Acad. Quest. (2018) 31:472–475 DOI 10.1007/s12129-018-9743-z

UNORTHODOX IDEAS

Long Live William

Carol Iannone

Published online: 17 October 2018 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018

One aspect of the “special relationship” is that we in America, many of us anyway, care very much about the British monarchy. Why else would The Crown and Victoria be aired here to large and eager audiences? And now that an American has joined the royal family—the Meghan/Harry wedding also avidly watched stateside—we feel more involved than ever. Some Brits whom I respect for wanting to hold onto what remains of the famous “stiff upper lip” in their land deplored the renewed expressions of grief at the twentieth anniversary of the death of Diana last year. But the British public are more than entitled to their grief, for those twenty years have made very clear the nature of Charles’s culpability in the devastation of her life. It is abundantly evident now that Charles should not be king, and surely Camilla should not be queen, or princess consort. They may well be good people in other respects and I’m sure they have many good qualities, but what they did to Diana Spencer, to the institution of marriage, and to the integrity of the church he is supposed to head, is simply insupportable. It is clear now that the two of them brought her into the marriage without really disclosing to her that they had every intention of continuing their own relationship. Even to ask whether they intended to proceed platonically is rather naïve when we learn that Charles and Camilla spent the day before the wedding (some say the night before) in sexual congress. But even if he was technically faithful to Diana for some brief time, it is the depth and intensity of his emotional attachment to Camilla that unfitted him for marriage to another person altogether. As a result of Camilla’s years-long fulfillment of his evidently considerable needs for protective mothering and

