Path for Royals No Longer Tried, True

To employ a James Bond martini metaphor, the people of Britain have been stirred--and the House of Windsor has been shaken.

Now that Diana, princess of Wales, has been buried on an island in a lake comes the question that all of last week’s lesser questions of precedent and protocol had been leading up to: What should the future monarchy be like or does it even have a future?

From the flower-bearing millions, the monarchy learned, belatedly and again, that “us” and “them” are dangerous pronouns to be on the wrong side of.

In large measure because of those millions, the princess of Wales in death may accomplish what she found herself thwarted at in life: changing the royal rules at unprecedented speed.

Already there are indications that the Diana divide was not only between people and palace but between royal generations--and that Charles, the prince of Wales, may come out of it smelling like a Tudor rose for his part in making precedent bend to the moment.

Until last week, it was an even bet that the heir to the throne would step out of the succession, marry his first love and grow organic vegetables. But through the standard process of oblique leaks, it began to emerge that Charles had pushed for the funeral concessions and innovations, backed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Britain’s Channel 4, quoting a “senior official close to court circles,” said it was Queen Elizabeth II who insisted that because Diana was no longer a member of the royal family, her body “was on no account to be brought to any of the royal palaces” but was to be sent to a private mortuary for a private funeral.

Her ally was her private secretary and Diana’s brother-in-law, Robert Fellowes, married to Diana’s sister Jane and liaison to the Spencer family, which also supported a private funeral.

Charles was airborne to London from Paris, London’s Sunday Times reported, negotiating by air phone to be allowed to bring Diana’s body to St. James’s Palace. At one point, Channel 4 reported, “Charles had a blazing row with Sir Robert Fellowes in which Sir Robert was told to ‘impale himself on his own flagstaff.’ ”

The palace has called that story “nonsensical speculation.”

Charles the Modern

Until Diana’s arrival on the scene, Charles was looked to as the agent of change, arguing for a modern monarchy, musing over the worth of other religions, setting up his Prince’s Trust for Britain’s young, poor and hopeless.

It was he who had reached across 50 years of post-abdication bitterness when he visited the outcast duchess of Windsor, calling her “Aunt Wallis.” Even her death occasioned criticism for “callous” treatment at the hands of the monarch--and Britain had once hated her as intensely as it loved Diana.

Whatever the dissonance of their personal lives, Charles and Diana had much of their work in common--in particular, the young and disadvantaged--and on the day in 1996 that both a marriage and a royal team were dissolved by divorce, they sat together on a sofa at Kensington Palace and wept for both a marriage and a team that had failed.

Charles was savaged by talk-show callers for walking in his ex-wife’s funeral procession in a blue suit instead of a black one--until it was learned that he wore it because Diana liked him in it.

The royals last week took hesitant advantage of Blair’s media savvy and took up the visual language of the modern media, sending palace spokesmen out in person to speak to cameras and engaging in awkward viewing of tribute flowers outside the Scottish castle of Balmoral and at London’s Kensington Palace, Diana’s residence. And, finally,there was the queen’s speech to the nation the day before the funeral.

Blair’s media guru was invited to the daily planning meetings, it was reported, and a troika of Charles, Blair and the Spencer family had approval over each decision.

And hours after the funeral, during which Charles Spencer had eulogized his sister as someone who “needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic,” Buckingham Palace even raised the possibility of restoring to Diana the title she had lost with her divorce: “her royal highness.” The Spencer family rejected the offer, a palace spokesman said Monday.

Some court observers believe last week’s close call gives Charles more leverage to persuade the institution to move into the 21st century with the rest of the nation. As he remarked years ago, “Something as curious as the monarchy won’t survive unless you take account of people’s attitudes.”

Without direct political or military power, the monarchy not only needs to do but to be seen to do. And that means dealing with the press, in what has been the unwinnable struggle of the modern monarchy: How much press is enough, how much is too much, and how, like Dr. Frankenstein, can the royals keep the monster they had a hand in creating from destroying them?

The media courtship, sometimes a waltz and sometimes slam-dancing, is trickier than it seems. Diana’s brother’s savaging of the press was something the royal family could never do itself, but it stands to benefit from at least temporary institutional remorse.

Charles stepped into this opportunity that Diana’s brother created, and his plea that the press leave his motherless sons alone elicited pledges of cooperation Monday from editors who have “taken the pledge” not to use paparazzi grab-shots of the boys.

One enduring principle of monarchy is that no one is irreplaceable; the king is dead, long live the king. Diana has now been characterized as the irreplaceable princess, whose touch-and-hug style ironically revived a kind of atavistic magic that the monarchy had worked to discard, such as the ancient belief that the British sovereign’s touch could cure scrofula.

Once the couple divorced, speculation had only grown about whether there will ever be a King Charles III. His stepping aside would make the beloved Diana’s son the heir apparent--but Charles the Parent also knows it would, on the queen’s death, thrust his young son into lifelong harness that even the queen, at a self-disciplined 25 years of age, did not want so soon.

And there is another consideration: that Charles, having failed at marriage, will more likely cling to fulfilling the only other duty demanded of him in life, to become king.

Power of the Courtiers

Royal biographer James Pope-Hennessy declared that “it is the courtiers who make royalty frightened and frightening.” Many of those who surround the monarch come from families whose service to the crown, like the monarchy itself, is practically hereditary, and thus increasingly different in style from the new Britain of meritocracy and flattened class structure.

The lord chamberlain is the son of the closest friend of the late Queen Mary, the current queen’s grandmother. His brother is married to the queen’s favorite cousin. Fellowes is married to Jane. You get the idea.

