royal family essay

The Royal Family in the 1980s

A decade of highs and lows for the monarchy.

A staff writer National Library of Scotland

'How are you enjoying married life, Madam?' yelled one of many gathered reporters, 'It's highly recommended' responded Princess Diana coyly during her extended honeymoon at Balmoral.

A nation swept up in the fairy-tale courtship and marriage of the young Princess and Prince Charles could not imagine the hardship and difficulties the marriage would be facing by the end of the decade. The British royal family during the 1980s in many ways became the nation's favourite soap opera, aided by their intense exposure in the emerging battle between tabloid media outlets to gain the latest royal scoop. The casting was perfectly set, with Charles and Diana as the leading couple; would they get their happily ever after?

The Queen remained the formidable matriarch in charge of the family firm. The Duke of Edinburgh, the gaffe-prone father figure, provided the occasional comedy moment. There was a cast of younger siblings to add spice and variety to the sub-plots, and an occasional guest appearance by the eccentric extended family. With an international audience, the exploits of the royal family were followed as eagerly as the soap opera 'Dynasty'.

The 1980s is a difficult decade to summarise in terms of key royal events as there were so many. The list includes: two royal weddings, four royal births, one marriage breakdown and one palace break-in. However, one shall endeavour to do one's best! Let us rewind to the very start of 1980s and take a tour through the decade of the most noteworthy royal moments.

The Royal Wedding — 29 July 1981

The year 1980 dawned with an overhanging sadness in the royal family. The previous year Lord Louis Mountbatten, uncle of Prince Philip and mentor to Prince Charles, had been assassinated. This left a large gap in the Prince Charles' life at a time when the pressure placed upon him to settle down was at a peak. Now in his early 30s, there was an increasing expectation from his family, the media and the public to find a suitable wife. He had formed an attachment in the early 1970s to Camilla Parker-Bowles but she was deemed an unsuitable consort given that she had previous relationships.

Charles met Diana at a house party in 1980 (they had met briefly in 1977 when Charles had been dating her older sister). It was Diana's apparent sympathy at the recent death of Lord Mountbatten that caught his attention and he asked her on a date. The couple began dating and apparently met on around a dozen occasions before Prince Charles asked Diana to marry him. This was despite the fact that he was 32, she was 19, and they had very little in common. Nevertheless, their engagement was made public on 24 February 1981 with the wedding date set for 29 July 1981, a quick turnaround for any wedding let alone a royal one.

Diana's engagement ring was a 12-carat Ceylon sapphire surrounded by diamonds, and it quickly became the most copied engagement ring in the world. The couple's engagement interview when watched today looks distinctly awkward, certainly compared to the interviews given by William and Kate, and Harry and Meghan. When the question was asked if they were in love, Diana replied 'of course,' whereas Prince Charles replied with the now infamous 'whatever in love means'. Diana looked downcast and when reflecting on it later she admitted to being very confused and hurt by the comment.

The wedding itself was billed as the wedding of the century. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury was swept along by the mood, remarking during the ceremony, 'here is the stuff of which fairy-tales are made', increasing the sense of expectation on the royal couple. The wedding was watched by a global audience estimated at 750 million, providing a great lift for national morale at a point marked by high unemployment and inner-city riots. The wedding was often voted one of the most memorable moments of the 1980s, and for good reason. The pomp and pageantry were excessive, with Diana arriving at St Paul's Cathedral in a horse drawn carriage to reveal one of the most eagerly anticipated wedding dresses. It was a fairy-tale dress for the fairy-tale wedding, made from ivory silk taffeta with a 25-foot train. The dress was also atypical of early 1980s fashion, voluminous with puffy sleeves and sadly very crushed from the carriage ride to St Paul's.

For her vows Diana had controversially decided not to 'obey' Charles, going against royal protocol, perhaps the first indication of her later reluctance to follow tradition. She also fumbled her vows calling Charles 'Philip', which was one of his middle names. The most famous moment of the day was the kiss on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, a royal first. The kiss was not only demanded by the assembled crowd, but also happened because Charles had forgotten to kiss Diana during the ceremony. He also asked the Queen for permission to do so before planting the briefest possible kiss upon Diana's lips.

Not only has the visual aspect of the royal wedding become so embedded in the collective memory, there was also the nationwide frenzy for 'Royal Wedding' merchandise ranging from the cheap and tacky to luxurious. Within the National Library of Scotland's Moving Image Archive catalogue, there is a record describing a film of china being made in Scotland for the Royal Wedding . While we all know the marriage did not work out in the end, the wedding itself remains an iconic moment in British history.

Threats against the Queen — 1981 and 1982

Potential threats against the Queen and the monarchy increased during the 1980s. Luckily there were no serious incidents but there were a few near misses.

In June 1981 during the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony, six shots were fired at the Queen as she rode down the Mall on her way to Horseguards parade. The shots were fortunately blanks fired by 17-year-old Marcus Sarjeant who had planned an assassination, but was unable to get a licence for a real gun. He was charged under the 1848 Treason Act and jailed for five years. The Queen was unharmed in the incident and was widely praised for her calm demeanour and superb control of her startled horse.

The following year, on the morning of 9 July 1982, the Queen woke up to a nasty surprise when she found an intruder, Michael Fagan, in her bed chamber. This was not the first time that he had broken into the palace. A month earlier he had climbed up a drainpipe into a maid's bedroom. The maid ran for help, but when they were unable to locate an intruder, palace security assumed she had been mistaken. It had left Fagan to wander around the palace freely. On the second occasion in July he managed to make it all the way to the Queen's bedchamber despite tripping several alarms on the way, which were disabled by police believing them to have been set off in error.

There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. Contemporary accounts stated that the Queen chatted to Fagan in an attempt to distract him while waiting for help to arrive. However, Fagan has said in interviews that she actually ran from the room to get help and did not mention that a lengthy conversation took place. Palace security was heavily criticised in the aftermath of the event and the Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw was so horrified that he offered to resign. The break-in led not only to increases in palace security, but the security of all the royal residence was improved. Fagan had previous criminal convictions and was sent for psychiatric observation. The details that emerged after the event through interviews with Fagan allowed the public to glimpse a little deeper into the private lives of the royals and increased press and public appetite for royal gossip and scandal.

The 'Other' Royal Wedding — 23 July 1986

'What' I hear you ask, 'another royal wedding in the 1980s?' Given the amount of attention allocated in the history books to his brother Prince Charles' wedding, it is perhaps not surprising that Prince Andrew's wedding is often forgotten about. Prince Andrew was under a lot less pressure to marry than his elder brother, given that he was the 'spare'.

He had known Sarah Ferguson since childhood, but met her again at a party in 1985 after which they began dating. They had a relatively short courtship and Andrew proposed to Sarah on his 26th birthday in February 1986. Their engagement was announced on St Patrick's Day and the wedding was set for 23 July 1986. The engagement ring was unusual, featuring a ruby centrepiece surrounded by diamonds. There was not quite the same level of public enthusiasm for the wedding or Sarah Ferguson as there had been for Diana. However there were some reports in the press of 'Fergie Fever' and an interest in learning more about the future Duchess of York. She was older than Diana with more life experience, and she was also a working woman. Unusually, she had vowed to continue to work as the editor of a graphic arts firm even after her marriage.

The wedding was held in Westminster Abbey with a smaller guest list than the other royal wedding but still there were around 1,800 guests. There were fewer people on the street for the ceremony and the global audience for the television broadcast was around 500 million, still a significant number.

On the day itself, the reveal of the bride's wedding dress was once again one of the major moments of the day. The new Duchess of York had opted for a more classic style of dress, embroidered ivory satin with a 17.5 foot train. There were still hints of the 1980s in style of the shoulders, but far less puffy and frothy than her sister-in-law Diana's dress. The Duchess caused some controversy by promising to 'obey' Andrew which seemed to contrast her otherwise modern approach to her future royal life. In common with Diana she also fumbled Andrew's name during her vows, but otherwise the 45-minute ceremony ran smoothly. The couple undertook the newly created tradition of sharing a kiss on the balcony though it was a far less awkward moment than it had been for Charles and Diana. The marriage however was not successful and they separated after six years in 1992. The couple managed to remain good friends and shared custody of their daughters.

'It's a Royal Knockout' 1987

The participation of some of the family in the gameshow 'It's a Royal Knockout' proved to be a public relations disaster. 'It's a Knockout' was a game show where towns competed against each other often dressed in strange outfits in a variety of different outdoor games. Inflatable obstacles often featured.

The royal version of the show was a charity event organised by Prince Edward, who was keen to move into a career in theatre and television. He tried to recruit the Prince and Princess of Wales for the show but they refused. Instead the Duke and Duchess of York, Princess Anne, and Prince Edward headed up teams of celebrities who played for different charities.

Although they did not take part in the events and were merely team captains, the Royals dressed up in medieval costumes and encouraged their team from the side-lines, with varying degrees of success.Ironically when announcing the programme, Prince Edward had remarked it would be similar to the original game show but with a sense of decorum. Unfortunately for him, decorum was entirely absent from the proceedings and the behaviour of Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, was seen as especially embarrassing. Although the programme had huge audience figures of more than 18 million and raised £1.5 million for charity, it was widely criticised as damaging the dignity of the royal family. The media was especially savage in their criticism of both the show and of Prince Edward. The Queen and Prince Philip had thought the show sounded a bad idea, but they were not forceful enough in expressing their opinion or convincing their youngest son to cancel the project. Royal correspondents and biographers often trace a decrease in public and media deference towards the family to this event.

Royal births

With two royal weddings taking place in the 1980s it was inevitable that there would soon follow the birth of the next generation of Windsors. The Queen was delighted to welcome her second grandchild on 15 May 1981, Zara Phillips, the daughter of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips (her first grandchild was Zara's older brother, Peter). Her less-than-traditional royal name was suggested to her mother by Prince Charles after the Greek name for bright dawn. Princess Anne had not wanted to give her children any royal title, believing it was a difficult enough life for the granddaughter of the monarch.

Zara's more muted arrival into the world was a direct contrast with her cousins William and Harry. Given the public and media interest in Charles and Diana, the pending arrival of another future monarch was covered endlessly. From the minute it was clear Diana was pregnant the media documented every second of her pregnancy. At the 12 week stage of pregnancy the Princess fell down some stairs at Sandringham which caused a scare, but luckily the baby was unharmed. Diana later revealed through biographers that she intentionally threw herself down the stairs in order to get Prince Charles' attention. Their marriage was already in trouble after barely a year.

Prince William was born on 21 June 1982, although his name was not announced for a week afterwards. He was one of the few royals to be born in a hospital and it did unfortunately allow the world's media to camp outside the Lindo Wing ward of St Mary's Hospital in London for days awaiting the Prince's arrival. It was a similar situation when his younger brother Harry arrived on 15 September 1984. He was christened Henry but it was announced from the beginning that they intended to name him Harry.

The final royal birth of the 1980s was the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York, Princess Beatrice, who was born on 8 August 1988. Her name was not revealed for two weeks after her birth and was seen as a surprising choice; the favourite names had been considered to be Victoria or Elizabeth. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh began the 1980s with only one grandchild and by the end of the decade they would have five with a sixth on the way: the Yorks' other daughter Princess Eugenie (born in March 1990).

The Royals' marital issues

While the spate of royal separations and divorces did not happen until the 1990s, the marital troubles for several royal couples began and continued during the 1980s. The first royal couple to publically announce their marriage was beyond repair was Princess Anne and her first husband Mark Philips, father of her two children. They had been married for 15 years when they announced their separation in 1989.

The announcement came in the wake of a scandal when letters to the Princess from the Queen's equerry, Commander Timothy Lawrence, were stolen from the palace and given to 'The Sun' newspaper. Given the illicit manner in which the paper received the letters, it was not able to publish them. Instead they handed them over to the police and in an uncharacteristic move chose not to reveal the contents to the public. Even more surprisingly, Buckingham Palace made the announcement about the sender of the letters, but not the contents. The gaps were quickly filled in by the media, given the Princess' marital issues, and the story soon broke about the Princess being in love with her mother's equerry.

The Princess and her husband eventually divorced in 1992, and she married Timothy Lawrence later that year. Their marriage breakdown, while not pleasant for all involved, gave Anne the opportunity for a happier situation than either of her siblings. The marriages of both Prince Charles and Prince Andrew became increasingly difficult towards the end of the decade.

The marital troubles of the Prince and Princess of Wales became notoriously difficult and were well-documented by the media. Their relationship experienced issues from the outset as Diana felt overwhelmed by the attention she received but felt she got little support in adapting to her role. In taped conversations which were made into a documentary 'Diana in her Own Words', released in the UK in 2017, Diana revealed her deepest secrets and admitted that she and Charles quickly drifted apart after the birth of Prince Harry. Charles was reported to have rekindled his affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles in 1986. The press increasingly reported on the slow crumbling of the marriage, especially the decreasing number of public events the couple attended together.

