THE ENGLISH-speaking world bubbled with enthusiasm this spring over the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton. French, German, Chinese and Japanese audiences weren’t far behind in their excitement about the royal couple. Why all the fuss, especially here in the United States, a country that once fought a bloody revolutionary war to get away from one of the prince’s ancestors? And does the royal wedding matter, except as an incident in modern celebrity culture?

The case against hereditary monarchy has proved widely persuasive over the last couple of centuries. Nearly everywhere it has either been phased out completely or reduced to no more than a matter of ceremony. No wonder. Monarchy was always inherently unstable, vesting as it did so much power in one individual. If the monarch was strong, wise, resourceful, charismatic, generous, merciful and shrewd, the system could work, but a casual glance at the kings and queens of England shows all too plainly how few of them even remotely approached such a standard. As Thomas Paine remarked in Common Sense, “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ass for a lion.”

Quite apart from the ass-and-lion dilemma, every monarch had to worry about producing an heir. Kings hoped that their wives would give birth to at least one healthy son. High death rates made second and third sons valuable insurance against the heir’s premature death—something that has happened repeatedly in English history. As soon as possible these sons too had to be married in politically advantageous ways. The choice of royal brides was often linked to diplomatic alliances with other kingdoms. With very few exceptions, the princes and princesses involved in marriage treaties were in no position to choose for themselves. Rather, they were forced to do the bidding of their parents, no matter how incongruous the proposed mates might seem from a personal or romantic point of view. The history of royal marriages before the twentieth century is largely a story of misery, exile, incompatibility, xenophobia and a clenched-teeth doing of one’s duty. Royal weddings, far from being the feel-good celebrity events of our own time, were often moments of maximum political and personal anxiety.

ROYAL WEDDINGS today are certainly very different from those of five hundred years ago. Think about King Henry VII, the first of the Tudors. In 1485, having just defeated and killed the last leader of the House of York, King Richard “my-kingdom-for-a-horse” III, at the Battle of Bosworth Field, Henry asserted his claim to the throne by right of conquest. But to end the long and bitter civil conflict that we remember as the Wars of the Roses (1455–1485), Henry recognized the need to marry a prominent figure from the other side. The logical choice was Elizabeth of York, niece of Richard III—the fact that she was a nineteen-year-old fair-haired beauty was just a bonus. Their wedding at Westminster Abbey in January 1486, soon after his coronation, helped reconcile the warring factions in his kingdom. Better still, she bore him three sons and appeared to secure the royal succession.

With the pacification of his own lands well in hand, Henry’s next move was to increase his legitimacy in the eyes of his great European contemporaries. What better way to do so than by marrying his eldest son, Prince Arthur, to a daughter of Europe’s rising superpower, imperial Spain? Catherine of Aragon was the youngest child of Christopher Columbus’s patrons Ferdinand and Isabella. Well educated, admired by the great Renaissance humanists Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More, she was also attractive and a fine linguist. After rigorous diplomatic negotiations and the promise that she would bring a big dowry, she was married by proxy to Prince Arthur before ever seeing him. For two years they exchanged letters in Latin. When he turned fifteen she sailed to England to meet and marry him, but they discovered, on their first encounter, that their pronunciation of Latin was so different that neither could understand a word the other one said.

Their wedding, at the old St. Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of London, was followed by a week of wild revelry and jousting. Royal brides in those days did not wear white. Instead they wore wealth, loading up on furs, jewels and cloth of gold to emphasize the magnificence of the kingdoms they represented. Henry VII appeared to have taken another sound step toward securing his dynasty. But joy quickly turned to sorrow. Prince Arthur died suddenly, just five months after the wedding. Now what? The tightfisted Henry did not want to return the dowry that had come with Catherine. So she stayed on in England and even served briefly as Spain’s representative at the English court, becoming the first female ambassador in European history. Then the old king died and, after further hard bargaining, she married the new king, Henry VIII, Arthur’s younger brother, in 1509. The wedding itself was subdued, and took place not in one of the cathedrals but in Greenwich Church. Two weeks later, however, the couple celebrated a lavish joint coronation. Henry was seventeen; Catherine was twenty-three.

THE MARRIAGE, auspicious at first, soured, and its unraveling had immense political and religious implications for English history. Of the couple’s six children, five died in infancy. The only survivor was Princess Mary. Henry dreaded the prospect of going to his grave without a male heir, lest anarchy and civil war (still a recent memory) return to haunt the kingdom. He tried to get his marriage annulled on the grounds that it was uncanonical to marry your brother’s widow. The pope said no: his predecessor had specifically granted a dispensation. Besides, Catherine said that Prince Arthur had never managed to consummate their marriage, rendering it invalid.

