Diana and the Historic difficulties of being Royal and Sane

 I finished the biography of Diana, princess of Wales,  (The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown) which was perhaps more than I really wanted to know. The course of true love never ran smooth, I guess. I was looking through my atlas of Paris trying to figure out where the Pont de l'Alma where the fateful accident took place.

 Anyway the ghoulish details are as follows:  the chauffeur was taking anti-depressants and was drunk and driving too fast.  Diana suffered a tear in the pulmonary artery from the sudden deceleration of the Mercedes Benz as it hit a concrete pillar and spun around. Dodi Fayed died at the scene from a massive head injury. The driver was impaled on his steering column. The paparazzi showed up and were snapping pictures of the wreck and the bodies and were later arrested for not lending assistance, which in France is a crime. The father of Dodi said he thought it was an MI-6 conspiracy. Diana's older brother the Earl Spencer said rude things at the funeral about the royal family and accused the paparazzi and the press in general of killing Diana. She was interred on an island in the middle of an artificial lake on Spencer property.  That was probably the only way even in death that she could avoid the approach of the public, unless they could swim.

And what is the moral of the story? I guess if you are going to marry the prince and future King, you better get used to not having any privacy whatsoever. Every servant and chauffeur and bodyguard will be selling stories to the press about every tiny aspect of your life, and the ones who aren't are spies.  Some of the press predation may have been republican animus and some of it just perverse curiosity and the desire to sell newspapers. All celebrities live with this sort of thing to varying degrees.   It is hard to have the perquisites of fame without the drawbacks too.   I at least can put my trash out on the curb on Monday mornings and rest assured that nobody is going to steal it and try to speculate about what goes on in my private life.  

And a second moral is that if you marry someone who sees himself as God's gift to humankind, defender of the faith, and future head of the Church of England, you are not going to have much clout. He cannot cleave for himself as unimportant persons do, and his royal mate must pass muster by the entire apparatus of government and public opinion.  Even today the love life of a royal heir is subject to discussion in parliament and by the Prime Minister.
It would have been far better for Prince Charles to marry whom he loved and love whom he married and not get mixed up with ineligible married women such as Camilla Parker-Bowles.  As carefully vetted as Diana may have been, the vetting didn't go far enough, apparently.   The fragility of unions under the constraints of the Royal firm, and perhaps the changing roles of women and men in society in general have played havoc with marriages. 

And thus does human biology, to which we are all subject, overrule the intentions of the British monarchy. If you read about the long sanguinary history of hereditary monarchies in England or anywhere else, you begin to see what a bad fit it makes as a form of government. Henry VIII famously went through six wives trying to produce a male heir, got in trouble with the Pope and established a new church (essentially the same as the old church but under different management) as a result. He produced a male heir but that heir died from a "fever" after barely reaching his majority. Henry however did have a couple of fine girls who were more viable than the son, who disagreed as to religion. And there were all those pesky Papists to worry about. Bloody Mary succeeded him and with her habit of executing Protestants, proceeded to have a tomato and vodka drink named after her. When she died, the Protestant Elizabeth I took over and led England into its golden age, defeating the Spanish Armada and sponsoring the age of Shakespeare and the opening up of the Americas for British exploration. After that James I (VI in Scotland) was brought in from Scotland because of the apparent infertility of the last Tudors, and commissioned a new translation of the bible.   As a result people in England began to read the bible for themselves and developed their own ideas about what it meant. This lead to an outbreak of Calvinism, for whom the monarchs were suddenly found not Protestant enough to suit them. All this came to a lost head when Charles I ascended the throne and got in trouble with his own parliament, the Scots and with Oliver Cromwell.

The roundheads proved the better soldiers and decided to dispense with the monarchy altogether. They melted down the crown jewels and set up a kind of theocracy based on Calvinism and persecution of everyone who wasn't a Calvinist. It was as though Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson ran the country. Cromwell was a killjoy, and closed down the theaters, forbade dancing and gambling, and other signs of impiety. This clearly couldn't last. When the old man died, his boy Richard took over, but Richard was not the leader that the old man was and the restoration happened. Charles II came back from exile, reopened the theaters, people danced in the streets, and reverted to their usual impious ways. New crown jewels were commissioned.

 
But infertility, early death, and lack of issue and the Catholic affiliation of many otherwise eligible royals led to the necessary importation of royals from abroad.  First there was William and Mary,  then Queen Anne, who seemed only to be able to produce miscarriages.   So finally and more successfully they brought in George I from Hanover, Germany. At last they found someone who could produce a live litter and the Hanoverian imports multiplied and prospered. George II followed, and then George III. George III  took his divine rights as king very seriously but royal prerogative was definitely on the decline, unlike across the water in France.  Still, he took a dim view of colonists thinking they had rights and the impudence to think they were not there just to send the crown money and shut up. The ensuing war, encouraged by the French Monarchy was a chastening loss to the King, and his bouts of madness and porphyria did not enhance his power. His son was a playboy and parliament finally decided to make the king basically a figurehead, with the Reform act of 1830. Fertility continued  with the ascendancy of Victoria and Albert who had a large number of children, many of them carrying a recessive gene that contributed to the demise of the Russian house of Romanov, among others as they married into just about all the Royal families of Europe.  

The British Empire, recovering from the loss of America, reached its apogee with the colonization of most of Africa, India, and significant parts of the far East including Australia. After that of course the sun slowly began to set on the British Empire. Edward VI gave the name to the Edwardian Era from 1901 -1910, as Victoria's reign came to an end in 1901.   As the Royals had German names, befitting their origins in Hanover (recently) and since the Germans were very unpopular in Britain during the two wars, they changed the name to something British sounding, Windsor.  Then there was George V from 1910-1936.

At this juncture Edward VIII was to succeed, but at this critical moment he wished to marry a divorced American named Wallis Simpson.  It was bad enough perhaps to have Germans running around the various royal palaces, but an American?  And a divorced one?  Edward VIII was the titular head of the Church of England.  And who wanted a Queen Wally anyway?   The monarchy OR the match was doomed.  Edward chose to stick with Wallis, and they were unceremoniously banished to France. 
 Thus did the line of succession take a left turn and end up in the lap of George VI, who was king during the Second World War and died in 1952.  His eldest daughter, Elizabeth, young and beautiful, became queen in the postwar age, a position she holds to this day.