The Duke and Duchess of York's marriage also ran into trouble very quickly. The Duchess claimed through biographers that the Duke's naval career kept them apart and quickly put a strain on the marriage. The Duchess was said to have been quite alone during her pregnancies and this led her to feel increasingly isolated. Their marriage did not end until 1992, but the seeds of discontent and difficulty were certainly sown during the 1980s. The collapse of three royal marriages over the course of the 1980s was seen as another way in which royalty was becoming less distant and more relatable although perhaps a little less respected by the public.

Princess Diana fever

'How can anyone, let alone a 21 year old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazed attention unscathed? … the media's fixation frightens me and I know for a fact that it petrifies Diana.' Prince Charles wrote to a friend during the tour of Australia in 1983. When you think about the Royal family in the 1980s, it is undeniable that the first person who comes to mind is Princess Diana. She overshadowed all the other members of the family as her every move, royal engagement and private life were scrutinised by the press. She was seen to have a more human touch than the other members of the family.

The attention quickly became frightening. One of the worst occasions was the couple's visit to Australia in 1983; the crowds were unbelievable and the only person they wanted to see was Diana. She said in Andrew Morton's biography 'Diana: Her True Story' that the public were clamouring to see her and that this made Prince Charles very jealous. Members of the public would be visibly disappointed when the Prince would appear alone and it was clearly difficult for him to accept the loss of the limelight. Princess Diana was untrained and had very little idea of how intense the media focus would be. She found it an ordeal and one which over the years she would learn to tolerate.

Her own natural instinct to help people and her charm made the public ever more desperate to meet her and read about her life. The circulation war in the tabloid press encouraged photographers to become ruthless in order to take a picture of the Princess which could make their career. The Library holds a vast collection of newspapers, and you would be hard-pressed to find a day from 1981-1989 where the Princess was not on the cover, or a story about her did not feature somewhere in a British newspaper or magazine. It was an immense strain which took a toll on her physical and mental health. There is no denying that to some extent the Princess courted the press and made sure they were aware of her intentions. She was a global celebrity and by the end of the 1980s, 'Princess Diana fever' showed no signs of abating, indeed it appeared to be increasing.

A reflection of the decade?

There we have it, the royal family of the 1980s, a period dominated by high drama, spectacular royal weddings and eagerly anticipated royal births which generated a huge amount of media attention. However, this attention was not always favourable. At the start of the 1980s there was an enormous amount of affection and reasonable levels of public respect for the royal family and its traditions. This was certainly diminished by the end of the decade as the reporting of royal gossip became increasingly salacious and more intrusive. Rather than making the royals more relatable, the disastrous 'It's a Royal Knockout' turned them into a laughing stock and damaged their respectability. Only one member of the family really seemed to understand the way branding worked in that decade.

It was a testing time for the royal family who had to adapt to changes in public expectations of them. Yet as the decade closed, the royal soap opera was still a hit with each episode leaving a gasping public begging for more.

Video of Princess Diana visiting Dundee
Video of Prince Charles at Trooping of the Colour

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Is the British Monarchy a worthy institution or outdated relic?

is the british monarchy a worthy institution or outdated relic?

*Updated 2023

Charles iii was recently crowned king of england , the nation’s first coronation in 70 years. his mother, elizabeth ii, the former queen of england, who died at the age 96 after holding the throne for 70 years, was the longest-reigning ruler of any monarch in history. while her passing evoked a strong and global outpouring of grief in support of her as a person and leader, and charles’s coronation similarly attracted worldwide support and enthusiasm, both historic events have raised questions regarding the monarchy’s legacy and whether there is a future for it., meanwhile, prince harry’s very public break from the royal family, not to mention prince andrew’s controversies , have also put a spotlight on the monarchy’s relevancy moving forward. it seems that while the majority of british subjects over 65 still support the british monarchy and the royal family, 40% of younger british subjects (between 18-24) prefer an elected head of state. in an era that increasingly values merit over birth, the very concept of a monarchy may seem outdated at best and positively inegalitarian at worst. so, is the british monarchy a worthwhile institution that should continue, albeit under a new king , or an unnecessary relic of times long gone, here are three arguments in support of the british monarchy and three against it., god save the king.

The Queen unified the British masses and others across the world, as will the King

As an a-political figurehead (even during the heated times of Brexit and especially during the anxiety-ridden pandemic ), the Queen, and by extension, the royal family, united Great Britain around principles that transcended day-to-day politics, highlighting shared history and values, and contributing to societal cohesion. This unifying effect stretched long beyond the UK’s borders to the 2.2 billion subjects of the Commonwealth of Nations, a voluntary union of 54 nations dedicated to shared values like democracy and human rights. Previously headed by Queen Elizabeth II and now helmed by King Charles III, the Commonwealth unites countries in history and trade, and provides a friendly platform to hold member states to high civic standards. To set the stage for a future with more inclusivity and diversity , King Charles held an inclusive, modern coronation , suggesting that the monarchy can change with the times.

The royal family has historically provided assurance in uncertain times

In times of upheaval, the English have always leaned on the monarchy as a symbol of security in a changing world. Queen Elizabeth II’s 1952 coronation provides an excellent example. While Great Britain was recovering from the ravages of WWII, a country whose citizens were living on rations held an outsized ceremony to commemorate their new queen. In the former Queen’s prosperity, the people of England saw their own prosperity, and the coronation a shining symbol of English perseverance. Moreover, there is something profoundly comforting in knowing that if the state’s political institutions go berserk – or get sidelined by the coronavirus – there is a statesperson prepared to take the reins.

The royal family is a boon to the United Kingdom’s economy

Step aside James Bond , the Windsor family is the UK’s most popular and marketable brand, in good times as well as in bad. Be it weddings, births, funerals the world is constantly watching as the Windsor family expands or, sadly, gets smaller . The prestige, popularity (and family drama ) of the royal family earns the UK plenty of PR that drives tourism and business. Estimates from the British Tourism Council surmise that the Windsor family, worth an estimated $88 billion , generates over $770 million in tourist spending annually. Additionally, the family’s milestones (such as the weddings of Prince William and Prince Harry and the births of their respective children) spur adjacent industries – injecting the economy with hundreds of millions of extra dollars from Britons and non-Britons alike who are eager to participate in the festivities.

Magna Carta the Royal Family Out of Here!

Monarchy is unfair to monarchs

Being born a prince or princess is very much an accident of birth. But is it a happy one? According to Princess Diana and her youngest son , no. Imagine a life where your every movement was carefully watched and judged, where you were forbidden to have political conversations, refused medical treatment – even when having suicidal thoughts. To put it bluntly, the life of royals is dictated by tradition and expectation; they don’t enjoy the same basic freedoms , or the privacy to deal with sibling rivalry, as their subjects. Many argue that the UK has long passed the necessity of an absolute ruler. It stands to reason that, if the royals’ role in the governance of their society is largely ceremonial, then English society would be generous to release them of this burden.

The monarchy ties England to a dark past that is best left behind

Sure, the majority of Britons express favor for the monarchy and royal family. Of course, speaking against the monarchy is technically an offense that can be punishable by life in prison . Laws like the aforementioned Treason Felony Act reveal the pernicious nature of the British Monarchy’s past, and to an extent, its present. Monarchies have long survived on the bread and blood of their subjects, whom they regularly plundered and sent to wars on their behalf. Add to this the English Crown’s long history of colonialism, slavery and racism – its subjugation and pilfering of nearly a quarter of the planet’s resources – and reveal a wholly inhumane enterprise. Is an institution that thrives upon degradation really an appropriate centerpiece of national pride?

Monarchy is expensive

Weighed against the cost of security, travel, and yearly pensions (even for extended family!), the royal family’s revenues are not quite as bountiful as they seem. The royal family cost taxpayers in the United Kingdom $114.6 million in 2021/22 – a 12% increase over the previous year. That’s quite a price tag for figureheads in a country strapped with over £2.52 trillion in debt. Instead of spending an estimated $125 million on King Charles’s recent coronation, this money could have been put to better use to improve the nation’s ailing (some would even say failing) healthcare system , especially during a global pandemic, or spent on schools.

The Bottom Line: The British monarchy is UK society’s most exquisite display of romanticism – at once representing the grandness of the past and the promise of the future. However, it is both expensive to uphold and may be trapping the British in a past they no longer connect with (just ask Harry ). Do you think the British monarchy should be preserved, or, in the absence of Queen Elizabeth , is it time for a change?

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Royal Bodies

Hilary mantel.

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L ast summer at the festival in Hay-on-Wye, I was asked to name a famous person and choose a book to give them. I hate the leaden repetitiveness of these little quizzes: who would be the guests at your ideal dinner party, what book has changed your life, which fictional character do you most resemble? I had to come up with an answer, however, so I chose Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, and I chose to give her a book published in 2006, by the cultural historian Caroline Weber; it’s called Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution . It’s not that I think we’re heading for a revolution. It’s rather that I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung. In those days she was a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore. These days she is a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions. Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant. They will find that this young woman’s life until now was nothing, her only point and purpose being to give birth.

Marie Antoinette was a woman eaten alive by her frocks. She was transfixed by appearances, stigmatised by her fashion choices. Politics were made personal in her. Her greed for self-gratification, her half-educated dabbling in public affairs, were adduced as a reason the French were bankrupt and miserable. It was ridiculous, of course. She was one individual with limited power and influence, who focused the rays of misogyny. She was a woman who couldn’t win. If she wore fine fabrics she was said to be extravagant. If she wore simple fabrics, she was accused of plotting to ruin the Lyon silk trade. But in truth she was all body and no soul: no soul, no sense, no sensitivity. She was so wedded to her appearance that when the royal family, in disguise, made its desperate escape from Paris, dashing for the border, she not only had several trunk loads of new clothes sent on in advance, but took her hairdresser along on the trip. Despite the weight of her mountainous hairdos, she didn’t feel her head wobbling on her shoulders. When she returned from that trip, to the prison Paris would become for her, it was said that her hair had turned grey overnight.

Antoinette as a royal consort was a gliding, smiling disaster, much like Diana in another time and another country. But Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished. When it was announced that Diana was to join the royal family, the Duke of Edinburgh is said to have given her his approval because she would ‘breed in some height’. Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners. She looks like a nicely brought up young lady, with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ part of her vocabulary. But in her first official portrait by Paul Emsley, unveiled in January, her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One critic said perceptively that she appeared ‘weary of being looked at’. Another that the portrait might pass muster as the cover of a Catherine Cookson novel: an opinion I find thought-provoking, as Cookson’s simple tales of poor women extricating themselves from adverse circumstances were for twenty years, according to the Public Lending Right statistics, the nation’s favourite reading. Sue Townsend said of Diana that she was ‘a fatal non-reader’. She didn’t know the end of her own story. She enjoyed only the romances of Barbara Cartland. I’m far too snobbish to have read one, but I assume they are stories in which a wedding takes place and they all live happily ever after. Diana didn’t see the possible twists in the narrative. What does Kate read? It’s a question.

Paul Emsley’s portrait of Kate Middleton is unveiled.

Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture. Diana was capable of transforming herself from galumphing schoolgirl to ice queen, from wraith to Amazon. Kate seems capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation. When her pregnancy became public she had been visiting her old school, and had picked up a hockey stick and run a few paces for the camera. BBC News devoted a discussion to whether a pregnant woman could safely put on a turn of speed while wearing high heels. It is sad to think that intelligent people could devote themselves to this topic with earnest furrowings of the brow, but that’s what discourse about royals comes to: a compulsion to comment, a discourse empty of content, mouthed rather than spoken. And in the same way one is compelled to look at them: to ask what they are made of, and is their substance the same as ours.

I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not? Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.

A few years ago I saw the Prince of Wales at a public award ceremony. I had never seen him before, and at once I thought: what a beautiful suit! What sublime tailoring! It’s for Shakespeare to penetrate the heart of a prince, and for me to study his cuff buttons. I found it hard to see the man inside the clothes; and like Thomas Cromwell in my novels, I couldn’t help winding the fabric back onto the bolt and pricing him by the yard. At this ceremony, which was formal and carefully orchestrated, the prince gave an award to a young author who came up on stage in shirtsleeves to receive his cheque. He no doubt wished to show that he was a free spirit, despite taking money from the establishment. For a moment I was ashamed of my trade. I thought, this is what the royals have to contend with today: not real, principled opposition, but self-congratulatory chippiness.

And then as we drifted away from the stage I saw something else. I glanced sideways into a room off the main hall, and saw that it was full of stacking chairs. It was a depressing, institutional, impersonal sight. I thought, Charles must see this all the time. Glance sideways, into the wings, and you see the tacky preparations for the triumphant public event. You see your beautiful suit deconstructed, the tailor’s chalk lines, the unsecured seams. You see that your life is a charade, that the scenery is cardboard, that the paint is peeling, the red carpet fraying, and if you linger you will notice the oily devotion fade from the faces of your subjects, and you will see their retreating backs as they turn up their collars and button their coats and walk away into real life.