Rather than take no for an answer, Henry took the drastic step of severing ties with Rome, appointing himself Defender of the Faith, head of the Church of England. He then dissolved Catholic monasteries throughout England and seized their property, making himself incomparably wealthier than anyone else in the kingdom. The Church of England has had to blush ever since at the knowledge that it owes its founding, not to a point of high theological principle, but to a sordid royal maneuver to off-load the aging queen. Among Henry’s many subsequent brides he tried four local girls—two of whom ended up on the executioner’s block—and one more foreigner, Anne of Cleves. That experiment worked better only to the extent that he didn’t actually kill her. Having never seen her, and having gained an overoptimistic view of her beauty from a painting by Hans Holbein, Henry suffered a jarring disappointment on encountering the reality. Of their wedding night he told his friends, the next morning:

I liked her not well before but now I like her much worse. She is nothing fair, and have very evil smells about her. I took her to be no maid by reason of the looseness of her breasts, and other tokens, which, when I felt them, strake me so to the heart, that I had neither will nor courage to prove the rest. I can have no appetite for displeasant airs, and have left her as good a maid as I found her.

After six months and no consummation, they separated. She lived on in England with a royal pension and the role of king’s “sister” at court. He got busy with the next bride, Catherine Howard, a teenager whose disastrous mixture of promiscuity and indiscretion brought her to an early and violent end.

Henry finally sired a son in the twenty-eighth year of his reign, but the sickly boy, Edward VI, who ascended the throne at the age of nine, lived for only another six years. He never married but was briefly betrothed to Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was just seven months old. Henry’s daughters, on the other hand, were a redoubtable pair and ruled England for the rest of the sixteenth century.

DURING THEIR reigns, the Catholic-Protestant division racked not only England but all of Europe, complicating the issues involved in the negotiation of royal weddings. The eldest of Henry VIII’s daughters, Mary I (sired with Catherine of Aragon), married Prince Philip, heir to the Spanish throne, in 1554. Both were fanatical Catholics. Hoping to reverse the English Reformation they soon set to work burning prominent Protestants at the stake, hence the queen’s nickname, “Bloody Mary.” After a year Philip was called back to his homeland; his father’s decision to retire to a monastery made him the new king, Philip II. The couple never met again, but the queen believed herself to be pregnant at the time of his departure. The fact that it was a phantom pregnancy greatly consoled the hard-pressed Protestants, who took it as evidence of divine intervention on behalf of the Reformation. It was becoming clear by then that a Spanish king married to an English queen was going to subordinate England and its resources to Spanish policies. When Mary died in 1558, the Protestant majority in England breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Her younger half sister, Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, now became queen. Shrewd, tough-minded, a survivor and a Protestant, she realized that to get married as Mary had done would be to deliver her power into her husband’s hands. Might it not be better, she speculated, to avoid a trip to the altar? Her advisers were constantly suggesting suitable suitors, and she periodically indicated enthusiasm for this or that gentleman. When it came to the point, however, she never tied the knot, being celebrated by courtiers in her later years as the “Virgin Queen.” Philip II would have liked to marry her for dynastic reasons but never got the chance. Instead, her navy shattered and dispersed his great armada in 1588, inspired by her declaration: “I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England too.” It was the beginning of England’s naval greatness, a period that would last nearly four hundred years.

Elizabeth I was the last English monarch to have to fear encirclement by hostile powers. When she died in 1603, unmarried and childless, King James VI of Scotland succeeded to her throne, becoming the first man to rule both lands. He lived the rest of his life in England, where he was known as King James I. He commissioned the best-loved and most influential English translation of the Bible, which celebrates its four hundredth anniversary this year.

THE RELIGIOUS division of Europe during the Reformation had left France and Spain, the two strongest powers, on the Catholic side of the divide. England was Protestant, yet reasons of state usually made a Catholic marriage alliance more attractive than a Protestant one. The relative political weakness of the Protestant royal families—most of them from Scandinavia or from small German principalities—made Protestant marriage alliances unlikely to enhance English power. On the other hand, the intense religious hatreds of the era made negotiations across the divide difficult and dangerous. Unsuitable personalities made the bargaining harder still.

