How would you behave if you were at the Royal wedding? I concede that at this stage the contingency is remote, but humour me anyway. It’s a grand sight, the sort of pageant that Britain does best. The royal family, bishops, assembled dignitaries, guardsmen lining the route: all that’s missing is a Spitfire, Vera Lynn and some fleeing Bosche.
But Huw Edwards and some bearskins does not a state occasion make. The wedding will look splendid and solemn, but, once the religious ceremony ends, it’s like any other familial knees-up.
So was it ever thus. The Gentleman’s Magazine, a staple of polite Georgian England, considered this question of deportment in an edition published around the marriage of the Prince Regent to Princess Caroline in 1795. It was unable to provide a clear answer, although there were some subtle swipes at the corpulent Prince and his rumoured misadventures with Mrs Fitzherbert.
A coronation is a different matter: the greatest state occasion where every man knew his place and carried himself appropriately. For example, pamphlets were published to accompany William IV’s coronation, with detailed illustrations to identify the ranks of the peerage and the military and to explain what they did at various stages of the liturgy and why it was significant.
The ceremony is ancient. The historian Michael Linton posits that the damaged final section of the Bayeux Tapestry depicts William the Conqueror’s coronation on Christmas Day 1066. Various contemporary chroniclers, many of them from the defeated Anglo-Saxon side, described how William adopted the customs of the Anglo-Saxon coronation ceremony to stress the legitimacy of his claim to England’s crown. Whoever succeeds Elizabeth II will be using a variation on that original to assert their right to the throne. Solemnity is therefore essential.
Of course, a marriage is an important mark in the life of a monarch. But after the vows have been exchanged, the revels begin, the setting for display of a different kind. The vision of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves playing cards on their wedding night is famous because the half-cut courtiers peeping through the keyhole were disappointed that the couple were not consummating their marriage.
The concern was not just for the succession: royal bashes were notoriously excessive. Prudish chroniclers lamented those royal occassions of the past that descended into bawdy or orgy, which they deemed an offence to the sanctity of monarchy. Rose Tremain undoubtedly drew on this varied source material when writing her historical masterpiece, Restoration. Charles II’s court decamps to the country for the marriage of one of the king’s mistresses to the book’s feckless protagonist, Robert Merivel. Merivel is shocked by the general drunkenness, particularly when he discovers the ‘Merrie Monarch’ copulating with his bride in the marital bed. Merivel suffers more than the cuckold’s misery: he feels an acute social embarrassment, which inspires his personal restoration in the end.
And the superstars of English literature levelled a fair measure of censure at the Royals too. Jonson’s Sejanus and Milton’s Comus perhaps belong to this genre, but Shakespeare was a particular master of subtle criticism. There are any number of examples in the histories, but I always recall John of Gaunt’s digust with Richard II’s debauches with Bussy, Bagot and Green, leading to Gaunt’s spectacular speech: ‘That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.’ There is a school of thought that argues Richard II is to an extent a critique of Elizabeth I’s reign during the ascendancy of the Earl of Essex, a time when pleasure trumped duty and the taxpayer picked up the bill.
So, Prince Harry’s various boozy gaffes have a context older than the crown jewels. Who knows what Pippa Middleton’s and Guy Pelly’s revel will produce?
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