bizarre theories and jokes — mixed with genuine concern about Kate’s health — into which thousands of people descended until her announcement last week that she was recovering from cancer.

It was, in part, entertainment for some people with too much time on their hands. Except it involved real people with real lives — and, it turns out, real medical challenges.

That’s when the theorizing really began, noted Ryan Broderick, who writes the Garbage Day newsletter about the online environment.

Providing some proof of life, some morsels of information — even a staged shot of Kate waving from a balcony — would have filled the vacuum, he said. Mancusi contrasted the strategy with that surrounding King Charles, where it was quickly announced around the same time that he was fighting cancer. It has never been made clear exactly what kind of cancer the king has, but people are inclined to grant some degree of privacy with that diagnosis, Mancusi said.

“It’s just human nature, and it’s the nature of a lot of companies when bad news hits, to go into a defensive crouch,” Mancusi said. “But hope isn’t a strategy anymore.”

What shouldn’t be lost, however, is how preventable it all was.

“But it was, and it wasn’t driven by us,” he wrote. “It was driven by you.”

#WhereIsKate? Now we know.

Associated Press correspondents Sylvia Hui and Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.

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The British royal family learns that if you don’t fill an information vacuum, someone else will

ANATOMY OF AN INFORMATION VACUUM

CLEAR AND VERIFIABLE INFORMATION CAN HELP MATTERS

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Watch: How much does the British royal family cost?

World News | The British royal family learns that if you…

World News | The British royal family learns that if you don’t fill an information vacuum, someone else will

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