This situation plagued James and his descendants. His son, Prince Charles, went to Spain for wedding negotiations in 1623, accompanied by his father’s handsome favorite, the Duke of Buckingham (King James had a reputation for being far more interested in beautiful men than beautiful women). The Spaniards drove a hard bargain, insisting that in return for marrying the infanta, Charles would have to convert to Catholicism and then stay in Spain for a year to show the sincerity of his conversion. Buckingham was outraged by the proposal and rejected it—in his view it was tantamount to holding the prince hostage. When he and Charles got back to England, they demanded that James avenge their humiliation by declaring war on Spain. He did, but unlike the Virgin Queen in her face-off against the armada, he was not adequately prepared and suffered a crushing defeat.

Charles ended up marrying a French princess instead, Henrietta Maria, in 1625. Her Catholicism made her unpopular among ordinary Britons, and she was not allowed to attend his coronation. Forty-eight years later his younger son, the future James II, married an Italian Catholic, Mary of Modena, who was similarly despised in England and nicknamed “The Pope’s Daughter.” The fact that James did become a Catholic—something his father had refused to do—alarmed the Protestant majority, which greeted the news that Mary had given birth to a son with disbelief. They argued that the baby was a changeling, smuggled into court in a bed-warming pan. Rather than accept a Catholic monarchy, England drove James and Mary out in the bloodless coup that we remember today as the Glorious Revolution.

Charles I’s older son, Charles II, meanwhile, had done rather better with a Catholic bride. The downside of his marriage to a Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza in 1662, was the lack of an heir. The upside was that her dowry included the city of Bombay, on the west coast of India. Until then, the British East India Company had been finding Portuguese and Dutch competition in the Far East hard to match. With this excellent port, however, and now allied with a former rival, Britain began its rise to dominance in India, a position it would hold until the mid-twentieth century. The Anglo-Portuguese friendship begun by this marriage treaty persisted without interruption for the next 350 years. As was so often the case, the person at the center of the deal, Catherine of Braganza, got no joy from it herself. To the contrary, she lived a life of perpetual mortification. Her husband was the most notorious womanizer in the history of the British monarchy, siring at least fourteen illegitimate children and feting his mistresses openly at court. To add insult to injury, she was falsely accused of trying to poison the king and of fomenting a Catholic uprising; Parliament regularly petitioned Charles II to divorce her and take a Protestant bride instead.

IN 1707, Parliament passed the Act of Succession, specifying that from then on the monarch, whatever else he or she might be, had to be a Protestant. The Royal Marriage Act of 1772 added the further refinement that the monarch’s spouse must also be a Protestant and that no prince was allowed to marry without the king’s express permission. Making rules is one thing but living up to them is another. In 1785, George, Prince of Wales and eldest son of George III, married his mistress, Maria Fitzherbert, even though she was six years older than he, twice widowed, a commoner and a Catholic! The ceremony took place in secret at Mrs. Fitzherbert’s London house, with the Reverend Robert Burt officiating, a humble curate whose motive was the prince’s agreement to pay off the debts that had until recently kept him confined to debtors’ prison. Rumors of this wedding circulated in London, but the prince preserved what a later political generation would call “plausible deniability.”

George stands out as one of the most odious men in the history of the royal family. He was widely lampooned at the time for his vanity, profligacy and greed. His father urged him to marry some suitable Protestant princess. Parliament declared that it would not pay off his massive debts or increase his annual allowance unless he did. Though the political power of the monarchy was weaker by this time, it was still a central element of the British Constitution—and George was the heir. His father’s incipient madness also made him the obvious choice in the event of a regency. The unfortunate lady selected to be his bride was Princess Caroline of Brunswick, who was brought to London in 1795 unaware that she was about to be married bigamously. The French king, Louis XVI, along with all his family, had recently been executed by revolutionaries in Paris. It would have been reasonable for George to fear that monarchs might perish across the whole of Europe, himself included, and that he should be circumspect. In fact, the lesson was completely lost on him.

Historian Steven Parissien describes what happened on the day of the royal wedding in George IV: Inspiration of the Regency (incidentally, bringing to mind the dilemma subsequently faced by Jane Eyre):

At the wedding itself . . . the groom was visibly drunk and almost passed out twice. During his carriage ride to the chapel in the company of [his close friends] the Prince professed his undying love for Maria Fitzherbert. . . . At the altar, completely inebriated, “he hiccupped out his vows of fidelity” while turning to gaze meaningfully at Lady Jersey [another mistress] and, in the anxious silence after the Archbishop of Canterbury asked whether anyone knew of “any just cause or impediment,” burst into tears. (The Archbishop was plainly terrified lest the rumoured marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert be divulged at this point: he stared directly at the Prince as he enunciated the word “impediment,” and repeated the passage regarding “nuptial fidelity” twice.)