Then a little later I went to Buckingham Palace for a book trade event, a large evening party. I had expected to see people pushing themselves into the queen’s path, but the opposite was true. The queen walked through the reception areas at an even pace, hoping to meet someone, and you would see a set of guests, as if swept by the tide, parting before her or welling ahead of her into the next room. They acted as if they feared excruciating embarrassment should they be caught and obliged to converse. The self-possessed became gauche and the eloquent were struck dumb. The guests studied the walls, the floor, they looked everywhere except at Her Majesty. They studied exhibits in glass cases and the paintings on the walls, which were of course worth looking at, but they studied them with great intentness, as if their eyes had been glued. Vermeer was just then ‘having a moment’, as they say, and the guests congregated around a small example, huddled with their backs to the room. I pushed through to see the painting along with the others but I can’t remember now which Vermeer it was. It’s safe to say there would have been a luminous face, round or oval, there would have been a woman gazing entranced at some household object, or perhaps reading a letter with a half-smile; there may have been a curtain, suggestive of veiled meaning; there would have been an enigma. We concentrated on it at the expense of the enigma moving among us, smiling with gallant determination.

And then the queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones. I felt that such was the force of my devouring curiosity that the party had dematerialised and the walls melted and there were only two of us in the vast room, and such was the hard power of my stare that Her Majesty turned and looked back at me, as if she had been jabbed in the shoulder; and for a split second her face expressed not anger but hurt bewilderment. She looked young: for a moment she had turned back from a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.

And I felt sorry then. I wanted to apologise. I wanted to say: it’s nothing personal, it’s monarchy I’m staring at. I rejoined, mentally, the rest of the guests. Now flunkeys were moving among us with trays and on them were canapés, and these snacks were the queen’s revenge. They were pieces of gristly meat on skewers. Let’s not put too fine a point on it: they were kebabs. It took some time to chew through one of them, and then the guests were left with the little sticks in their hands. They tried to give them back to the flunkeys, but the flunkeys smiled and sadly shook their heads, and moved away, so the guests had to carry on the evening holding them out, like children with sparklers on Guy Fawkes night.

At this point the evening became all too much for me. It was violently interesting. I went behind a sofa and sat on the floor and enjoyed the rest of the party that way, seeking privacy as my sympathies shifted. And as the guests ebbed away and the rooms emptied, I joined them, and on the threshold I looked back, and what I saw, placed precisely at the base of every pillar, was a forest of little sticks: gnawed and abandoned. So if the queen’s glance had swept the room, that is what she would have seen: what we had left in our wake. It was the stacking chairs all over again; the scaffolding of reality too nakedly displayed, the daylight let in on magic.

We can be sure the queen was not traumatised by my staring, as when next we met she gave me a medal. As I prepared to go to the palace, people would say: ‘Will it be the actual queen, the queen herself?’ Did they think contact with the anointed hand would change you? Was that what the guests at the palace feared: to be changed by powerful royal magic, without knowing how? The faculty of awe remains intact, for all that the royal story in recent years has taken a sordid turn. There were scandals enough in centuries past, from the sneaky little adulteries of Katherine Howard to the junketings of the Prince Regent to the modern-day mischief of Mrs Simpson. But a new world began, I think, in 1980, with the discovery that Diana, the future Princess of Wales, had legs. You will remember how the young Diana taught for a few hours a week at a kindergarten called Young England, and when it was first known that she was Charles’s choice of bride, the press photographed her, infants touchingly gathered around; but they induced her to stand against the light, so in the resulting photograph the nation could see straight through her skirt. A sort of licentiousness took hold, a national lip-smacking. Those gangling limbs were artlessly exposed, without her permission. It was the first violation.

When Diana drove to St Paul’s she was a blur of virginal white behind glass. The public was waiting to see the dress, but this was more than a fashion moment. An everyday sort of girl had been squashed into the coach, but a goddess came out. She didn’t get out of the coach in any ordinary way: she hatched. The extraordinary dress came first, like a flow of liquid, like ectoplasm emerging from the orifices of a medium. It was a long moment before she solidified. Indeed the coach was a medium, a method of conveyance and communication between two spheres, the private and the public, the common and the royal. The dress’s first effect was dismaying. I could hear a nation of women catching their breath as one, not in awe but in horror: it’s creased to glory, how did they let that happen? I heard the squeak as a million ironing-boards unfolded, a sigh and shudder as a collective nightmare came true: that dream we all have, that we are incorrectly dressed or not dressed at all, that we are naked in the street. But as the dress resolved about her, the princess was born and the world breathed out.

Diana was more royal than the family she joined. That had nothing to do with family trees. Something in her personality, her receptivity, her passivity, fitted her to be the carrier of myth. She came near to claiming that she had a healing touch, the ancient attribute of royal persons. The healing touch can’t be felt through white gloves. Diana walked bare-handed among the multitude, and unarmed: unfortified by irony, uninformed by history. Her tragedy was located in the gap between her human capacities and the demands of the superhuman role she was required to fulfil. When I think of Diana, I remember Stevie Smith’s poem about the Lorelei:

There, on a rock majestical, A girl with smile equivocal, Painted, young and damned and fair, Sits and combs her yellow hair.

Soon Diana’s hairstyles were as consequential as Marie Antoinette’s, and a great deal cheaper to copy.

In the next stage of her story, she passed through trials, through ordeals at the world’s hands. For a time the public refrained from demanding her blood so she shed it herself, cutting her arms and legs. Her death still makes me shudder because although I know it was an accident, it wasn’t just an accident. It was fate showing her hand, fate with her twisted grin. Diana visited the most feminine of cities to meet her end as a woman: to move on, from the City of Light to the place beyond black. She went into the underpass to be reborn, but reborn this time without a physical body: the airy subject of a hundred thousand photographs, a flicker at the corner of the eye, a sigh on the breeze.

For a time it was hoped, and it was feared, that Diana had changed the nation. Her funeral was a pagan outpouring, a lawless fiesta of grief. We are bad at mourning our dead. We don’t make time or space for grief. The world tugs us along, back into its harsh rhythm before we are ready for it, and for the pain of loss doctors can prescribe a pill. We are at war with our nature, and nature will win; all the bottled anguish, the grief dammed up, burst the barriers of politeness and formality and restraint, and broke down the divide between private and public, so that strangers wailed in the street, people who had never met Diana lamented her with maladjusted fervour, and we all remembered our secret pain and unleashed it in one huge carnival of mass mourning. But in the end, nothing changed. We were soon back to the prosaic: shirtsleeves, stacking chairs, little sticks. And yet none of us who lived through it will forget that dislocating time, when the skin came off the surface of the world, and our inner vision cleared, and we saw the archetypes clear and plain, and we saw the collective psyche at work, and the gods pulling our strings. To quote Stevie Smith again:

An antique story comes to me And fills me with anxiety, I wonder why I fear so much What surely has no modern touch?

In looking at royalty we are always looking at what is archaic, what is mysterious by its nature, and my feeling is that it will only ever half-reveal itself. This poses a challenge to historians and to those of us who work imaginatively with the past. Royal persons are both gods and beasts. They are persons but they are supra-personal, carriers of a blood line: at the most basic, they are breeding stock, collections of organs.

T his brings me to the royal bodies with whom I have been most concerned recently, those of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII. Long before Kate’s big news was announced, the tabloids wanted to look inside her to see if she was pregnant. Historians are still trying to peer inside the Tudors. Are they healthy, are they sick, can they breed? The story of Henry and his wives is peculiar to its time and place, but also timeless and universally understood; it is highly political and also highly personal. It is about body parts, about what slots in where, and when: are they body parts fit for purpose, or are they diseased? It’s no surprise that so much fiction constellates around the subject of Henry and his wives. Often, if you want to write about women in history, you have to distort history to do it, or substitute fantasy for facts; you have to pretend that individual women were more important than they were or that we know more about them than we do.

But with the reign of King Bluebeard, you don’t have to pretend. Women, their bodies, their reproductive capacities, their animal nature, are central to the story. The history of the reign is so graphically gynaecological that in the past it enabled lady novelists to write about sex when they were only supposed to write about love; and readers could take an avid interest in what went on in royal bedrooms by dignifying it as history, therefore instructive, edifying. Popular fiction about the Tudors has also been a form of moral teaching about women’s lives, though what is taught varies with moral fashion. It used to be that Anne Boleyn was a man-stealer who got paid out. Often, now, the lesson is that if Katherine of Aragon had been a bit more foxy, she could have hung on to her husband. Anne as opportunist and sexual predator finds herself recruited to the cause of feminism. Always, the writers point to the fact that a man who marries his mistress creates a job vacancy. ‘Women beware women’ is a teaching that never falls out of fashion.

Anne Boleyn, in particular, is a figure who elicits a deep response, born out of ignorance often enough but also out of empathy. The internet is abuzz with stories about her, as if everything were happening today. Her real self is hidden within the dramas into which we co-opt her. There is a prurient curiosity around her, of the kind that gathered around Wallis Simpson. Henry didn’t give up the throne to marry her, but he did reshape his nation’s history. So what was her particular attraction? Did she have a sexual secret? A special trick? Was she beautiful, or ugly? The six fingers with which she was credited were not seen during her lifetime, and the warts and wens and extra nipple that supposedly disfigured her were witches’ marks produced by the black fantasy of Catholic propagandists. Her contemporaries didn’t think she was a great beauty. ‘She is of middling stature’, a Venetian diplomat reported. A ‘swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the English king’s great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful’. It was said, though not by unbiased observers, that after her marriage she aged rapidly and grew thin. If this is true, and we put it together with reports of a swelling in her throat, and with the description of her by one contemporary as ‘a goggle-eyed whore’, then we’re looking, possibly, at a woman with a hyperthyroid condition, a woman of frayed temper who lives on the end of her nerves. It often surprises people that there is no attested contemporary portrait. Just because an unknown hand has written ‘Anne Boleyn’ on a picture, it doesn’t mean it’s an image from the life or even an image of Anne at all. The most familiar image, in which she wears a letter ‘B’ hanging from a pearl necklace, exists in many forms and variants and originates at least fifty years after Anne’s death.

So much close scrutiny, and none of it much help to posterity. Anne was a mercurial woman, still shaped by the projections of those who read and write about her. Royal bodies do change after death, and not just as a consequence of the universal post-mortem changes. Now we know the body in the Leicester car park is indeed that of Richard III, we have to concede the curved spine was not Tudor propaganda, but we need not believe the chronicler who claimed Richard was the product of a two-year pregnancy and was born with teeth. Why are we all so pleased about digging up a king? Perhaps because the present is paying some of the debt it owes to the past, and science has come to the aid of history. The king stripped by the victors has been reclothed in his true identity. This is the essential process of history, neatly illustrated: loss, retrieval.

To return to Henry VIII: almost the first thirty years of his reign were shaped by his need for a male heir. Religious and political activity cluster around the subject. Not all the intelligence and diligence of his ministers could give Henry what he most needed. Only a woman could: but which woman? Neither of Henry’s first two wives had trouble conceiving. Royal pregnancies were not announced in those days; the news generally crept out, and public anticipation was aroused only when the child quickened. We know Katherine of Aragon had at least six pregnancies, most of them ending in late miscarriages or neonatal deaths. She had a son who survived for seven weeks, but only one child made it past early infancy, and that was a daughter, the Princess Mary. Anne’s first pregnancy was successful, and produced another girl, the Princess Elizabeth. Then she miscarried at least twice. It was not until his third marriage that Henry had a son who lived. Both those daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, were women of great ability, and in their very different ways were capable of ruling; but I don’t think this means that Henry was wrong in his construction of his situation. What he feared was that his bloodline would end. Elizabeth found the puzzle of whom she could marry too difficult to solve, so that her reign was dominated by succession crises, and she was indeed the last of the Tudors. The line did end: just a lot later than Henry had imagined.

Anne Boleyn wasn’t royal by birth. Her family were city merchants dignified into gentlefolk, and her father had married into the powerful and noble Howard family. She became royal, exalted, at her coronation when, six months pregnant, she walked the length of Westminster Abbey on a cloth of heaven-blue. It was said she had won Henry by promising him a son. Anne was a power player, a clever and determined woman. But in the end she was valued for her body parts, not her intellect or her soul; it was her womb that was central to her story. The question is whether she could ever win the battle for an heir: or was biology against her? At his trial Anne’s brother, George Boleyn, entertained the court by telling them that Henry was no good in bed. Conception was thought to be tied to female orgasm, so the implication was that what George called Henry’s lack of ‘skill’ was the problem.

Yet clearly he was able to make his wives pregnant. Was something else wrong? The old notion that Henry had syphilis has been discarded. There never was any contemporary evidence for it. The theory was constructed in the 19th century, as part of a narrative that showed Henry as a sexual beast justly punished for his promiscuity. In fact Henry constrained his sexual appetites. He had few mistresses compared to other grandees of his time. I think it was more important to him to be good, to be seen to be good, than to be gratified in this particular way. In fact I think we can say that the old monster was a bit of a romantic. Later in life, when he married Anne of Cleves, he didn’t want to have sex with a woman with whom he wasn’t in love; it was a scruple that baffled his contemporaries.

