Wedding says much about our fascination with royalty

The monarchy sidesteps the awkwardness of patriotism and allows us to feel a rare British pride What memory will live on? For those who lined the Mall, painting their faces red, white and blue, or who just stayed home watching on television — what will they remember? The kiss on the balcony will be the image replayed in perpetuity, just as it was when William’s mother and father married 30 years ago — the difference being that this time they looked like a couple genuinely in love. Others will talk about the pageantry, a show no one lays on quite like the British. It’s a fair bet that almost no one will remember the words. Even the eyes of the wedding couple wandered during the spoken bits. Yet when the Dean of Westminster invoked a “mystical union”, he surely got close to the essence both of the royal wedding and of something much larger. The literal reference was to the bond between Christ and the church, but he could just as easily have been describing the “mystical union” that exists, and was reinforced in spectacular style, between Britain and the royal family. For what we witnessed was the mysterious alchemy that somehow converts love of country into affection for the House of Windsor. The emblem of it was the banner waved by many in the crowds, the same one that has been on display in shop windows throughout the land: a union flag, with a portrait of William and Kate at its centre. The scale of the crowds, like the fervour of the broadcasters, was a reminder of just how rare such displays are in Britain. We have no national day, no Fourth of July. World Cup victories are rarer than coronations and, besides, sporting events are complicated: the teams often represent England or Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland alone rather than Britain. As for the union flag, that too can be fraught – residually associated with a nasty strain of nationalism rather than simple, sentimental patriotism. Royal occasions sidestep all these difficulties. They are all-encompassingly British – note the Scottish titles handed to William and Kate, as well as the one that makes the prince sound like a pub: the Duke of Cambridge. But they are also unthreatening, the union flag rendered utterly benign once there’s a smiling young couple in the middle of it. This, then, is how Britain does patriotism. Too ironic and embarrassed to make the “Is this a great country or what?” declarations of the Americans, we channel our feelings through the outlet of a single family, praising them rather than ourselves. Note our national anthem. Not a song about us at all, it is entirely focused on them. We don’t ask God to save Britain – but to save the Queen. How else to explain the hunger of those crowds, camping for several nights, just to get a glimpse of the bride in her dress? It’s nothing Kate Middleton herself has done: she looked lovely and seems perfectly decent, but she would be the first to admit that she has hardly notched up some great human achievement. The people who cheered themselves hoarse love her the way football fans love a new signing to the team – because she has joined the select group of people who embody the entity to which they feel they belong. Viewed this way, as our chief vehicle for national pride, royalty has several advantages. For one thing, a family story has an emotional resonance few abstract ideas can match. And the Windsors have proved to be a compelling story. Yesterday’s event had an extra poignancy for those who remembered William’s last major appearance at Westminster Abbey, as a 15-year-old boy come to bury his mother. Indeed, the tension – and peril for the royal family – of that dizzy week in 1997 seemed long ago. Monarchists will have noted the warm cheers that greeted Charles and Camilla’s limousine as it approached the abbey – unimaginable in the heat of Diana week – and smiled with satisfaction. The threat of those days, when the institution itself seemed fragile, has receded. The wound has closed over. A family can also promise what might elude other national institutions: a permanent connection to the past and the possibility of a future. Take that balcony appearance. At the edges were the Queen and Prince Philip, who stood in that same spot before similar crowds after their own wedding in 1947. Continuity with the national past is built-in. At the centre, though, was Kate Middleton — who an hour earlier had heard the most senior cleric in the land pray for her to bear children. She brings fresh blood into the royal family, offering the prospect of a new generation and a secure succession. For William, this may have been a wedding. For the institution of monarchy, it was a blood transfusion. Above all, royalty is able to be ruthlessly selective about what it does – and does not – represent. Outside party politics, it need not stand for any of the difficult decisions associated with governments, past or present. It can blame those on the politicians. But it can co-opt the good bits without shame. Striking yesterday was the flypast by the Battle of Britain memorial flight: the Lancaster bomber and Spitfires overhead recalling Britain’s “finest hour”, our solitary defiance of the Nazis in 1940. That story now has the status of a creation myth in Britain and the royal family can put themselves at its centre. There are drawbacks to this practice of ours, making a single dynasty the symbol of our nationhood. It can end up in a curious disdain for democracy. The exclusion of two past prime ministers – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – from the abbey was not just an insult to them or to Labour. Those men are part of our nation’s history now; Blair was elected by the British people three times. And yet, in royal terms, that counts for nothing. Our royal habit also makes us an object of fascination abroad, but of a variety we might not relish. We are seen as the keepers of a tradition last seen in storybooks. One US TV network, seeking to discover what Kate Middleton’s life would be like as a princess, went to Disneyland to interview Snow White and Cinderella. Republicans in Britain have long made their case in the language of political institutions, explaining why an elected head of state would be a better system. They’ve couched the argument as if abolishing the monarchy were like a move to AV. It’s nothing of the sort. What we saw yesterday is proof that a shift away from royalty would require an entirely new form of British patriotism – for the two are utterly bound together, hand in hand, like a prince and his bride at a gorgeous wedding. Royal wedding Monarchy Jonathan Freedland guardian.co.uk

Posted by on April 30, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.