The honeymoon was no better, being held at a nearby hunting lodge to which the prince had invited a crowd of his drinking companions. They lolled about, cracking jokes and snoring on the couches. George was too drunk and miserable to consummate his marriage at first but got around to it a few days later. He slept with Caroline only three times but did succeed in making her pregnant. The couple soon separated, and he spent the next twenty-five years spreading rumors that she was having affairs and giving birth to children by other men.

This prince, who would eventually become George IV, incidentally, illustrates another of the problems with monarchy—the fact that heirs sometimes have to wait a very long time before succeeding to the throne. Having nothing to do in the meantime, they tend to misbehave. That was certainly true for him, for his successor William IV, for the man who became Edward VII in 1901, and for the man who is currently waiting to become Charles III and is already sixty-two.

THE HISTORIAN David Cannadine once proposed that the way to think of the morality of British monarchs was by analogy with a pendulum, swinging back and forth between probity and debauchery. The accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 certainly bore witness to a swing in the direction of moral uprightness. A highly principled and virtuous eighteen-year-old with an overdeveloped sense of duty, Victoria soon got busy singling out an appropriate husband from among Europe’s Protestant royals and selected the even more upright Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Because she was the monarch, she proposed to him, a scene nicely re-created in the recent film The Young Victoria. When he said they should have a long honeymoon she chided him gently in a letter, writing: “You forget, my dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing. Parliament is sitting, and something occurs almost every day, for which I may be required, and it is quite impossible for me to be absent from London.” She permitted them no more than three days at Windsor.

Victoria was, nevertheless, besotted with Albert and married him at St. James’s Palace on February 10, 1840, in a state of high excitement. She was the first royal bride to wear white, a decision that greatly contributed to white becoming the standard color for young brides. Hers was also the first of the royal nuptials to feature a wedding cake (displacing an earlier delicacy known as “bride pie,” which could contain living birds). After the day’s official duties were accomplished, they retired. In her diary Victoria recalled their first evening together:

I NEVER, NEVER spent such an evening!! MY DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert sat on a footstool by my side, and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, and we kissed each other again and again! His beauty, his sweetness and gentleness—really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband!

Next morning, “when day dawned (for we did not sleep much) and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express.” They lived happily for the next twenty-one years and brought forth nine children, nearly all of whom married into the other royal families of Europe (perhaps generations of interbreeding among royal cousins contributed to the hemophilia that they inadvertently spread across the continent).

Albert’s death in 1861 was a crushing blow from which Victoria never recovered. Although she outlived him for forty years, she never cast off her mourning clothes. When her oldest son, Bertie, later Edward VII, married Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863, the bride again wore white. Victoria refused to wear anything but black and would not join the main celebration, watching instead from an enclosed balcony in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. Her diary entry that night was full of self-pity:

All is over and this (to me) most trying day is past. It all seems like a dream now and leaves hardly any impression on my poor mind and broken heart. Here I sit lonely and desolate, who so need love and tenderness, while our two daughters have each their loving husbands and Bertie has taken his lovely, pure, sweet bride to Osborne . . . Oh, what I suffered in the chapel, where all was joy, pride and happiness . . . Only by a violent effort could I succeed in mastering my emotion.

Alexandra was also destined to lead a long and difficult life, because Bertie represented the opposite swing of the pendulum. He was already developing a scandalous reputation for gambling and womanizing. Among his many mistresses was Alice Keppel, the great-grandmother of Camilla Parker-Bowles, who was to feature in a later generation’s royal-wedding scandals.

IN THE twentieth century, facing a large and literate electorate, the British monarchy began to pay attention to its public image. During World War I, for example, the Britain of King George V fought the Germany of his first cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II. The two men looked similar; both were grandsons of Queen Victoria, and George’s family name, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, was resonantly Germanic. The sudden surge of blazing hatred for everything German that came with the war prompted the king to change the family name to “Windsor,” which it remains to this day. He also encouraged his children to marry in Westminster Abbey, just over the road from the Houses of Parliament, as a way of underlining, and drawing attention to, their Englishness. Kate Middleton and Prince William had their ceremony this year in Westminster Abbey, and it is easy to regard the place as the logical spot for royal weddings. For several hundred years, however, it had been reserved for coronations and funerals, while the weddings took place elsewhere.