Recently a new hypothesis about Henry has emerged. In 2010 a paper by Catrina Banks Whitley and Kyra Cornelius Kramer appeared in the Historical Journal , called ‘A New Explanation of the Reproductive Woes and Midlife Decline of Henry VIII’. It suggested that Henry had a blood type called Kells positive. People who are Kells positive carry an extra antibody on the surface of their red blood cells. The blood type is rare, so we can assume Henry’s wives were Kells negative, and that their lack of compatibility was the reason for the multiple reproductive failures. When a woman who is Kells negative conceives by a man who is Kells positive, she will, if the foetus itself is Kells positive, become sensitised; her immune system will try to reject the foetus. The first pregnancy will go well, other things being equal. As with rhesus incompatibility, it takes one pregnancy for the woman to develop the sensitisation. But later children will die before or just after birth.

To a certain point this fits Henry’s story. He had a healthy illegitimate son by Elizabeth Blount: that was a first pregnancy. His first child with Anne Boleyn was a healthy girl, and his first child with Jane Seymour a healthy boy; Jane died soon after Edward’s birth, so we don’t know what would have happened thereafter. With Katherine of Aragon the pattern is more blurred. Mystery surrounds her first pregnancy, much of it made by the queen herself, who perhaps didn’t want to admit that she had miscarried; so we know the pregnancy didn’t work out, but we don’t know what happened. One of Katherine’s doctors thought it was a twin pregnancy and it may have failed for any number of reasons. So Katherine’s healthy child, Mary, was not her first. But every child fathered by Henry had a chance of being Kells negative, and the paper’s authors suggest that this is how Mary survived.

If this is true, it makes the history of Henry’s reign a different sort of tragedy: not a moral but a biological tragedy, inscribed on the body. The efforts of the wives and the politicians and the churchmen didn’t avail because a genetic lottery was in operation. What makes the hypothesis persuasive, to some minds, is Henry’s later medical history. Some individuals who are Kells positive go on to develop a collection of symptoms called McLeod syndrome. In early life Henry was, by all contemporary accounts, a creature of great beauty. He excelled in every sport. We wonder, of course, did his opponents let the king win? But Henry was not a fool and though he was susceptible to flattery he didn’t need flattery of that simple kind; and besides, in a dangerous pursuit like jousting, where one armoured man on an armoured horse is charging at another headlong, the outcome is difficult to control. I think we can take it that he was a star. He collected a number of injuries that stopped him jousting, and then in middle age became stout, eventually gross. He developed a weakness in his legs, and by the end of his life was virtually immobile. It also seems to some authorities that he underwent personality changes in mid-life. It was said that as a young man he was sweet-natured; though the claim would have had a hollow ring if you were Richard Empson or Edmund Dudley, ministers to his father, whom he executed as soon as he came to the throne. But it’s incontrovertible that as Henry aged he became increasingly angry, irrational, wilful and out of control. He fits the picture for McLeod syndrome: progressive muscular weakness and nerve deterioration in the lower body, depression, paranoia, an erosion of personality.

Some historians see the year 1536 as a turning point for Henry, personally and politically: that was the year in which Anne Boleyn was beheaded. Certainly his later years were very sad ones for a man who had been so magnificent and imposing. Pathology is at work, but of what kind? It seems to me that there are more obvious explanations for his poor health and the deterioration of his character, and the authors of the original paper didn’t really understand the external pressures on the king later in his reign. Henry had suffered accidents in the tiltyard and one of his legs was permanently ulcerated. He probably had osteomyelitis, an infection in the bone. His leg caused him chronic pain and historians – and, I’m afraid, doctors – underestimate what chronic pain can do to sour the temper and wear away both the personality and the intellect. When we call him paranoid, we must acknowledge he was right to think his enemies were everywhere, though he was increasingly bad at working out who they were.

As for depression, he had a great deal to be depressed about: not just his isolation on the world stage, but his own decay and deterioration. He had magnificent portraits created, and left them as his surrogates to stare down at his courtiers while he retreated into smaller, more intimate spaces. Yet he was quite unable to keep private what was happening to his own body. The royal body exists to be looked at. The world’s focus on body parts was most acute and searching in the case of Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife. No one understood what Henry saw in Jane, who was not pretty and not young. The imperial ambassador sneered that ‘no doubt she has a very fine enigme ’: which is to say, secret part. We have arrived at the crux of the matter: a royal lady is a royal vagina. Along with the reverence and awe accorded to royal persons goes the conviction that the body of the monarch is public property. We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all.

Is monarchy a suitable institution for a grown-up nation? I don’t know. I have described how my own sympathies were activated and my simple ideas altered. The debate is not high on our agenda. We are happy to allow monarchy to be an entertainment, in the same way that we license strip joints and lap-dancing clubs. Adulation can swing to persecution, within hours, within the same press report: this is what happened to Prince Harry recently. You can understand that anybody treated this way can be destabilised, and that Harry doesn’t know which he is, a person or a prince. Diana was spared, at least, the prospect of growing old under the flashbulbs, a crime for which the media would have made her suffer. It may be that the whole phenomenon of monarchy is irrational, but that doesn’t mean that when we look at it we should behave like spectators at Bedlam. Cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty. It can easily become fatal. We don’t cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago. History makes fools of us, makes puppets of us, often enough. But it doesn’t have to repeat itself. In the current case, much lies within our control. I’m not asking for censorship. I’m not asking for pious humbug and smarmy reverence. I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes. Get your pink frilly frocks out, zhuzh up your platinum locks. We are all Barbara Cartland now. The pen is in our hands. A happy ending is ours to write.

Send Letters To:

The Editor London Review of Books, 28 Little Russell Street London, WC1A 2HN [email protected] Please include name, address, and a telephone number.

Vol. 35 No. 6 · 21 March 2013

Hilary Mantel appears to endorse the postulate of Catrina Banks Whitley and Kyra Cornelius Kramer that the ‘reproductive woes and midlife decline of Henry VIII’ can be explained by his Kell blood group and the McLeod syndrome ( LRB , 21 February ). Their clinical analysis is well argued but they make a significant error in stating that the McLeod syndrome ‘is exclusive to Kell positive individuals’. The McLeod syndrome is associated with a rare X-linked genetic variant of the XK blood group system. The XK gene is inherited independently of the Kell blood group system. Therefore, had Henry suffered from the McLeod syndrome, there would still have been an 80 per cent probability of his being genetically K-negative.

Any speculative differential diagnosis to account for the unfortunate obstetric histories of Henry’s wives might well include haemolytic disease of the foetus and newborn (HDFN) due to maternal alloimmunisation by a foetal red cell antigen. However, prior to the introduction of blood transfusion, HDFN due to anti-K (Kell) would have occurred less frequently than it does today. Furthermore, the natural history of the disorder makes it unlikely that all of Henry’s conceiving wives and mistresses, had he been K-positive, would have been afflicted in the way the historical record seems to demand. Without the certainty that Henry was K-positive, the argument is further weakened.

A medical maxim aimed at curbing fanciful diagnoses reminds the clinician that common disorders account for the vast majority of ailments. The McLeod syndrome is extremely rare. Henry’s several problems as described by Whitley and Kramer would not put this diagnosis near the top of my list.

Gerald Smith London W4

Vol. 35 No. 7 · 11 April 2013

I’m indebted to Gerald Smith for his expert take on the health of Henry VIII ( Letters, 21 March ). I don’t in fact endorse the Whitley-Kramer postulate that Henry was Kell positive and went on to develop McLeod syndrome; I just throw it on the table, because it’s an interesting idea that encourages us to think again about the unhappy pregnancies of Henry’s first two wives and his own late-life afflictions. If biology was working against him, his striving for a healthy male heir, which conditioned so much of the history of his reign, was an even sadder enterprise than we have imagined.

If Henry had been the lecher of legend, and had slept with more women and sired more children, we would have more to go on. I think the Whitley-Kramer explanation is maybe overelaborate. As Smith says, the McLeod syndrome is very rare. There are more common conditions that could have led the later Henry to be obese, immobile, suspicious and miserable. And, as I said in my lecture, we should not underestimate the way that chronic pain (in his case from a leg ulcer) afflicts not just the body but the personality and the intellect.

As for the two unhappy wives, there’s no reason to suppose that their pregnancies failed for a shared reason. Henry may have thought so – in each case, God was not pleased with him – but we don’t have to think the same. Again, we don’t have all the information. We can’t be sure how many babies were lost, because the Tudors didn’t ring the bells for a royal miscarriage. Katherine of Aragon’s long history of multiple miscarriages and neo-natal deaths suggests more than common misfortune, but Anne Boleyn’s pattern of two or possibly three miscarriages is harder to read. The third wife, Jane Seymour, died after giving birth to her first child, so we don’t know what pattern might have emerged. And none of Henry’s later wives conceived. It’s interesting that Katherine’s surviving daughter, Mary, was an undergrown child and suffered poor health through her life, while Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth, enjoyed a glowing girlhood and proved to be a tough old bird.

People do tend to believe the worst of Henry, and it’s taken years to shake off the old notion that he had syphilis. So any new ideas are worth airing. And – I speak feelingly, as a person of expanding girth and diverse afflictions – a bit of posthumous sympathy doesn’t go amiss.

Hilary Mantel Budleigh Salterton, Devon

Vol. 35 No. 9 · 9 May 2013

Some of Hilary Mantel’s assertions about the two daughters of Henry VIII reiterate the conventional but increasingly suspect dichotomy between them ( Letters, 11 April ). Although an ambassador’s report did describe Mary as ‘not tall’, that does not endorse Mantel’s view of her as an ‘undergrown child’, and I am unaware of any evidence that does. Mary’s health, like that of most of her contemporaries, varied considerably, but from her own accounts her ailments were often due to seasonal allergies. The many ways that Mary was an admired ornament of Henry’s court were described by ambassadors at the time.

We know much less about the early years of Anne Boleyn’s daughter, but Mantel’s version of Elizabeth’s ‘glowing girlhood’ apparently ignores her consistent relegation to the status of the king’s least important child. Indeed, at one point he barred his younger daughter from his court and from communication with him for the better part of a year.

Judith Richards Melbourne

Vol. 35 No. 5 · 7 March 2013

Hilary Mantel urged the media, when dealing with royal stories, not to ‘behave like spectators at Bedlam’ ( LRB , 21 February ). They have behaved like the inmates instead.

Walter Hemmens Knockholt, Kent

Will the duchess be given a right of reply?

Yvonne Smith Leura, New South Wales

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Why does the Royal Family remain? The better question is, what does Britain even stand for anymore?

The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee is giving Britons four days off to reflect on how much their country has changed in 70 years – and how little they agree about where it should go next

This article was published more than 1 year ago. Some information may no longer be current.

Tom Rachman is a Canadian-British writer based in London. His new novel, The Imposters , comes out next year.

Horses dragged the golden carriage through London, eight glum beasts clopping no faster than you’d walk, owing to the tonnage of the absurd vehicle , with its carved cherubs, palm trees and sea gods blowing conch shells. Within the red-velvet interior, a 27-year-old woman endured the ride past the gawking crowds, kids on shoulders, grownups on tiptoes. Soon, black-and-white newsreels of the coronation travelled by sea to the old colonies, where spectators in dark cinemas pondered this woman in her rolling jewel box, she a descendent, they descendants, too, tied by history, opposite ends of the fraying rope of empire.

“Now that we crown Her as our Queen,” the poet laureate, John Masefield, wrote 70 years ago. “May this old land revive and be/Again a star set in the sea.”

Even back then, Britain knew it had come down in the world, and yearned for a resurgence. But would the second Elizabethan era make Britain great again?

Decades on, as the United Kingdom marks the Queen’s platinum jubilee with pageantry at the palace and pints at the pub, Britain is not quite “a star set in the sea.” It’s a disunited kingdom, humbled but not humble, lurching between bombast and insecurity. To the faithful, her jubilee is a jolly occasion to flap union flags, and perhaps summon national unity after all the bruises of Brexit. To skeptics, it’s nothing but a bore, even an affront, this rah-rah and curtsying to people whose ancestors happened to be better warlords than yours.

As for Elizabeth, she has – by abstaining on most matters that matter – spent a lifetime avoiding controversy, instead projecting a model of unimpeachable service, often in the form of ribbon-snipping. Older than almost everyone, she is Britain’s great-grandmother, dignified but mirthless, and always there. Only, a 96-year-old will not always be there, and the indulgence granted to Britain’s longest-serving monarch will not apply to her successors.

They will be urged to take moral positions, will resist and will blunder either way, prompting questions about why a Royal Family remains – and what Britain itself stands for anymore.

Since Elizabeth II’s ascent in 1952, the United Kingdom has transformed , economically and in terms of its citizenry, adding millions of people with origins in the former colonies, plus millions more from continental Europe. This has enriched the culture beyond measure, not to mention bettering the food. The transformation has also challenged traditional notions of Britishness, dismaying those who feel the past was theirs, the present is less so.

This disquiet exploded into view with the identity crisis named Brexit, whose guiding neurosis was that an island could become mightier if isolated: that Britannia might again rule the waves, would rival the 27 countries of the European Union, and revive the spirit of the Blitz. In short, the future would be the past.

