Winners by Accident, They Rule by Charm, Not Fiat
The only genuine monarchist of my acquaintance was a flamboyant fellow student at Brown University about 20 years ago. He planned to publish a magazine devoted to the enhancement of royal privilege, and solicited all the reigning monarchs for moral and financial support. He received only one reply--from the Shah of Iran, who sent good wishes but no money.
In this decade’s spurt of royal weddings it is more obvious than ever that the rites of monarchy retain their age-old appeal. There is virtually no public resistance to the regal figures that periodically dominate our newspapers and television screens. (An estimated 50 million Americans got up early Wednesday morning to watch TV coverage of the nuptials of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.) But today’s regents understand something that my reactionary friend never did--that in this century monarchs achieve power by surrendering the desire to govern. Like children and pets, they rule by charm, not fiat.
Visiting Great Britain this summer, I cannot turn a corner without encountering for sale the handsome visages of Elizabeth and Philip, Charles and Diana, and especially newlyweds Andrew and Sarah--on plates, cups, towels, tea cosies, ashtrays, jigsaw puzzles, pendants, whatever surface would hold a dual portrait. One hardly dares to imagine the number of dwellings in Britain and overseas--much of this merchandise is aimed at tourists--in which these faces preside like icons. What do such daily presences mean to the people who buy and gaze on them?
An 18th-Century monarchist, Samuel Johnson, gives us a persuasive answer. Explaining to Boswell the principle of subordination, he said that a civilized society requires some invariable measurement of value, and that the “higher” class must rest its claims on qualities above and beyond the jungle rivalries of the marketplace. Royalty is the supreme of those distinctions of rank and title that “create no jealousy as they are allowed to be accidental.”
Who can doubt this? Members of a royal family are fascinating precisely because they are “accidental” or arbitrary winners in the lottery of life. A civilization ruled by the Wheel of Fortune requires some figures who symbolize a virtual eternity of good luck. These display creatures are cushioned from chance and irreversible loss. Their lives are the fantasy embodiment of what each of us will attain when our ship comes in, when our castle-in-the-air comes down to earth, grand as Windsor. The tendency to make royalty more accessible, more like its subjects, springs from the same respect for serendipity: We wish to be more like these fortunate exceptions whom the media increasingly make more like us.
My monarchist friend, who wore a long cape to class and liked to quote Balzac as authority on the need for kings, claimed that Freud’s theory of the family romance supported his undemocratic views. According to this theory, each of us imagines that through some mischance he or she has been raised in the wrong household, and that his or her real family is far more noble in rank and manner. “This is the myth that makes sense of all other myths,” my friend would say, “including religion,” and then he would sigh, “The Europeans know themselves so much better than we do.”
Lacking the pomp and circumstance of royalty, Americans have always sought surrogate images of glamour and good fortune. The love-hate relations that we carry on with our always less-than-perfect celebrities suggest that we could use a few majestic figures whose dependable, limited, even ornamental lives are a refuge from the wear and tear of routine existence. Restless at doing and making, Americans yearn for the ceremonial state of “being” represented in the popular conception of royalty. This accounts in part for the Gatsby-like longing, and also the resultant dynamism of effort, that characterizes American images of success.
Wealth, power, fame--these cannot finally satisfy us because in America they are so fickle and mutable. Monarchs possess advantages more compelling--the accidents of a unique birth and a unique destiny denied to the more deserving. When the great reputations of our time dwindle, and perhaps disappear, some Prince and Princess of Wales will still beguile the world by their fully justified smiles, their empty and enviable lives.