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Royalty has evolved to a dying ceremonial role
By Carl Heintze
Don't you sometimes feel sorry for kings? Or at least for the Prince of Wales? Being a king or even a prince these days is the pits. Mostly it's because royals really don't have much to do any more. They show up to dedicate things, open events or just to show they are still around, but your basic royal is like a bird in a gilded cage. You're on exhibit most of the time, a living symbol of something that most of the time is not very clear: nationhood, tradition, patriotism, or to fulfill the unfulfilled dreams of those of us who aren't kings, queens or princesses.
Indeed, you can count the kings of the world these days on one hand: Great Britain, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and that's about it. Most of the remainder of royal rulers have slunk off into the shadows of history.
It wasn't too long ago--the early part of the last century to be precise--when there were lots of kings, too many, in fact. One by one they got dumped by revolutions, wars and the electoral process. Those that remain don't really rule anything. They're constitutional monarchs without any real say in how their countries are run.
But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries kings were big time, especially in Europe where they and their offspring intermarried, often with disastrous results. Many inherited hemophilia and assorted other genetic problems because royalty was supposed to marry royalty.
This all sprang from the "divine" right kings supposedly had acquired. Royal persons could only be succeeded by their offspring, no matter how tenuous the relationship.
Thus, France, after Napoleon--who created his own royal family by making himself an emperor-- didn't have an heir who lived long enough to succeed him. So the French resorted to nephews of Napoleon.
And one of these decided to make a Hapsburg archduke, Maximilian, the emperor of Mexico. Unfortunately for Max, the Mexicans didn't want an emperor. They already had a president, Benito Juarez; so, rather unkindly, they rebelled, captured Maximilian and put him in front of a firing squad.
Maximilian was one of the few emperors in the New World, although Brazil briefly had another. That's because most of the New World was run by Europeans who had come across the ocean to get away from kings and emperors.
The American Revolution, after all, came about, in large part, because the colonists wanted to get rid of George III.
And even in Europe, kings, emperors and princes were going out of style. After World War I they disappeared in wholesale lots. Now we have lots of presidents and prime ministers, but few working kings, queens, princes or princesses.
I have a feeling, though, that secretly most of us carry somewhere a vague craving for royalty. We'd all like to be king or queen for a day, perhaps no longer than that, but for a day anyway. Witness the outpouring of sympathy and grief for Princess Diana, who was every American girl's dream of what a princess should look like and how she should act in public. I'm not so sure how many American boys would want to be Prince Charles, although they might settle for being one of his sons for a day.
We think it would be nice to be dressed in beautiful clothes, to have everyone bow and stand when we came into the room, to honor our every whim and to have a palace or two in which to hang out, so long as someone else paid the bills and took care of its maintenance.
Actually, being a prince or princess or, worse yet, being a king or queen seems to me to be really boring, hardly divine and a life from which most people would yearn to escape. It involves a lot of standing, some rather limp handwaving, handshaking, a lot of fixed smiling, and paying a lot of people to take care of all these things.
No wonder King George V's advice to Edward VIII was, "Never miss an opportunity to sit down or relieve yourself."
And in Britain, at least, being royal also involves an almost constant prying on the part of the media, something which must get old very fast. This certainly reached its heights with Princess Diana.
The Scandinavian kings and queens seem to handle public attention much more successfully, to be more just folks and yet somehow to retain something of the national mystique kings and queens are supposed to have.
There you have it. Royalty seems a dying tradition, although I guess we can't count the Windsors out yet.
All in all, I'm glad I'm not a king, not, of course, that I've been asked to be one. And, all in all, it's a good thing that monarchies have gone out of style in government, that kings and queens reign only through democratic choice and not by divine right.
Royalty has gone where it should be--into fairy tales.
And yet, wouldn't you like to be king or queen for a day?
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