But the past isn’t only for nostalgics. Activists, too, are scrutinizing what Britain has been, and they demand a reckoning with the brutality of empire. On occasion, the Queen has met with direct criticism, as during a 1986 trip to New Zealand, when protesters pelted her with eggs and a Maori man spun around to expose his tattooed buttocks. Yet the royals – that epitome of unearned privilege and its thread to colonization – have faced surprisingly limited pressure to answer for the past. That is changing.

On Prince Charles’s recent visit to Canada, Indigenous leaders demanded that his mother say sorry for historical crimes.

Two months earlier, Prince William conducted a tone-deaf trip to Belize, the Bahamas and Jamaica, where protesters called for reparations over slavery, which his ancestors, starting with Elizabeth I, endorsed and profited from. A half-dozen Caribbean countries are now likely to break with the British monarch as ceremonial head-of-state.

Barbados did so in November, prompting Prince Charles to declare that the atrocity of slavery “forever stains our history.” As for the Queen, her defenders say it’s not her place to issue a formal apology for Britain: The monarch is a figurehead, restricted from expressing opinions that could seem political. According to the official line , the sovereign is there “as a focus for national identity, unity and pride.” If so, her role is a paradox: represent the nation – yet stand for little.

When Britain could’ve broken apart in the 2014 referendum on Scottish secession, the Queen merely expressed hope that voters “think very carefully about the future.” On Brexit – whose fallout once more threatens to fracture the kingdom – she has revealed no public opinion. In 1995, she did worry aloud about the coming Quebec independence referendum, but only when fooled by a Montreal radio host into believing she was speaking privately with prime minister Jean Chrétien.

As stated in a review of two new books on the royals (1,296 pages combined): “None of the authors discussed here has managed to track down a single new interesting thing the Queen has said or flush an opinion she holds.”

So what would merit a royal intervention? For instance, if a sociopath with a taste for fascism took power, as keeps happening elsewhere, would the Queen speak up? I’m not sure.

The organization Republic – with the slogan “Make Elizabeth the Last” – campaigns to replace the Crown with a head-of-state who has accomplished something on her own merit, someone aspirational, someone elected. For now, most Britons still prefer a hereditary monarchy. But support is eroding . In 2016, 76 per cent were in favour. By late last year, it was down to 60 per cent. Young Britons are split , with almost as many wishing for an elected head of state.

The recent scandal of Prince Andrew, who denied a sex-abuse claim, then paid a large settlement to end his accuser’s lawsuit, has damaged the royal reputation, as have tensions with Prince Harry and his biracial wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who said a member of the Royal Family expressed concerns about how dark their children’s skin would be.

A common (but disputed ) argument is that the royals are good for tourism. They also cost public money, receiving an annual grant to conduct their official duties, including paying the servants and holding garden parties. The latest payment was £86.3-million, or $140-million.

A suspicion of pomp and power has history here, from Oliver Cromwell’s rebels beheading King Charles I in 1649; to the English-born agitator Thomas Paine (and his American revolutionary brethren) ridiculing the monarchy as a system that crowns “an ass for a lion”; to George Orwell describing England as “a family with the wrong members in control.”

But equally, the British have scorned revolt, considering radicalism a vanity, possibly of French extraction, or for the wild Bolshevik. The tendency (till Brexit) was to muddle along, merely patching worn practices against present-day leakiness, as with the decrepit , mouse-infested Houses of Parliament. This worked as long as Britain – despite class tensions – had a sense of nationhood. In 1941, when Nazi bombers dropped bombs on Britain, Orwell wrote : “At the approach of an enemy, it closes its ranks.”

Yet this Blitz spirit – island-dwellers standing bravely apart; protecting the vulnerable; suffering hardships together; holding fast to their green fields and burbling brooks – this itself became a much-patched, much-repurposed myth, sometimes drifting into chauvinism. Britain doesn’t need the Europeans, with their shifty bureaucrats! They need us!

The irony is that nothing in memory undermined the nation as much as nationalism, the Brexit hubris that relegated the country internationally, punctured its economy and cleaved the population so sharply that – even six years after the vote – “Remain” or “Leave” can seem stronger affiliations than the passport.

Now, Boris Johnson and his Brexiteer chums hold power, partying in violation of COVID-19 restrictions, undermining the peace in Northern Ireland and scheming to dump migrants in Rwanda. As for the burbling brooks of English legend, they’re pumped with raw sewage .

Perhaps this is what a queen is for. Not, to be clear, for dealing with raw sewage. But simply to exist: a British public figure who still respects rules.

When her husband died last year, Elizabeth sat at his funeral among rows of empty church seats. Prince Philip had been her partner for 73 years, the private confidant of a public figure with few outlets for her true self. She could’ve bypassed COVID regulations that day, but declined. Others grieved alone. So would she.

Still, why cheer a clan of rich strangers? Why follow their sagas, both tawdry and tedious?

C. S. Lewis, author of the classic children’s novels The Chronicles of Narnia , argued that people crave heroes, so democracies must provide healthy choices. “Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters,” he said in 1943, when Hitler and Stalin were still in power. “For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

Ever since those poisonous times, liberal thinkers have struggled for a healthy incarnation of national pride, one that doesn’t end up in the invasion of Poland. But Britain today is so complex and so polarized that it’s not obvious what to settle on.

When my son’s nursery pledged to teach kids “British values,” I almost laughed – not only because telling toddlers about the rule-of-law seemed optimistic, but because I myself wasn’t certain what “British values” were.

Whether you believe the royals embody any values worth teaching may link to your view of the British Empire, and if you consider it an evil or a good.

But this balance-sheet view of history is folly, says Sathnam Sanghera, author of the influential bestseller Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain . You cannot reduce centuries of history, involving hundreds of millions of people, to a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, he contends.

Mr. Sanghera – raised in Wolverhampton, the son of Punjabi immigrants – wants Britain to study the imperial past more forthrightly, including its many wrongs. He also takes patriotic pride in British historical achievements.

“After all, the British empire, on which the sun famously never set, was not only the biggest thing that ever happened to us, but one of the biggest things that ever happened to the world,” he writes. “The problems begin when you miss it, when you fail to remember what actually happened – when these empires of the mind become a toxic cocktail of nostalgia and amnesia.”

Since the Brexit vote, writers have been trudging around these drizzled isles, and returning a steady downpour of state-of-the-nation tomes with titles such as Who Are We Now? , a recent volume by Jason Cowley. “An attachment to the nation and the flag is often strongest among those groups who are struggling or feel excluded or scorned,” he notes.

That might seem strange: snubbed by society, you revere its symbols? Then again, if trapped in a dismal job or surviving on state benefits, left out and left behind, you’d reasonably long for triumphs, even reflected ones, whether from family, or a sports team, or celebrities or royals. Inequality remains a cruel feature of Britain, with the poor watching the rich, and finding no point of entry. A woman in the most-deprived part of England can expect to die eight years earlier than her counterpart in the wealthiest area; for men, it’s a staggering 10 years less life.

To associate yourself with anything that makes you feel less small, that you don’t need to compete for but is unconditionally yours – surely, this longing is understandable, when even the lucky and confident dread where politics is headed and what tech is making us; are stressed about soaring prices, the war in Ukraine, insanity in the culture; afraid of hackers and viruses, both digital and respiratory; bewildered by online trends that seem ridiculous till they obsess millions, and you must join or be left behind. Not to mention the environment.

So, no, it’s not mad to want something to hold onto, something stable, a comfort. For some, the royals are that.

But eventually, Elizabeth will exhaust her jubilees. Old clips will play, chronicling her voyages around the former empire (perhaps editing out footage of her watching “native displays”). It’ll depict her affection for corgis and her disaffection with Princess Di (relatable as a royal oughtn’t to be). It’ll capture a rigid role-player, waving to us in that slow-motion karate chop: known to billions, hardly known at all, a hunched old human in the end, supporting herself on the walking stick of her late husband.

You can condemn the Queen for what she should’ve said. On the other hand, should one who merely inherited the job wield the power to nudge people this way or that? If the royals ever become political, the family business probably collapses.

So, from the start, the Queen was stuck in a golden carriage, rolled around town, and honoured – provided she didn’t do much besides keep up a blinking crown of 1,333 diamonds that, technically, isn’t even her property .

Some day, glum horses will drag a new monarch through the streets of London in that same horribly uncomfortable golden carriage, greeted by crowds whose cheers will ring out – but with less ardour than once.

The new emperor’s clothing could unravel fast. And perhaps that’d match his royal highness to the times: an ordinary man in extraordinary headgear, on a little island that once looked larger from afar.

Illustration by Salini Perera

Monarchy’s past and future: More from The Globe and Mail

The decibel.

Why was 2021 the moment Barbados chose to declare itself a republic? Kareem Smith, a reporter for the online publication Barbados Today, spoke with The Decibel about how a younger generation made it happen. Subscribe for more episodes.

Editorial: Canada’s monarchy is here to stay. Embrace it

John Fraser: The Queen may be 96, but that doesn’t mean the end of the monarchy is near

Kris Manjapra: For the Royals, slavery is a family affair. They need to show remorse, not sorrow, for their role in its history

Alex Renton: Racism was a cornerstone of the British Empire, including Canada. Reparative justice can help to right these wrongs

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Articles on Royal Family

Displaying 1 - 20 of 95 articles.

Announcing Kate Middleton’s cancer diagnosis should have been simple. But the palace let it get out of hand

Victoria Fielding , University of Adelaide and Saira Ali , University of Adelaide

Princess of Wales and King Charles: one in two people develop cancer during their lives – the diseases and treatments explained

Gavin Metcalf , Anglia Ruskin University

The Kate Middleton photo scandal: When does editing become manipulation?

Bethany Berard , Carleton University

The PR silence around Princess Kate’s well-being fuels frenzy about photo mishap

Terry Flynn , McMaster University and Alex Sévigny , McMaster University

Where’s Kate? Speculation over the ‘missing’ princess proves the Palace’s media playbook needs a re-write

Naomi Smith , University of the Sunshine Coast and Amy Clarke , University of the Sunshine Coast

How to navigate a parent’s cancer diagnosis – like Princes William and Harry will now have to do

Lydia Harkin , Nottingham Trent University

The royals have historically been tight-lipped about their health – but that never stopped the gossip

Lisa J. Hackett , University of New England ; Huw Nolan , University of New England , and Jo Coghlan , University of New England

Who owns the royal body? Public interest in royal health reveals anxieties about our rulers

Lisa Smith , University of Essex and Rachel Rich , Leeds Beckett University

Queen Margrethe II is the first Danish monarch to abdicate in 900 years – but it is just a sign of the times

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski , Australian Catholic University

Trudeau separation: Divorce is common for most people, but still rare for political leaders

Rod Phillips , Carleton University

Dismay over King Charles’s coronation raises questions about Canada’s ties to the monarchy

Jeffrey B. Meyers , Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Busting a king-sized myth: why Australia and NZ could become republics – and still stay in the Commonwealth

James Mehigan , University of Canterbury

What the coronations of maximalist George IV and (relatively) minimalist Charles III reveal about the British monarchy

Natalee Garrett , The Open University

King Charles coronation: what impartial broadcast coverage of the event would look like

Stephen Cushion , Cardiff University

What Prince Harry’s memoir Spare tells us about ‘complicated grief’ and the long-term impact of losing a mother so young

Sarah Wayland , University of New England

Spare: how the soap opera around Prince Harry’s memoir will affect the royal brand

Pauline Maclaran , Royal Holloway University of London

Netflix’s Harry & Meghan: the Sussexes are not unique in being royal victims

Robert Hazell , UCL and Bob Morris , UCL

Why Prince Andrew and Prince Harry can fill in for the King, and how the law might change

Craig Prescott , Bangor University

Karl, Karel or Karol? The translation confusion over King Charles III’s name, explained

Neil Bermel , University of Sheffield

King Charles will redistribute hundreds of charity patronages – here’s why they are such an important part of royal life

John Tribe , University of Liverpool

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What are the pros and cons of the monarchy?

Majority of Britons still favour having a royal family but support is waning

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The royals mark their first Christmas with King Charles on the throne

1. Pro: popular with public

2. con: cost to taxpayers, 3. pro: ‘soft’ power benefits uk, 4. con: no place in equal society, 5. pro: boosts national unity, 6. con: undemocratic.

Spare: the leaks, the quotes, the damage King Charles coronation: all the details and who’s attending Queen Elizabeth II: stories from an extraordinary life

As King Charles III’s coronation approaches, the role of the monarchy in modern Britain is under renewed scrutiny.

Supporters argue that the monarchy provides a sense of national identity and stability, but critics insist it is an outdated institution that perpetuates elitism and inequality within British society.

Efforts to modernise the coronation ceremony, including a proposed “Homage of the People”, have triggered further debate. The invitation to swear allegiance to the King has met with reactions ranging from approval to “mild bemusement” or “plain disgust”, according to The Guardian .

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The royal family has been mired in a series of controveries in recent years. Prince Andrew’s friendship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein triggered a PR disaster that was exacerbated by his car-crash Newsnight interview in 2019. And the reported rift between Prince Harry and other senior royals including his brother William continues to be a headache for the monarchy.

Here are the arguments for and against keeping the centuries-old institution.