Carol Iannone is editor-at-large of Academic Questions, 12 East 46th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10017; [email protected]. Her article “Appreciating Tom Wolfe” appears in this issue, as well. Long Live King William 473 his satisfaction in her lusty Wife-of-Bath qualities, he lacked the impetus to seek a proper union for himself. Diana truly was, as she later said, a lamb led to the slaughter, simply to be used by him to fulfill his royal duty to produce the heir and a spare and then be made content with her ceremonial position. Charles and Camilla adulterated their separate unions practically from their beginnings. She offered herself to Charles as a mistress quite early in her own marriage and proceeded to raise her children in the midst of her ongoing affair. Her husband was evidently an adulterer too and may even have carried on with Princess Anne during his engagement to Camilla, but he is not asking to be king or queen and, frankly, it’s wearisome to follow the sordid meshugas of this whole boomer generation of royals and their hangers-on. Although at times commentators have winked at this as glamourous, sophisticated aristocratic behavior, it is actually quite shabby and repellant. "Musical beds is one of the sports of the upper classes,” one royal commentator says. Oh really, and the plebes are supposed to bow and curtsy to these aging nymphs and satyrs? No. Since Victoria, the British monarchy has upheld the middle class virtues of family life, as the present queen shows in having her breakfast cereals sorted in Tupperware, and except for the decadent Edward VII, who thankfully didn’tlastlong(andwhokeptCamilla’s great-grandmother as a mistress), they have made a pretty good show of it. A lot of this was obscured for many years because of Charles’s supporters bringing out Diana’s own misbehavior, admittedly often dreadful, vindictive, and manipulative, and her own eventual unfaithfulness. They portrayed her as stupid, uneducated, uncultivated, mentally unbalanced, extraordinarily untethered, irretrievably damaged by her unhappy childhood, and an utterly impossible human being. Now that Diana is no longer here to defend herself, they can make it seem as if she had all manner of good choices that she refused to make. But I would like to know who at twenty years of age would have behaved much better after learning that her marriage was a lie, and, even more excruciating, was not ever going to get better. And she was left stranded in a very public and symbolic role as a difficult, damaged, rejected, misused person whose emotional needs were to grow ever greater because of this mistreatment. Even Diana’s death, and the wrenching void she left in her sons’ lives, can be ascribed in part to this ugly deception into which she was brought. And the chances are good that all of Diana’s horrendous behavior would have abated if Camilla had left the three-way marriage (which Diana described as “a bit crowded”), or if she hadn’t readily offered cuddling and coddling to Charles 474 C. Iannone when the marriage grew especially difficult, making it possible for him to duck out of it altogether. What happened to, “you made your bed, now lie in it”? Diana knew something of Charles and Camilla’s attachment beforehand, but she believed that the marriage itself, of necessity, would cause that to recede, especially since she really did love and admire him. The painful moment in their premarital interview when she insists that their engagement is a love match, and Charles shrugs “whatever love is,” was ominous, and showed that he had not fully briefed her on what was to be the nature of their union and how limited was to be her importance to him. But even apart from love, she had a right to believe that marriage itself would make a difference, not to mention that he was the older and established figure, and it was up to him to make it work. And he could have, by distancing himself completely from Camilla, instead of carrying Camilla’s picture in his wallet, wearing his Charles and Camilla cufflinks, and calling Camilla every day on his honeymoon with Diana. If anything useful comes of the publicity surrounding their corrupt union, it would be as an illustration of the ravages adultery wreaks upon human life. As shown in The Crown, back in the 1950s when Group Captain Peter Townsend was a palace courtier, everyone was in sympathy with him because his wife had left him. But Prince Philip is given to register a demurral. The reason his wife left him is that he was spending too much time away from home and in royal environs, eventually making himself available to Princess Margaret when he wasn’t really free. Thus his spiritual, and eventually physical, unfaithfulness to his marriage initiated Margaret into a lifetime of disappointment and unhappiness. Evidently, Charles was also jealous of the adoring attention Diana received. That seems quite petty and can only mean that he never saw the two of them as a team. George VI was happy that his spouse, Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, enhanced his reign, staying at his side during the dark days of WWII, keeping up his spirits and wearing her bright colors to the desolating bombsites during the Blitz. Before that, the dour, regal Queen Mary worked well to create a stable monarchical image with the equally dour King George V,because they were in it together. Elizabeth and Philip have made an excellent pair after straightening out some early kinks in their relationship. William is happy for how Catherine attracts and pleases the crowds. It doesn’t speak well of Charles that he was jealous of Diana’s popularity. When Diana fully realized what was happening she confronted Camilla, who, evidently channeling the Joan Crawford part in Claire Booth Luce’s The Women, said something like, you have two beautiful children, you are the Princess of Wales, every man in the world is in love with you, what more do you want. And Long Live King William 475 something like the noble, wronged wife played by Norma Shearer, it is to her credit that Diana exclaimed, “Iwantmyhusband!” What she wanted more than anything was to know that her marriage was real and not a makeshift cover for adultery. The idea that the succession cannot be overturned without damage to the monarchy won’t wash. We know that more than once in English history the succession was revised, particularly to ensure that the country not return to Roman Catholicism. It’s also no good blaming the -of-the-Flies boarding school Charles attended. That doesn’t extend as an excuse for selfish behavior through an entire lifetime. His own carelessness of others was exemplified when he stupidly led a party of friends off-piste on a ski vacation, only to have one of them perish in the snow. There is recent precedent for peaceful, orderly, and un-traumatic abdication in the modern era. King Juan Carlos of Spain and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands both abdicated in favor of their sons. Charles’s abdication would protect the integrity of the monarchy and the church to which it is connected. At the time of the controversy over Edward VIII’s pending marriage to a twice divorced woman in 1938, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin moved heaven and earth to find a solution that would allow Edward to remain king. But the Church of England could not marry Edward and Mrs. Simpson, and Baldwin found that a civil marriage is constitutionally impermissible for the British monarch, who is of course also head of the Church. That is true now as well, since Charles and Camilla have only a civil marriage, albeit “blessed” by the Church of England, in spite of various trimmers and public relations people trying to make it appear that times have changed. The Church of England does allow the remarriage of a divorced person under “exceptional circumstances”: “The breakdown of the previous marriage must not be ‘directly caused’ by the new partner, and the new marriage should not ‘cause hostile public comment or scandal,’” according to BBC News. These exceptions certainly apply in Meghan Markle’s case, but, clearly, not to the Charles-Camilla match, to say the least. They may not have realized all the implications when they started on this road, but they chose each other rather than the greater good. It is said, repeatedly, maybe a little too repeatedly, that they are happy. Fine. God bless them, let them be happy. But let William be king.