I direct your attention to this marvelous essay in the current New York Review of Books by your friend and mine, our own Jonathan Freedland, on a certain upcoming wedding, which article appears under one of the finest headlines I've encountered recently, "The Windsor Knot."
Freedland concludes by musing, quite interestingly to me, that the monarchy is basically fine as long as Elizabeth stays around (which, he notes given her mother's track record, may yet be a while), for one simple reason: she is a living link to Britain's finest hour:
Pupils in UK schools now study the Third Reich more intensely than they learn about the Tudors. History before 1939, with all its imperial complications, is glimpsed only vaguely. Britain alone, Churchill, 1940, the Blitz?this is the tale of unalloyed heroism that the country likes to tell and retell to itself. And as long as Elizabeth sits on the throne, Britons remain tied to those events directly.
This is the bedrock on which the current monarchy stands. While the Queen lives, no republican will be able to shake it. After she is gone, she will leave a gap that her son, her grandson, and his new wife?no matter how charming?will have to struggle to fill.
So your long and glorious history, except that spot of bother you ran into in the form of that crushing military spanking you absorbed in the 1780s, is so elided in your schools?
But here's the part that was even more interesting to moi:
As Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of Wales, second in line to the English throne, and his girlfriend since student days, Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, are heralded into Westminster Abbey on April 29 by a Ruritanian phalanx of footmen and flunkies in gilt-edged robes, watched by a bejeweled congregation of aristocratic cousins including several crowned heads of Europe, their domestic television audience will include a good many who will have just received redundancy notices, sharply reduced welfare payments, or notification of the removal of much-cherished social services. April is the start of the financial year, when many of the Conservative-led government's most stringent deficit-cutting measures begin to bite.
Seems to me a good point. Should they, as we Yanks say, tuck it in a little? Has there been broad debate about this? I don't really follow these things. I always have to stop for a moment and ask myself whether the groom's name is William or maybe Andrew or indeed perhaps something else. I did read one profile of Kate, in Vanity Fair, which (perhaps unfairly) suggested that her chief expertise is shopping. Not that my opinion matters, but I'd be slightly impressed if they ratcheted down the pomp a bit under the circumstances.
Source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/commentisfree/rss/~3/1pjkpiqsj0c/royal-wedding
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