🥀The Queen Is Dead, Boys, and It’s So Lonely on a Limb
The House of Windsor has been America's favorite soap opera for forty years. Somewhere along the way, nobody asked us if we wanted a refund.
Let us pause, for just a moment, and register appropriate astonishment. The British Royal Family — that ancient institution of hereditary ceremony, chinaware, and corgi photographs — has managed to become genuinely confusing to the American public in a way that no war, no Brexit backstop, and no number of Downton Abbey seasons ever quite accomplished. We are not confused because the story is complicated. We are confused because we cannot figure out whose side we are supposed to be on, and nobody in Buckingham Palace seems interested in helping us work that out.
Cast your mind back, if you will, to the early 1980s. Charles and Diana. The wedding dress with the preposterous train. A billion people are watching on television. The entire Western world was invited to believe that something genuinely fairytale was underway across the Atlantic. For a certain generation of American women — women who had grown up listening to the same pop radio stations, crying over the same ballads, following the same celebrity magazines — Diana was the story. Young, luminous, nervous, and apparently very much in love with a man who very much was not in love with her. We did not know that part yet. We were enchanted.
Here is the thing about enchantment: it has an expiration date stamped on the bottom that you only notice after the rancor hits you. The years that followed produced enough dysfunction to stock a decade of daytime television. Separations announced through palace press offices. Tell-all interviews delivered in tones of wounded dignity. Children photographed in military uniforms on airport tarmacs, waving at cameras like tiny diplomats nobody briefed. And threading through all of it, a name that an entire generation of American women was quietly trained to despise: Camilla. The other woman. The reason. The person who, we were given to understand, had always been there, waiting, while Diana did her best with a man whose heart was already occupied. We absorbed this. We did not forget it.
The theory that a debauched Royal Family reassures the British public — proving that wealth and title confer no special virtue — may explain a great deal about the domestic press appetite. It does not explain why that same appetite is being catered to in Middle America, where the mood is considerably less forgiving. The British may have made their peace with Camilla. We were not consulted.
But the ornaments have started talking! That is the development nobody in the palace gift shop anticipated. The children who were photographed waving on tarmacs are now adults, and some of them have given interviews, written memoirs, and moved to California — which, in the British tabloid imagination, appears to be roughly equivalent to defecting to a hostile power. The feuds are no longer whispered through anonymous sources. They are documented, timestamped, and available on streaming platforms with original scoring.
In Middle America — among the listeners who came of age with the same pop stations that soundtracked Diana's wedding — the reaction is not gleeful. It is something closer to exhausted bewilderment. We were sold a romance. We have a property dispute with the Crown. And then, this past week, we were asked to watch Camilla Parker Bowles — Queen Camilla, if you please — tour a horse farm in Virginia and pose for photographs at the White House. She looked perfectly pleasant. She read to children. She said nice things about books.
There is growing suspicion that the money was never particularly well-spent, the spectacle was never particularly well-managed, and the family at the centre was never particularly well-suited to the role of being a symbol. We do not begrudge them their humanity. We simply cannot, with a straight face, continue to call it majesty.