The monarchy as a whole “has long enjoyed broad, albeit declining, support among Britons, even if several of its individual members have not”, said Time magazine. Despite fears, Prince Harry’s scathing biography, Spare , “did little to dent the royal family’s popularity” – although his own ratings fell to a record low.

Support for retaining the monarchy in the UK increased briefly to 67% following the death of Queen Elizabeth in September, up from 62% at the time of her Platinum Jubilee in May 2022, according to YouGov polling.

But as of last month, support had dropped back down to 62% – significantly lower than a decade ago, when backing for the institution was as high as 75%.

Today, attitudes to the monarchy differ dramatically by age, with only 36% of younger Britons in favour of keeping the monarchy, compared with 79% of over-65s.

The “first and most obvious challenge” for King Charles will be to “maintain popular support”, said Robert Hazell, professor of government and the constitution at University College London. “Modern monarchy no longer depends on divine grace, but the consent of the people,” he wrote in a guest paper for the Institute for Government last December. He warned that if public support “does start to dwindle”, the government might come under pressure to reduce funding for the royals, as has happened in Spain.

The monarchy is supported financially by UK taxpayers via the Sovereign Grant, which covers central staffing costs and expenses for the monarch’s official households, maintenance of the royal palaces in England, and travel and royal engagements and visits.

Accounts for the Sovereign Grant, released in June, showed that this cost £102.4m in 2021/22, an increase of 17% from the previous financial year.

“At a time when all we keep hearing about is the cost-of-living crisis and our bills rising, the thought of the monarchy costing us over £100m last year is eye-watering,” said Rhiannon Mills, royal correspondent for Sky News . To be fair, said Mills, a lot of their engagements have focused on people struggling financially. But they will “inevitably always face the criticism of ‘how can they understand?’ when their family is one of the most privileged in the country”.

The cost of the coronation of King Charles III has not been confirmed, but was predicted to be “around £100m”, according to the London Evening Standard .

The funding sources for the coronation include the sovereign grant and the UK government, according to a Buckingham Palace spokesperson, but that the bill will be footed at least in part by the taxpayer has sparked public concern.

A YouGov poll carried out around two weeks before the crowning on 6 May found that more than half of respondents did not believe the government should fund the coronation, compared to around a third who did.

Many critics have called for more transparency and clarity on the final total.

The Queen was a source of British “soft power” and diplomatic influence throughout her 70-year reign, making countless state visits and foreign tours that brought benefits for national security, influence and trade.

A 2017 report by consultancy agency Brand Finance said that the monarchy generated an estimated £150m worth of trade for the UK each year. And combined with contributions including surplus revenues from the Crown Estate, which go to the Treasury, and money from tourism, the total estimated gain for the UK economy was almost £1.8bn.

“Measuring the wealth-generation of a brand is no easy task, especially when it comes to the royal family,” noted Sebastian Shehadi at Investment Monitor , but their influence on the UK economy “spans the likes of trade, tourism, media, real estate and heritage sites, foreign investment and much more”.

Critics of the monarchy argue that having a system of hereditary power at the top of the country’s political, military and religious institutions perpetuates class divisions and inequality.

Political journalist and author Eve Livingston argued in The Independent that the royal family “exist as a glaring symbol of the unearned privilege and inequality that pervades the roots of British society”.

And it is not just in Britain that the monarch’s role as head of state is increasingly under scrutiny. Elizabeth’s reign was “bookended by periods of great uncertainty about Britain’s role on the world stage”, said Foreign Policy . She “was coronated in 1953 as the sun was beginning to set on the British Empire, and her death comes as the country reexamines its place in the world”. There are increasing calls for the UK to “reckon with its colonial history”, said the magazine, while republican sentiment is gaining traction in the Caribbean.

Supporters of a constitutional monarchy say it “represents a constant and lasting connection to the country’s past” and they stress the importance of having a head of state who is “above party politics or factional interests”, said Politics.co.uk . This neutrality means “the Crown can help secure smooth and peaceful handovers of political power and restrain abuses of authority”, said The Telegraph .

The royal family’s official website added that the monarch provides “a focus for national identity, unity and pride; gives a sense of stability and continuity; officially recognises success and excellence; and supports the ideal of voluntary service”.

Martin Kettle in The Guardian described Elizabeth’s seven decades on the throne “as a low-key but extremely effective unifying force”. But he warned that it was one “her heirs cannot assume they will be able to replicate”, especially if the now-King Charles “fails to earn the breadth of respect that Elizabeth enjoyed”.

Campaign group Republic and other anti-monarchists argue that “hereditary public office goes against every democratic principle”.

Calling for the monarch to be replaced with an elected head of state, the group said that because the public cannot hold the royal family to account at the ballot box, “there’s nothing to stop them abusing their privilege, misusing their influence or simply wasting our money”.

The monarch “can only ever act in the interests of the government of the day and does not represent ordinary voters”, according to the campaigners, who insist that “the monarchy is a broken institution” that should be scrapped in favour of an elected head of state who “could really represent our hopes and aspirations – and help us keep politicians in check”.

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Sorcha Bradley is a writer at The Week and a regular on “The Week Unwrapped” podcast. She worked at The Week magazine for a year and a half before taking up her current role with the digital team, where she mostly covers UK current affairs and politics. Before joining The Week, Sorcha worked at slow-news start-up Tortoise Media. She has also written for Sky News, The Sunday Times, the London Evening Standard and Grazia magazine, among other publications. She has a master’s in newspaper journalism from City, University of London, where she specialised in political journalism.

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Hilary Mantel Takes On Royals and Rebels in a Book of Essays

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By Fernanda Eberstadt

Oct. 8, 2020

MANTEL PIECES Royal Bodies and Other Writing From The London Review of Books By Hilary Mantel

The person we meet at the beginning of Hilary Mantel’s collection of essays is 35 and has already published two novels. She’s immensely ambitious, but she’s had some obstacles to literary success: She’s female; she’s the daughter of Irish Catholic millworkers; she comes from a village in England’s industrial North; she has had to support herself as a barmaid, medical social worker and department-store assistant; she is married to the boy she met at 16 and has followed him to postings in Africa and the Middle East; she’s dogged by a chronic illness. And finally, most damning: Her chosen genre, historical fiction, is considered down-market. All of which means it will take her a bit longer to become herself — or rather, to persuade the world of her prodigious powers. She’s still a long way from becoming Dame Hilary, internationally renowned author of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy.

“Mantel Pieces,” which includes nearly 30 years of Mantel’s essays for The London Review of Books , accompanied by facsimiles of her correspondence with its editors, is the story of an outsider finding her literary home. When the book opens, it’s 1987, and Mantel, with exaggerated self-deprecation, is offering her services to a magazine she considers the finest in Europe. “I was in awe of my paymasters,” she confesses in her introduction, and had decided to say “‘yes’ to anything, especially if it frightened me.”

Fear is a running theme — and essential motive — in Mantel’s makeup. The chosen subjects of her novels and essays are frankly hair-raising: child murders, ghosts, the French Revolution and the Tudor monarchy — a period, as she writes, that signifies “terror in the name of the church and torture in the name of the state.”

As a child, “I was often very frightened and the imprint of that fear stays with me,” she has said in an interview. Fear alternates with a formidable though somewhat specialized curiosity throughout this collection, as if knowledge — the child’s need to decode the system of “pipes and drains, culverts and sewers” beneath her feet — is the only thing that will keep her alive.

In the early pieces, we see a working critic accepting assignments that don’t so much frighten as bore her. Her riffs on Madonna and “ The Hite Report ” offer the kind of acid one-liners English critics can reel out in their sleep, whereas what we need her to do is explain the world to us. Her true province is history, and it’s only once Mantel-as-reviewer digs down hard into its rich soil, delving into biographies of Tudor aristocrats or Danton or Robespierre or Marie Antoinette — fortune’s darlings who end up headless in the Tower or the Tuileries — that she truly warms up, moving into a prose whose rhythmic and allusive range, whose nonchalance, bite and wayward erudition are always surprising, often thrilling. A Mantel essay will take you from the Children’s Crusade of 1212 to the Liverpool supermarket where a toddler is lured to his death. Is the author teasing us? Is such magic legal?

A good third of “Mantel Pieces” is devoted to kings and queens and courtiers, another third to the revolutionaries who are out to string them up. It’s clear where Mantel’s sympathies lie: Royals are mythic, archaic, “both gods and beasts,” but it’s their assassins — the stiff-backed, lawyerly, provincial fanatics — whom she loves. (It’s revealing that in her “Wolf Hall” trilogy she manages to spin her protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, not as courtier but as revolutionary: radical Protestant, protocapitalist numbers-cruncher.)

“Mantel Pieces” includes the author’s most celebrated essay, “Royal Bodies.” When The London Review published it in 2013, there were death threats, practically, from Britain’s right-wing press . Mantel’s offense was to compare Kate Middleton, Prince William’s wife, to a plastic doll. But actually the essay’s most incendiary moment is when Mantel, at a Buckingham Palace reception, finds herself staring at the queen: “I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.” “The force of my devouring curiosity,” she writes, was enough to make Elizabeth II look back over her shoulder with an expression of “hurt bewilderment.”

Mantel doesn’t hate the queen; she’s just curious about the hole in her center, the fact that monarchy has made her “a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed.”

This anti-institutional bent is what drives Mantel’s imaginative intelligence, flaming out in unexpected places. It drives her to describe the Virgin Mary statuettes that haunt her Catholic girlhood, perched in niches like CCTV cameras, watching her every move with “painted eyes of policeman blue.” It drives her in “The Hair Shirt Sisterhood,” a brilliant disquisition on eating disorders, sainthood and the church’s misogyny, to a defense of young girls who choose anorexia: “It is a way of shrinking back, of reserving, preserving the self. … For a year or two, it may be a valid strategy; to be greensick, to be out of the game; to die just a little; to nourish the inner being while starving the outer being; to buy time.”

The origins of her resistance to institutional power, her sympathy for the unsympathetic, Mantel has examined in an earlier memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost.” She describes the first day of school in her industrial Derbyshire village: “I thought that I had come among lunatics; and the teachers, malign and stupid, seemed to me like the lunatics’ keepers. I knew you must not give in to them.” Education is the traditional leg up for clever children from rackety working-class backgrounds like hers. Mantel, however, from her first glimpse of a classroom, recognized “the need to resist what I found there.”

She might say the same of her experience of the medical establishment, as glanced at in “Meeting the Devil,” an essay in “Mantel Pieces.” Riven since puberty by agonizing period pains and torrential bleeding, Mantel is gaslighted for decades by (male) doctors who palm her off with antidepressants and, yes, antipsychotics. Even after she has correctly diagnosed her own endometriosis and undergone an operation removing her ovaries and uterus, as well as part of her bladder and bowels, the pain and exhaustion are unrelenting. The drugs Mantel will need to take for the rest of her life cause gargantuan weight gain. The author of these essays, you are reminded, is someone in chronic pain, someone whose own body has become unrecognizable to her. What she’s left with is the ferociously lucid mind, the unruly delight of her mocking and self-mocking humor.

My favorite sentence in this book is uncharacteristically quiet, almost plaintive, let fall sotto voce in the middle of a hospital-bed memory: “I wonder, though, if there is a little saint you can apply to, if you are a person with holes in them?”

I suspect we all are people with holes in them, and there are many saints to apply to. For those who feel compelled to examine not just their own “perforations” but the world’s, St. Hilary is your woman.

Fernanda Eberstadt’s novels include “The Furies” and “RAT.”

MANTEL PIECES Royal Bodies and Other Writing From The London Review of Books By Hilary Mantel 333 pp. 4th Estate. $26.99.

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82 Monarchy Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best monarchy topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 simple & easy monarchy essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on monarchy, ❓ questions about monarchy.

