Neither, for that matter, does the self-same Church of England, which Charles will one day lead. The Church of England’s synod recently allowed for the remarriage of divorced persons, but only if their adultery was not the cause of marriage breakdown, which neither Charles nor Camilla can honestly plead. Charles was, according to various accounts, sleeping with Camilla as late as two nights before his marriage to Diana and as soon as two weeks after, and Diana publicly cited the affair as a cause of the marriage breakdown. Even receiving a church blessing of their civil marriage, under the strictest letter of canonical law, would require the couple to express penitence three times for all their out-of-wedlock shagging these past twenty years, something they were as likely to do as to support the ban on fox hunting.
All of this may sound like theological hairsplitting, but it goes to the heart of the objections lodged against the wedding and the Queen’s distaste for the proceedings. The British monarch is both spiritual and temporal head of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, but its temporal powers are now limited to those of moral suasion—and how can the Crown hope to cling to moral authority when it pursues its own pleasure, in violation of the Church’s teaching?
Indeed, there is only one precedent in English history for the divorce and remarriage of a monarch, the Tudor King Henry viii, who disowned his first wife Catherine of Aragon in favour of Anne Boleyn. The Lord Chancellor at that time was the English saint, Sir Thomas More, who opposed the remarriage, and lost his head. Nearly 500 years on, the Lord Chancellor today (solicitor-general-cum-speaker of the House of Lords) is Lord Falconer a former roommate of Prime Minister Tony Blair. He reached into the murky waters of European human rights legislation to declare the marriage between Charles and Camilla legal, despite 170 years of English laws forbidding royals to marry outside the Anglican Church. Falconer’s ruling was bad law but good politics, and, unlike More, he managed to keep head and shoulders intact.
The British Crown has long sought to retain relevance through a certain moral and guiding influence over the people. That ambition, it appears, will die with the present Queen. What the marriage of Charles and Camilla represents is the departure from sacrifice, ritual, and tradition, and the embrace of fame for fame’s sake. Elizabeth’s reign was exercised by royal jelly based on mystique and ceremony, as a sort of living incarnation of the British ideal. Charles will reign along with the supermarket sales of Duchy Originals jelly, his authority based on the principles of organic husbandry and low-impact architecture. He has traded the air of mystery for the allure of celebrity, a process that began with the publication of his extended whinge in the Jonathan Dimbleby book The Prince of Wales (my mother never talks to me; I never loved Diana; that brute Philip forced me to marry her) and end with the exchange of vows in Guildhall.
Ironically enough, the turning point in the monarchy’s fortunes, the one figurehead who presaged the passing of ceremony and the advent of celebrity, was Diana. She was the first postmodern royal, the first to realize that the monarchy could no longer hide behind a veil of secrecy. With naive cunning, she manipulated the media and provided it with the requisite storyline, casting herself in the role of principal saint and victim, a helpless pawn in the heartless Windsor grip. At the same time that she was a victim herself, she openly embraced victims. Not for her the aloof patronage of charitable causes: she hugged the aids victim and consoled the limbless casualties of land mines, in the process turning herself into a hagiographic image for the electronic age.
She achieved this in part through what English philosopher Anthony O’Hear calls the newest form of political correctness—“emotional correctness,” whereby the individual has no higher calling than the pursuit of personal happiness. In order to record her heroic struggle, it was necessary for Diana to expose publicly the intimate details of her life. This she did, through a series of private background briefings with tabloid editors, the Andrew Morton books, and the bbc interview in which she confessed to her own and Charles’s infidelities. It was all laid bare: her bulimia, her suicide attempt, her string of disappointing lovers—all were spilled like blue blood on the carpet.
The Queen in particular was mortified: Diana not only won the public relations battles, now she was eroding the shoreline of royal mystique. How long would it be before the “barbarous” philosophy that moved the French revolution would be afoot in Britain, a philosophy in which, as Sir Edward Burke described it, “a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order.”
And where does the Diana legacy leave the royal family, seven years after her death? Let us peruse the smoking remains. Shorn of its air of nobility and reduced to the level of pop idols, the royals find they are second-rank in the celebrity stakes. They are devoted to good works, but not as devoted as Bono or Bob Geldof; rich, but not as rich as Bill Gates; popular, but not as popular as Will Smith or Beyoncé. And they are paying the price of celebrity, the public’s right to the tawdriest details of their personal lives.
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