One of the first royal couples to take advantage of this new location was George V’s second son, another George, and his bride, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who have recently enjoyed a lot of popular attention thanks to the movie The King’s Speech. They married in the abbey in 1923. George’s older brother became King Edward VIII when their father died in January 1936. Yet again, marriage plans caused a severe political problem. Just as it was illegal for the heir or monarch to marry a Catholic, so was it illegal for him to marry a divorcée, because the king was head of the Church of England, and the Church did not permit the remarriage of divorced people if the former spouse was still alive. Edward, however, was infatuated with a twice-divorced American woman, Wallis Simpson, and declared his determination to marry her. Political power was now vested firmly in Parliament rather than the monarchy. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, told the new king that Mrs. Simpson was unacceptable. Edward retorted that he would not live without her and, to the horror and astonishment of politicians and common folk alike, abdicated.

That left his brother to ascend the throne as King George VI. He hated it but had the same flinty sense of duty as Queen Victoria, a sense conspicuously absent in Edward himself. Edward married Mrs. Simpson in France, and among their honeymoon visits was one to see the German dictator Adolf Hitler. Political supporters of the monarchy were relieved that he and his American wife (who became the Duchess of Windsor) had no children since they would have become rival claimants to the throne, challenging the right of succession of George VI’s daughter Elizabeth.

THE CIRCUMSTANCES of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip in 1947 bear witness to the changing fortunes of Britain and the changing nature of monarchy. No longer politically significant, royal marriages were less fraught with the making and breaking of dynasties, leaving slightly more room for the forces of personal attraction. The choice of spouse was narrowly restricted but the future queen had at least some opportunity to decide for herself whom she would wed. She had met Philip in 1939, when he was eighteen and she thirteen, and had admired him. Philip, born in Corfu, belonged to the deposed royal family of Greece but grew up in England, served in the Royal Navy during World War II and was thoroughly Anglicized.

By the time they announced their engagement, Britain was undergoing a profound political transformation at the hands of a majority-Labour government that was dedicated to socialism. The major industries were being nationalized, the National Health Service was being established, the British Empire was slated for abolition, India was about to become independent and Prime Minister Clement Attlee was eager to raze, as far as possible, the invidious class distinctions that had bedeviled England for centuries. To add to the drama, the nation was in the midst of an economic crisis, brought about by the stress of fighting World War II. The Marshall Plan had not yet begun, the winter of 1947 was extremely severe, and draconian rationing of food, clothes and other essentials persisted.

Could a regime of this kind, under these emergency circumstances, possibly countenance a lavish and costly royal wedding? Ironically, the answer was yes. Ministers, Attlee included, recognized the overwhelming popularity of the monarchy among nearly all classes, shared the admiration felt by most Britons for the king’s willingness to stay in London throughout the Blitz (Buckingham Palace had suffered bomb damage) and understood the political folly of opposing a wholehearted regal spectacle. The princess wore an elaborate white silk dress with an immense train, the groom looked smart in full navy uniform, the gilded coaches and prancing horses were brought out of storage and stables, and the parade route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey was lined with great cheering crowds. It seems illogical that the same people who had ejected Prime Minister Winston Churchill two years earlier by voting Labour should love the king and his winsome daughter, the living embodiments of social inequality, yet they did.

CONDITIONS CONTINUED to change rapidly in the ensuing decades. Elizabeth ascended the throne upon her father’s death in 1952 and was crowned the next year. By then, royalty was becoming a form of celebrity—photographers were to plague her with increasing aggressiveness and diminishing deference for the next sixty years.

As royalty became celebrities, celebrities started to become royalty, a process begun by the marriage of an Irish American movie actress, Grace Kelly, to Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956. The prince even perpetuated a time-honored tradition by asking the bride’s father for a dowry of $2 million. Mr. Kelly was horrified but eventually did pay up. And then there was Elizabeth II’s sister, Princess Margaret, who actually married a photographer, Anthony Armstrong-Jones, in 1960. Such a choice by a princess would have been unacceptable among all former generations. Theirs was also, aptly, the first televised royal wedding in British history.