Queen Elizabeth I as the Greatest Monarch in England Queen Elizabeth, I was a pragmatic leader and she knew that if she married a foreigner she would put England’s future in jeopardy by relinquishing her power to her husband.
Deuteronomistic History: The Rise and Fall of Israelite Monarchy A monarch can fix it by always having the copy of God’s law on him to “read it all the days of his life” and follow God’s word. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
In a Democratic Britain, the Monarchy Is an Anachronism The presence of the queen as the head of state instils a sense of responsibility and ethics among the political leaders.
Critique of Thomas Hobbes’ Views on Monarchy According to him, man is naturally violent, and thus, there is a need for the establishment of an authoritative government in the form of a monarchy to check and contain the violent nature of man.
Editorial on British Monarchy Abolishment The editorial by Alaeddini takes the view that before taking the radical decision of abolishing the system, there is a need to change it to ensure that it reflects the current socio-political and economic environment […]
Elizabeth I of England as a Very Successful Monarch The achievements of her rule are very important for solving a row of difficult problems existing in the country those days and for leading the country on a new level of the world supremacy both […]
The History of Queen Lydia Liliuokalani: The Last Monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii Queen Lydia Liliuokalani was the last monarch to rule the Kingdom of Hawaii before it was annexed to the United States of America.
Absolute and Constitutional Monarchy A constitutional monarchy, as the name shows, is a regime based on the division of powers between the king and the legislative body like the Parliament with the supreme power of the Constitution.
Absolute Monarchy: Pro- and Counterarguments in the 17th Century The ideas of absolute monarchy in the 17th century were reinforced by the belief that rulers’ right to govern was given by the power of God.
George III and the Role of Monarchy Though the role of monarchy in the society is often underrated, monarchy, in fact, defines a range of features of the society in question, including its economic and financial status; it defines the national identity […]
The Downfall of Pentheus: The Clash of a Monarch and a God Although it is traditionally considered that the key reason behind Pentheus’s death was his denial of Dionysos as a god, it can also be argued that Pentheus’s non-acceptance of Dionysos was only the factor, while […]
Monarchy in Canada The first reason why the monarchy in Canada should not be abolished is that it creates stability and continuity in the country.
The Origin of the Disagreements Between the Spanish Monarchy and the Castilian Cortes
The Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy: France From Old Regime to Revolution
The Development of a Limited Monarchy in England
What Characteristics of Monarchy Emerge From A Study of the English History Plays of William Shakespeare
The English Parliament and the French Monarchy
The American Revolution: Monarchy to Democracy
The Monarchy of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile
The Idea of Monarchy in Common Sense, a Book by Thomas Paine
Stature and Nutrition in the Habsburg Monarchy: The Standard of Living and Economic Development
The Development of Italian Monarchy from 1861 up to 1870
The Concept of Absolute Monarchy in King Lear by William Shakespeare
King Lear’s Self-Awareness Riding High Upon the Wave of Power Associated With the Monarchy
Turbulence in Politics and Government: Absolute Monarchy
Princess Diana’s Effect on the United Kingdom and the Monarchy
William Shakespeares View on Monarchy Expressed Through His Play Macbeth
The Monarchy Challenged the Papal’s Authority by the End of the Middle Ages
The Issues within the Monarchy That Sparked the French Revolution
The Loss and Restoration of French Monarchy
To What Degree Did the Battle of Actium Mark the Establishment of a Monarchy
The Absolute Monarchy of Austria During the 17th and 18th Centuries
The Democracy Monarchy Cycle, An Essay on the Theories of Hobbes
The Articles of Confederation and the British Monarchy During the Coloni
Monarchy vs. Self : Government, the Morality of the Monarchy
Religious Interests and Political Interests in the Spanish Monarchy
The Irresponsibility of European Monarchy
The Benefits of the UK Having a Constitutional Monarchy
The Benefits and Consequences of the Past and Present Monarchy Government
The Abolition of the Monarchy Affect New Zealand’s
The Failure of Monarchy in King Lear, a Play by William Shakespeare
The Constitutional Monarchy: The Beginning of Liberalism
The Development of Constitutional Monarchy in England
The Impact of Spanish American Revolutions on the Spanish Monarchy
The Responsibility of the Monarchy for Their Own Downfall in 1793
The Coevolution of Economic and Political Development From Monarchy to Democracy
The Life and Times of Victoria Ka’iulani, Member of Hawaiian Monarchy
To What Extent Did The Valois-Habsburg Conflict Weaken the French Monarchy During the Period of 1519-1529
The Relationship of the American Colonists and the British Monarchy
Roles of the British Monarchy: Existent, Relevant, and Important
The Greeks and Non-Greeks Under the Ptolomeic Monarchy
Terminating Hyperinflation in the Dismembered Habsburg Monarchy
Valois-Habsburg Wars and Its Contribution to the Weakening of the French Monarchy During the 1519-1529
The Best Form of Government Between Monarchy, Dictatorship, and Democracy
The English Bill of Rights: The Role Change for the Monarchy
The Key Points of the Concept, Role and Challenges of a Constitutional Monarchy
Why Did The Restored Bourbon Monarchy Fail in France
What Is a Monarchy in Government?
What Country Is a Monarchy Today?
Is the UK a Monarchy?
How Does a Monarchy Take Power?
Which Countries Use Monarchy?
How Many Countries Have a Monarchy?
Who Is the Most Famous Monarch in the World?
What Are the Benefits of Monarchy?
What Is the Best Example of Monarchy?
What Are the Laws of Monarchy?
What Countries No Longer Have a Monarchy?
Is Japan a Monarchy Country?
Which Country Abolished Monarchy?
Who Is the Longest Monarchy in the World?
Who Is the Oldest Monarchy in the World?
Is Monarchy Good for a Country?
Who Started Monarchy?
How Does Monarchy Treat the Citizens?
Why Does Monarchy Fail?
Why Is a Monarchy Weak?
How Does a Monarchy Gain Power?
Do People Have Rights in a Monarchy?
Will England Ever Get Rid of the Monarchy?
What Is It Called When You Go Against the Monarchy?
Is North Korea a Monarchy?
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IvyPanda. (2024, March 2). 82 Monarchy Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/monarchy-essay-topics/

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1. IvyPanda . "82 Monarchy Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/monarchy-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "82 Monarchy Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/monarchy-essay-topics/.

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Hilary Mantel’s prediction about Prince George and the royal family

Late author said in an interview that it was ‘hard to understand the thinking behind the monarchy in the modern world’, article bookmarked.

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British author Hilary Mantel was known almost as much for her observations about the current British royal family as she was for her works of historical fiction.

For instance, in September 2021, the late author said that she did not believe that Prince George, the eldest son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, would ever be crowned king.

She also estimated that the royal family could be defunct within two generations.

“I think it’s a fair prediction, but let’s say I wouldn’t put money on it,” she told The Times . “It’s hard to understand the thinking behind the monarchy in the modern world when people are just seen as celebrities.”

Prince George is the eldest child of Prince William and Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales. He is currently the second in line to the throne, behind his father . He was third in line until King Charles succeeded his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II , following her death on 8 September 2022.

King Charles ‘tired and infuriated’ as Prince Andrew ‘refuses to leave Royal Lodge’, report says
Inside Royal Lodge: Prince Andrew’s 30-room mansion that Prince William ‘has his eye on’
Queen Elizabeth II was ‘surprised’ when Meghan Markle ‘dismissed’ her advice, new book claims

Mantel claimed at the time that the Queen and Charles did their jobs “as well as anyone possibly could”, and “take it as seriously as anyone could”.

Asked about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s much-publicised disputes with the royal family , she said: “I’ve tried to sort of keep out of the Meghan thing because I think it’s far too soon to have an opinion. And anyway, all of us commentators are part of the problem.

“I’d like us all to say less. And let them have a chance to find some resolution.”

In 2013, Mantel caused controversy when she referred to the Princess of Wales as a “shop window mannequin” whose sole purpose was to provide an heir to the throne.

During a lecture at the British Museum, she claimed that the Duchess had no personality and described her as “gloss-varnished”.

She was subsequently criticised by public figures including the then-prime minister, David Cameron, who said Mantel was “completely wrong” in her remarks.

However, Mantel defended her comments , saying her words were taken out of context and she was in fact describing the perception of the Duchess created by the media.

Hilary Mantel: Her grasp on character and circumstance was equal to Shakespeare

She told host Anne McElvoy on BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves : “My lecture and the subsequent essay was actually supportive of the royal family and when I used those words about the Duchess of Cambridge, I was describing the perception of her which has been set up in the tabloid press.

“My speech ended with a plea to the press and to the media in general. I said, ‘Back off and don’t be brutes. Don’t do to this young woman what you did to Diana.’

“My whole theme was the way we maltreat royal persons, making them one superhuman, and yet less than human.”

Mantel was awarded a CBE in the 2006 Birthday Honours, and made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBW) in 2014, for her services to literature.

She died on 22 September 2022, aged 70.

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The Royal Family of Saudi Arabia: A Historical Overview and Contemporary Influence

The Saudi Royal Family

Historical background:.

The origins of the Saudi royal family can be traced to Muhammad bin Saud, the founder of the first Saudi state in the mid-18th century. Since then, successive generations of the Al Saud family have ruled over various incarnations of the Saudi state. However, it was not until the early 20th century that the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia emerged under the leadership of Abdulaziz Ibn Saud.

Abdulaziz Ibn Saud and the Modern Saudi Arabia:

Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, commonly known as Ibn Saud, played a pivotal role in unifying the Arabian Peninsula and establishing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. His military campaigns and political acumen allowed him to gradually conquer and unify the disparate tribes of the region, solidifying his rule over vast territories. Under his leadership, Saudi Arabia witnessed significant socio-economic changes, including the discovery and exploitation of oil reserves, which transformed the country's fortunes.

Key Members of the Royal Family:

The House of Saud consists of numerous members, each with their own roles and responsibilities within the Kingdom. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, is one of the prominent figures in the current generation. He has been instrumental in driving social and economic reforms as part of the Vision 2030 initiative, aimed at diversifying the Saudi economy and reducing its dependence on oil revenue. Other influential members include Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, and Prince Turki al-Faisal, who have held various high-ranking positions within the Saudi government.

Political Power and Governance:

The royal family holds immense political power in Saudi Arabia. The country's political structure is characterized by a monarchy, where ultimate authority rests with the King. The King, in consultation with the family's inner circle, makes important decisions related to domestic and foreign policy, socio-economic reforms, and governance. The family's members occupy key positions in the government, military, and other state institutions, allowing them to exert significant influence on policy matters.

Global Relations and Diplomacy:

Saudi Arabia's royal family has been actively engaged in shaping the Kingdom's foreign relations. It has maintained close ties with powerful nations, particularly the United States, which has been a longstanding ally. The royal family's influence extends beyond the country's borders, and its members have played key roles in regional and international diplomacy. For instance, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a former ambassador to the United States, played a crucial role in strengthening Saudi-US relations during his tenure.

Social and Cultural Influence:

The royal family's influence extends beyond politics and governance. It also plays a significant role in shaping Saudi Arabia's social and cultural landscape. While the Kingdom adheres to a conservative interpretation of Islam, the royal family has been at the forefront of introducing social reforms. In recent years, there have been efforts to grant women more rights and expand their participation in public life, with several royal family members actively advocating for these changes.

Challenges and Criticisms:

Despite its enduring influence, the Saudi royal family has faced its share of challenges and criticisms. The Kingdom has been scrutinized for its human rights record, including restrictions on freedom of expression, women's rights, and treatment of political dissidents. Moreover, the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 drew international condemnation and raised questions about the Kingdom's accountability and transparency.

Conclusion:

The Royal Family of Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud, has been central to the country's history and continues to exert significant influence on its governance and global relations. From its historical origins to its contemporary role, the family's members have played instrumental roles in shaping the Kingdom's political, social, and economic landscape. While facing challenges and criticism, the royal family remains a powerful force in Saudi Arabia, navigating a path between tradition and modernization as the country moves forward.

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The British Royal Family

The british royal family - essay example.

Subject: English
Type: Essay
Level: High School
Pages: 5 (1250 words)
Downloads: 2
Author: domenick17

Extract of sample "The British Royal Family"

The Queen Elizabeth II alone is the patron of 600 charity organizations. Many members of the Royal Family are engaged in official relations with Force Units. The Queen promotes national unity and support overseas economic and diplomatic ties. Introduction: The grandeur of the British Royal Family continues to fascinate people around the world. Regardless of the fact that the Royal Family is a burden on the national treasury, as British citizens have to pay an exorbitant cost for their maintenance, no one in England has the power to abolish the British Crown.

Such is the power and the influence of the Royal Family. One of the primary reasons why no one has the authority to overthrow the monarchy is the fact that the British system has evolved in such a way that its sovereign authority flows through the Royal Family. The members of the British Royal Family are close relatives of the United Kingdom’s monarch. The Queen and the other members of the British Royal Family conduct their activities in strict accordance with the British Law. In overseas British territories, Governors, Commissioners and Administrators, represent the Queen and the other members of the British Royal family.

The Queen is the Head of the association of 53 independent countries known as the Commonwealth. Moreover, 15 Commonwealth Realms have the Queen as the Head of State. (PERKIN, L.1992). Role and Effectiveness of the Royal Family: The picture perfect Royal Family displays an immaculate attitude which is vital for earning respect from the Britain citizens and this is the very reason why The Queen and her family members exhibit a royalty behavior. It is absolutely essential to behave aristocratically in an effort to earn national and international respect.

The effectiveness of the Royal Family is mirrored by the fact that if the Royal members bring shame to themselves, then inevitably the respect for Britain and its citizens would diminish worldwide. Through out the British history, the monarch has been represented by the Royal Family members in many ways including as viceroys. In modern England, the British Royal Family performs ceremonial and social duties both inside and outside England. (RABLEY, S.1990). Apart from these duties, the Royal Family has no substantial role in the constitutional matters of England.

The primary objective of the Royal Family members is to support The Queen in carrying out numerous duties for the State and attending important charitable and public services. Over the years, the impeccable and influential attitude of The Queen has played an important role in strengthening national unity. Moreover, The Queen together with the members of her family performs essential roles for national stability of Britain. The Queen’s children and their spouses are responsible to undertake official duties.