The fact that the public felt its muscle, and Diana’s funeral route was lengthened and the Union Jack flew at half-staff over Buckingham Palace might go down hard with courtiers particularly, believes Majesty magazine’s editor, Ingrid Seward, inclining them to resist further change and precipitating clashes within the royal circle over what new direction to take and how far down that road to go.

What did the queen’s speech bode for them, the parts about “lessons to be drawn from Diana’s death” and about the queen “sharing your determination to cherish her memory”? Perhaps heads will roll, metaphorically, and a shuffle in the household staff is in the offing--much the way a president fires his chief of staff when things go awry.

Diana’s paradoxical legacy to her ex-in-laws is that she, who spoke frankly of her struggles with bulimia--a princess of Wales admitting she stuck her finger down her throat to make herself vomit--was praised and loved for her frailties and flaws, her “vulnerability,” as the archbishop of Canterbury put it during Saturday’s funeral service. This, after centuries of royal men and women having strived to achieve regality by heroic qualities of nobility, or at least by following duty and tradition.

‘I’m OK, You’re OK’

British writer Rebecca West once echoed decades of comment about the royal family’s value as “magnified images of ourselves . . . but better, ourselves behaving well.”

To comprehend the magnitude of Diana’s contrast to that behavior in the “I’m OK, you’re OK” age, imagine the queen’s father, King George VI, who stuttered so badly he sometimes had to record his Christmas radio speech a few words at a time and who worked for years to master the problem--imagine him instead talking publicly about the problem, serving as patron of therapy programs and taking his family to stuttering support groups.

Anti-monarchist sentiments have historically been quelled by royal tragedy, as in 1870, when Queen Victoria’s heir almost died of the same typhoid that killed his father. Yet this royal tragedy may revive those sentiments.

If the monarch is not, as the Anglo-American scholar Allan A. Michie wrote, “the most British Briton of them all,” then what is the point of having one?

In London now, over a business lunch about Malaysian capital investments in a rather posh London restaurant, a man with an Oxbridge accent and a Savile Row suit suddenly bursts out, “Cold bloody blocks of ice!” and means the royal family, not his drink. Well, if this were American political polling, we would be asking, have the royals lost part of their core constituency?

And although one proposal the Blair government floated in its election campaign was to allow only life peers and not hereditary peers--those who inherit their titles, like Diana’s brother--to vote in the already marginal House of Lords, it has given no sign at all of wanting to do away with the monarchy.

The royal family, which has changed too glacially for the public’s liking, has been moving at Mach 2 speed by its own standards.

The old tradition of being presented at court was abolished under the current queen. And the rule that divorced people could not be received at court was also ended, or President Reagan would not have been allowed to dine on the royal yacht.

It was only 60 years ago that Queen Mary, in a gesture that still chills, turned from the deathbed of her husband, George V, and kissed the hand of her new king--her own eldest son, Edward VIII.

But even Queen Mary saw the use of breaking precedent in extraordinary circumstances. Against centuries of tradition that the queen dowager does not attend the coronation of her husband’s heir, she attended her second son’s coronation in 1937 to display solidarity after the abdication.

A Healing Balm

Optimistic royalists will say the aftermath of Diana’s death offers a healing balm. The crown, they will point out, has survived four regicides--one by the king’s wife--two revolutions and an abdication, countless plots and coups and foreign wars, passels of illegitimate children, a schism with the Roman Catholic world.

In stable times, they note, people want change. But in tumultuous ones--in times of war or tragedy--they want stability.

Can the royals survive such fluid expectations? It has been obvious that they no longer lead; can they now even keep up enough to follow?

Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare’s play about King Henry V had the king, on the eve of the great victorious battle of Agincourt, agonizing over the burden of human lives that then rested upon rulers:

And what have kings that

privates have not too,

Save ceremony, save general

ceremony?

And what art thou, thou idol

ceremony?

. . . O ceremony, show me but

thy worth.

* Related photos: B1, B3

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House of Windsor

The House of Windsor took its name following the reign of Queen Victoria and is now headed by Queen Elizabeth II.

The Line of Succession to the Throne

1. Prince Charles, prince of Wales

2. Prince Williams, (elder son of Charles)

3. Prince Henry, (younger son of Charles)

4. Prince Andrew, Duke of York

5. Princess Beatrice, (elder daughter of Andrew)

6. Princess Eugenie, (younger daughter of Andrew)

7. Prince Edward, (yougest son of Elizabeth)

8. Princess Anne, (only daughter of Elizabeth)

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Queen Victoria

1819-1901

Married to Albert, prince of Saxe-Couburg-Gotha

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Edward VII

1841-1910

Married to Alexandra of Denmark

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King George V

1865-1936

Married to Mary of Teck

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King George VI

1895-1952

Married to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon

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Queen Elizabeth II

Born 1926

Married to Philip Mountbatten, duke of Edinburgh

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Princess Margaret

Born 1930

Married Anthony Armstrong-Jones, divorced in 1978

David Viscount Linley

Born 1961

Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones

Born 1964

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Charles, prince of Wales

Born 1948

Married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, divorced in 1996

Prince William of Wales

Born 1982

Prince Henry (Harry of Wales)

Born 1984

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Princess Anne

Born 1950

Married in 1973, divorced in 1992, remarried in 1992

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Andrew duke of York

Born 1960

Married Sarah Ferguson in 1986, divorced in 1996

Princess Beatrice of York

Born 1988

Princess Eugenie of York

Born 1990

Source: The Royal Handbook