The story from that point on is well known to anyone aged thirty or more. Of Elizabeth II’s four children, three married only to divorce a few years later. The most celebrated royal wedding of our era was that of Charles, Prince of Wales, to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Her innocence, her beauty and her distinguished lineage made her appear an auspicious choice. The mood in Britain at the time is well captured by Tina Brown in her biography of the princess:

The wedding day’s magic was so powerful that a mad, unreasonable joy coursed through the nation. The symptoms of royal fever . . . included extreme pulsations of patriotism at the sound of choral music, tears welling up involuntarily in eyes, shivers up spines, and intense envy of the bride and groom. The splendor and hopefulness of it all offered a vision of England that turned every hack into a troubadour, every Roundhead into a cavalier.

Unlike the long-suffering princesses of British and European royal history, however, Diana had not been brought up to endure humiliation in dignified silence; neither did she accept that reasons of state trumped personal well-being. She was forced, after the wedding, to recognize that her life would now be lived almost entirely in the public eye and under the most rigid forms of protocol. To quote Tina Brown again:“It was like an icy wave hitting her in the face. The oldness, the coldness, the deadness of royal life, its muffled misogyny, its whispering silence, its stifling social round confronting sycophantic strangers, this is how it would be until she died.” Bad enough by themselves, these conditions were made worse by her husband’s long association with Camilla Parker-Bowles, which, it soon appeared, had not been broken once and for all at the time of the wedding.

The blame never lies on only one side when a marriage fails, and Diana surely had faults of her own. Anyone who is married knows that, after the early months of euphoric union, there are always going to be areas of tension and practical difficulties to be worked out between spouses. Imagine trying to wrestle them to the ground when literally thousands of other people are eagerly sowing discord by photographing, gossiping about and magnifying every public moment. Imagine being surrounded by people whose ostensible role is to help protect your privacy but who turn out to be corruptible, willing at the right price to tell the tabloid press every lurid detail. No wonder so many modern royal marriages have turned sour.

Is there any reason to hope that Prince William and Princess Kate will fare any better than their recent predecessors? Without getting carried away, I do think there are grounds for cautious optimism. The circumstances of their early lives have been less different than those of Charles and Diana. They are closer in age. Prince William knows better than anyone what his mother had to endure and surely feels anxious not to put his own bride through the same ordeal. Kate is now playing the role that Diana played in 1981, but this time the bridegroom, every time he smiles, vividly brings to mind Diana herself. There’s something auspicious about this configuration, surely.

THE BAD old world of arranged marriages and domineering husbands has been exchanged for the bad new world of chosen marriages, paparazzi and pitiless publicity. Through it all, however, an intense, burning love of the monarchy has persisted across all social ranks in Britain and throughout the British Commonwealth. There is no significant constituency in Britain in favor of abolishing it. Americans say they love equality and democracy, but they love the British monarchy too and join in wholeheartedly at moments like this. There’s even a palpable sense of what might be called dynasty-envy in the United States, by which certain distinguished political families (the Kennedys, the Clintons and the Bushes) take on a pseudoroyal glamour of their own. You only have to compare the muted fanfare around the weddings of Jenna Bush in 2008 or Chelsea Clinton last year, however, to realize that the Americans still have a very, very long way to go.

American excitement over the wedding also suggests an oblique recognition of the benefits of monarchy, once shorn of its obvious ancient abuses. Monarchy separates ceremonial leadership from political leadership, functions which, in the United States, are combined in the president. Nearly half of all American voters, in any given election year, voted against the person who now represents the nation, and probably don’t like him, whereas no British person voted against the queen. She can embody the nation over and above its squabbling politicians and can present a more dignified idea of the country to its own citizens and to outsiders.

Royalty has also, in the twentieth century, been a brake on, or antidote to, dictatorship. The restoration of the Spanish monarchy ended the sordid and repressive Franco era, while the constitutional monarchies of Holland and Scandinavia are among the most moderate and politically stable entities in the world. The fact that accident of birth decides who will be king or queen might offend our sense of meritocracy, but it also protects us against the kind of unscrupulous personalities who often claw their way to the top in democracies.

There are two caveats, however. First, the monarch has to have a well-developed sense of duty and to behave with political impartiality, a point that Elizabeth II appears to have understood perfectly. Second, the existence of the monarchy must not offend the citizens’ essential idea of their own country. The United States, in other words, can never have a king. Nevertheless, its people can look on, with admiration and a disguised form of regret, at monarchy’s capable functioning elsewhere, nowhere illustrated better than in a British royal wedding.

Image: Pullquote: There’s a palpable sense of what might be called dynasty-envy in the United States, by which the Kennedys, the Clintons and the Bushes take on a pseudoroyal glamour of their own. Essay Types: Essay