The Royal Wedding

I found the recent outbreak of irrationality and hysteria around the royal wedding to be extremely disturbing and not a little offensive. Here we are being asked to venerate and to pledge our undying loyalty towards two young people as they perform their matrimonial rites, on the sole basis that the groom was born into a certain family and has managed to keep himself alive and not disgrace himself in too outrageous a fashion over the course of his young life.

I see no other reason to revere this William character, he is in no wise an exceptional human being: at 29 he has achieved nothing outstanding, or even truly worthy of note — at least nothing under his own steam, and that wasn’t the direct result of royal privileges inherited at birth. Prince William is no great warrior, scholar, or statesman; and nor does he seem to possess any special religious or spiritual insights. He has so far failed to display any particularly remarkable personal virtues, nothing that, aside from his royal heritage, would serve to really set him above the common herd. It seems to be enough that he is quietly personable and can competently comport himself in a “regal” manner — that he takes his princely role seriously — for us to regard him as praiseworthy.

The point is that we expect very little from our royalty and demand even less. You see we’re not really supposed to exalt William on the basis of any personal qualities he may posses, but on the quasi-mystical basis of what he represents. His princely authority derives from the fact that he symbolises an institution which stands for Britishness, in the same way the union jack and the mythical figure of Britannia stand for Britain and Britishness — but not in the more straightforward way that, say, a map or a national census survey stands for Britain/Britishness. This institution, the Royal Family, wields no genuine power over the inhabitants of this island – or so we’re told, even if we are all, nominally speaking, its subjects and find ourselves under its dominion: the authority and the role of the royal family is merely symbolic.

All those magical incantations, honorifics, sigils and rituals, all that grand pomp and pageantry we’re meant to fall into some kind of blind ecstasy over — willingly handing over millions of pounds each year to maintain its upkeep and to keep the royals living lives of unimaginable luxury — is there to ensue some kind of psychic continuity with the past; to keep us in touch with our nation’s ancient cultural heritage — which we’re told, ultimately serves to bind us all together as a nation in some ineffable sense (the other royalist retort is of course that they bring in millions of pounds in tourism but that argument is easily defeated). It’s all rather vague of course, and works along the lines of a religion. I’d have thought by now we’d kind of grown out of that.

Our reverence and adoration helps to transmute base, muddy, inbred Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsor DNA into irresistible regal glory and splendour — and increasingly it’s the only thing. Surely, the more banal these people get with each passing generation and the farther they are from anything remotely approaching charisma and personal magnetism, the harder to is to summon up any vestige of desire to genuflect before them.

Indeed what offended me more than anything: over and above the millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money lavished on this absurd spectacle at a time of enforced austerity for the rest of the country; more than the heavy handed and indiscriminate crackdown, immediately before the wedding, on any kind of organised dissent or protest; and indeed more than the fundamental disconnect between our intuitive notion of the concepts of freedom and democracy, and the fact of living under a monarchical system of government, essentially a throwback from the days of feudalism: yeah all that stuff bothered me a lot, but what offended me most during the actual ceremony itself was what a pair of utter mediocrities the pair of them actually were!

It just felt like the final insult to me. OK, Kate carried herself well enough on the day, and had sufficient charm and pose to be able to engage her audience of hundreds of millions, but come on, she was clearly upstaged, quite early on in the proceedings, by her sister’s ass. I was expecting more from our future queen: I wanted her to project such an aura of stately radiance as to genuinely silence all the doubts and scepticism in my head, for however long the ceremony lasted, I wanted for her to be the very essence of regal feminine grace.

And I expected even more of William: I thought that for once he might truly live up to the title of Prince, and tower over the rest of us in his imperial confidence and the degree of his self assertion. That’s what I expected as the price for my devotion and for accepting, even if it was just for the length of the ceremony, that these two were somehow superior beings. You see I’m an old romantic: I kind of wanted to believe in it all. But, no, it was all just so pedestrian. And it convinced me that the magic had all but gone in this particular relationship.

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