I read in the UK Daily Mail yesterday (ok, it was a mistake - I wouldn’t normally read such a right-wing paper, but it was sitting there on the table looking lost and I was bored, so I picked it up) that the great British public are allegedly up in arms about two really significant things. One, should Camilla Parker Bowles go to the planned memorial service for the late Diana Princess of Wales? Two, should the British Monarch move forward two squares instead of one, skip Prince Charles, and go straight to Prince William? I am glad that I picked up the paper as such apparently momentous concerns had somehow passed me by.
Regular readers of this blog (don’t laugh, there may well be at least one) will be well aware that my natural sentiments tend towards the Republican rather than the Royalist end of the spectrum, and that I would not normally care too much about the intentions, actions, or fate of the future king and his former mistress. However, on this rare occasion, I find myself moved to speak up in their defence.
I suppose I find it difficult when people store up anger and resentment and judge others harshly, or when they want to take the high moral ground when they often don’t have a moral leg to stand on themselves. To me it feels as if the public are being hypocritical, and responding to the Diana myth rather than the Diana reality.
I can understand people being upset that the Charles-Diana marriage was allegedly wrecked by the presence of the third woman, but most people tend to conveniently forget that Diana, though doubtless wonderful in many ways, was not a saint herself. And I suspect that, if the divorce and adultery statistics are to be believed, over fifty percent of the crowd calling for Camilla to be metaphorically hung, drawn, and quartered may themselves have been in complicated relationships where passion rather than reason ruled the day.
In my view, fallible human beings make mistakes, and need to be allowed to move on. If Diana’s children are happy for her to be there (perhaps the only people whose wishes really count), and if Charles wants her there, then why not let her be there? Sure, you don’t necessarily have to agree with what happened in history, but you don’t have to be spiteful in the present. Such hypocritical and condemnatory attitudes remind me of the playground where someone says: “You were unkind to my friend last year so you cannot play with my ball now.”
I laughed out loud when I read in the Mail that apparently a large proportion of the population want to skip Charles and go straight to William when the Queen dies or abdicates. If that is true, then all I can say is that the great British public just don’t get it! They don’t understand that the whole point is that monarchy is monarchy and not a democracy. It isn’t like Pop Idol or the X-Factor, or choosing a new Maria or Joseph. You can’t vote in your king. If Charles is the heir in waiting, the only way the monarchy can survive (and the public apparently wish it to continue) is for Charles to succeed to the throne. If he gives in to any public pressure to renounce his claim (and I doubt that he would) he would be acknowledging that popularity rather than lineage mattered, and that would be the beginning of the end. The logical outcome would be for the matter to be decided in a TV show contest.
Hi:
I think The Queen should go straight to Prince William & forget Charles.
I have felt this way for the last, almost, ten years.