On the other hand, the younger members of The Queen’s family are not burdened with the responsibilities of performing official duties but are trained to represent the Royal Family on official events, State events and important commemorations. (Macmillan 1991). According to the official list in the Court Circular, the Monarch and other Commonwealth Realms conduct more than 2000 official events each year, both in the UK and around the world. The Queen is regarded as the Head of the State and her presence is vital in Royal events and ceremonies both on national and international levels.

Occasions such as the State Opening of Parliament and Garter

Royal Family
uneasy lies the head that wears the crown
Cited: 2 times
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Crafting lots of Royal Family papers is an essential part of modern studying, be it in high-school, college, or university. If you can do that all by yourself, that's just awesome; yet, other learners might not be that lucky, as Royal Family writing can be quite troublesome. The catalog of free sample Royal Family papers introduced below was set up in order to help lagging students rise up to the challenge.

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Inspiring essay about should the british monarchy be abolished.

The British monarchy should be abolished:

The Royals interfere in politics behind closed doors which is not good for democracy . The monarchy entrenches elitism and the class system. The king or queen only acts as a head of state but he/she does not have any political power. He/she only signs the legislation but does not decide re. the passing of laws.

The king or queen is not an elected head of state.

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ESL Questions About Royal Family

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Table of Contents

Welcome to our blog, where we aim to bring joy and creativity to ESL classrooms! In today’s post, we’ll dive into the fascinating world of royal families. Kings, queens, princes, and princesses have captivated our imaginations for centuries, and their stories continue to enchant us. Whether you’re teaching English as a second language or simply looking to engage your students with fun and educational content, exploring the topic of royal families can be both entertaining and educational. So let’s embark on this regal journey together, as we discover the secrets behind the crowns and castles!

ESL Speaking Questions About Royal Family

Beginner esl questions about royal family.

Do you know any members of a royal family?
What is a royal family?
Which country has a royal family?
How long do you think royalty has existed?
Have you ever seen a royal family on television or in person?
What is the role of a king or queen in a royal family?
What is the difference between a king and a queen?
Do you have a favorite royal family?
What is your opinion about royal weddings?
Who is the current monarch in the United Kingdom?
Have you ever heard of the British royal family?
Do you think it’s important for a country to have a monarchy?
How do you feel about the idea of a monarch being head of state?
Can you name any famous members of a royal family?
What are some common traditions associated with royalty?
Can you think of any countries that used to have a monarchy but don’t anymore?
What would you do if you were a member of a royal family?
Imagine you are a prince or princess. How would your life be different?
How do you think being a member of a royal family can affect someone’s life?
Do you think a royal family is necessary in modern times?

Intermediate ESL Questions about Royal Family

Do you follow news about the royal family in your country?
Why do you think people are interested in the lives of royalty?
What is your opinion about constitutional monarchies?
What role do you think the royal family should have in a country’s government?
How do you think the royal family affects tourism in their country?
What are some common traits or characteristics you associate with royalty?
What do you think are some challenges that members of a royal family face?
Do you think living a life in the public eye is a curse or a privilege?
What are your thoughts on the concept of a royal wedding?
How does the royal family in your country impact the economy?
Do you think it’s fair for taxpayers to financially support a royal family?
Who is your favorite member of a royal family and why?
What do you think is the biggest responsibility of a royal family?
Would you like to live a life like a member of a royal family? Why or why not?
What do you think about the idea of a royal family having a celebrity status?
What kind of duties or obligations do you think members of a royal family have?
What do you think are some advantages of being a member of a royal family?
What kind of skills or qualities do you think are important for a royal family member?
How do you think the role of royal families has changed over time?
Do you think the royal family should continue to exist in your country? Why or why not?

Advanced ESL Questions about Royal Family

What is the current Queen’s full name?
Who is the next in line to the throne after the current Queen?
What are the names of the Queen’s four children?
Which royal family member has recently stepped back from royal duties?
What is the title of the Queen’s husband?
Where was the Queen born?
What is Prince Charles’ official title?
Who is the eldest child of Prince Charles and Princess Diana?
How many grandchildren does Queen Elizabeth II have?
What is the name of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s eldest son?
Who is next in line to the throne after Prince William?
What are the titles of Queen Elizabeth II’s grandsons, Princes William and Harry?
Where did Prince William and Kate Middleton get married?
What is the name of Queen Elizabeth II’s youngest son?
Who was Queen Elizabeth II’s father?
Who was King of England before Queen Elizabeth II?
What is the full name of Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Prince Philip?
Who is the Queen’s sister?
Who is the head of the Church of England?
What is the official residence of the Queen in London called?

ESL Reading Activities About Royal Family

Beginner esl activities about royal family.

Do you know who the royal family is? The royal family is a special family that has kings, queens, princes, and princesses. They are very important in their countries. In some countries, like England, the royal family is known all around the world. They have a queen, Queen Elizabeth, who has been the queen for a long time. She has children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. People love to watch the royal family and see what they are doing. They have a special house called a palace where they live. The palace is very big and beautiful. The royal family wears special clothes and has lots of jewels. They have many people who work for them, like guards who protect the palace.

Here are some important words to know about the royal family:

Now that you know more about the royal family, you can talk about them and impress your friends!

Remember, it’s important to practice reading and understanding new words. Try to use these words in sentences to help you remember them.

Intermediate ESL Activities About Royal Family

In many countries around the world, there are royal families. A royal family is a group of people who have power and authority because of their relation to a king or queen. They often live in a palace and have a luxurious lifestyle. The royal family members are usually highly respected and admired by the citizens of their country.

One common role of a royal family is to serve as the symbolic figureheads of their nation. They represent their country at important events and ceremonies, both domestically and internationally. These events can include state visits, where they meet with leaders from other countries, and national holidays, where they participate in traditional celebrations.

Another role of a royal family is to engage in charity work and support various causes. Many members of royal families are involved in philanthropy, using their influence and resources to help those in need. They often focus on issues such as education, healthcare, and environmental protection.

Royal families also play a crucial role in preserving and celebrating tradition and culture. They are often associated with important cultural and historical landmarks, such as palaces, castles, and museums. They participate in cultural festivals and events, showcasing their country’s traditions to the world.

However, being part of a royal family is not always easy. Members of royal families often face intense media scrutiny and have limited privacy. They are expected to follow certain protocols and etiquette, and their actions and behavior are constantly monitored by the public.

Despite the challenges, being part of a royal family can also bring many privileges and opportunities. Members of royal families have access to the finest education and can travel extensively. They often represent their country on diplomatic missions, promoting international relations and fostering cultural exchange.

Overall, royal families hold a special place in the hearts of their citizens and play an important role in the history, culture, and identity of their country.

Advanced ESL Activities About Royal Family

The royal family is a fascinating subject for many people around the world. With their charm, elegance, and regal traditions, they capture the imaginations of millions. From the majestic palaces to the magnificent ceremonies, every aspect of their lives seems to be steeped in history and grandeur. Understanding the intricacies of the royal family can provide valuable insights into the culture and history of a nation. Let’s delve into some advanced ESL activities that will help you explore this captivating topic further.

1. Monarchy: The system of government in which a country is ruled by a king or queen. The British royal family is an example of a monarchy.

2. Nobility: The social class consisting of people who hold high titles of honor bestowed by the monarch. Nobles often play a significant role in the affairs of the royal family.

3. Regalia: The ceremonial clothing and accessories worn by members of the royal family during important occasions. The regalia adds magnificence and symbolizes their status.

4. Heir: The person who is next in line to inherit the throne. In the British royal family, Prince Charles is the heir to Queen Elizabeth II.

5. Coronation: The formal ceremony in which a monarch is crowned and officially becomes the ruler. The coronation is a momentous event in the life of a royal family.

6. Hereditary: Pertaining to characteristics or titles passed down through generations within a family. The royal family often has hereditary titles and privileges.

7. Protocol: The set of rules and customs that govern the behavior and interactions of members of the royal family. Adhering to protocol is essential for maintaining decorum.

8. Royal Guards: Specially trained personnel responsible for protecting and safeguarding the royal family. They are known for their distinctive uniforms and unwavering loyalty.

9. Crowned Heads of Europe: The title given to the monarchs of European countries. It signifies their authority and positions them as leaders among other nations.

10. Line of Succession: The order in which individuals are eligible to inherit the throne. The line of succession is determined by laws and traditions within the royal family.

ESL Writing Activities About Royal Family

Beginner esl writing questions about royal family.

1. Who is the Queen of England? 2. How many children does Queen Elizabeth II have? 3. Can you name any other members of the royal family? 4. What is the royal family’s official residence called? 5. What is the role of the royal family in the UK?

Intermediate ESL Writing Questions about royal family

1. How does the royal family contribute to the cultural identity of the UK? 2. Explain the difference between monarchy and democracy. 3. What are some advantages and disadvantages of having a royal family? 4. Discuss the significance of royal weddings and their impact on the public. 5. Describe the role of the royal family in representing the UK internationally.

Advanced ESL Writing Questions about royal family

1. Analyze the historical and political significance of the British royal family. 2. Compare and contrast the role and influence of the royal family in different countries. 3. Debate whether the UK should continue to financially support the royal family. 4. Discuss the challenges and controversies the royal family has faced in recent years. 5. Assess the impact of modern media on the public perception of the royal family.

Please note that these questions are just suggestions and can be tailored or expanded upon based on the English proficiency level of the learners.

ESL Roleplay Activities about Royal Family

1. The Royal Interview In this roleplay activity, students can take turns playing the role of a journalist and a member of the royal family. The journalist will prepare a list of questions about the royal family, such as their daily routines, their roles and responsibilities, and any interesting stories. The member of the royal family will answer the questions as authentically as possible, giving insights into their lives. This activity helps students practice asking and answering questions, as well as building vocabulary related to the topic.

2. The Royal Family Tree In this roleplay activity, students will create a family tree for a fictional royal family. Each student will take on the role of a different family member and describe their relationship to other members of the royal family. They can use vocabulary related to family relationships (e.g., cousin, aunt, nephew) as they construct the family tree. This activity encourages students to use descriptive language and practice speaking about relationships using proper vocabulary.

3. The Royal Banquet In this roleplay activity, students will plan and organize a royal banquet. Each student will take on a different role, such as the head chef, the event planner, or a member of the royal family. They will work together to decide on the menu, decorations, and seating arrangements. This activity promotes teamwork, cooperation, and helps students practice using vocabulary related to food, events, and hospitality.

4. The Royal Etiquette Lesson In this roleplay activity, students will play the roles of a member of the royal family and a royal etiquette instructor. The instructor will teach the royal family member proper etiquette for different occasions, such as formal dinners, public appearances, and receiving dignitaries. The member of the royal family will then demonstrate their newly learned etiquette skills. This activity allows students to practice using polite expressions, manners, and appropriate behavior in different social contexts.

5. The Royal Succession Debate In this roleplay activity, students will take on the roles of different members of the royal family and participate in a debate about who should succeed the current monarch. They will discuss and present arguments for their chosen candidate, using persuasive language and vocabulary related to monarchy, succession, and leadership. This activity encourages critical thinking, public speaking skills, and the use of persuasive language.

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The Royal Family Celebrates Queen Elizabeth II’s Birthday With a Few Photographs

By Erin Vanderhoof

Image may contain Elizabeth II Photography Person Adult Face Head Portrait Plant Potted Plant Animal and Canine

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Nearly two years after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, her birthday, April 21, is becoming a day when both the royal family—and the rest of the nation—celebrate the legacy of Britain’s longest-serving monarch. This year , King Charles III and Queen Camilla spent the weekend at Balmoral Castle , where the late queen died in September 2022, and on Sunday , which would have been her 98th birthday, the couple were spotted on their way to nearby Crathie Kirk.

According to a former butler for the royals who spoke to Slingo , the family likely continued honoring the queen during the rest of the day. “Privately, I have no doubt they'll raise a toast to her in the evening,” said Grant Harrold, per People . “I'm sure the day will very much be spent reflecting on the late queen.”

On Instagram, Sarah Ferguson remembered her mother-in-law with a photograph taken on the balcony of Buckingham Palace during 2022’s Platinum Jubilee. “Thank you for all that you have taught us, for being a steadfast leader and dear friend,” she wrote . “You are sorely missed.”

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

The Royals Collection Trust, which cares for and curates the royal collections, honored the late queen with an image taken during her teenage years. The photograph by Cecil Beaton will be part of a new palace exhibition called Royal Portraits, which will open next month in the King’s Gallery.

According to The Telegraph , a few corgis were on hand during one tribute to the late queen. On Sunday, the first posthumous statue of Queen Elizabeth was unveiled in the town of Oakham, Rutland, in England’s East Midlands, and the bronze sculpture by artist Hywel Pratley features three life-size corgis climbing on the plinth. To celebrate the unveiling, the Welsh Corgi League brought 46 of the queen’s beloved breed to the event, and they could be heard barking during a speech by Sarah Furness, the Lord-Lieutenant of Rutland who commissioned the statue.

Erin Vanderhoof

Staff writer, royal watch.

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ESL Questions About Royal Family
Advanced ESL Writing Questions about royal family. 1. Analyze the historical and political significance of the British royal family. 2. Compare and contrast the role and influence of the royal family in different countries. 3. Debate whether the UK should continue to financially support the royal family. 4.
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