Royal Reflections

A few random observations about the royal wedding:

Why don’t we all wear hats like they do in Britain?

Stoplights go from green to yellow to red…unless you’re a royal. When you’re a royal, they go from red to yellow to green. (You think I’m blowing smoke? See here at just before 54:40.)

When you’re a royal, you get to drive in lanes that say “keep clear.”

Just because you’re invited to the wedding DOESN’T mean you go to see anything. (See 1:29:30)

Gorgeous choir, but, um, no women. Call me crazy, but I still find that a little odd. However, you can’t argue with the beauty of the sound. Listen at 1:39:00 for the Ubi Caritas setting…gorgeous.

Ever since the engagement was announced, Christian has been rolling his eyes about the obsession with the royal wedding. “Why do we care about these people?” he said. “They don’t do anything.” To him, it’s like trying to figure out why Paris Hilton gets so much press. I mean, she does nothing. She’s famous for being famous. It’s nonsensical.

But royalty captures our imagination. It’s something out of our normal life, a life in which we have to fight tooth and nail for every luxury. Royalty seems like this fantasy life. Every little girl dreams of being a princess.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about royalty in the past two weeks. I mentioned The King’s Speech the other day. I also read the book True Memoirs of Little K. It is set in Russia at the end of the 19^th century and follows a ballerina’s long-time affair with the last tsar of Russia. It’s a novel, but I get the sense that Adrienne Sharp followed history pretty closely, as far as the tsar—that the fictionalization is limited to the character herself. It reads like a (really interesting) history lesson, and that quality made me really realize something I supposedly knew before: that all the royalty in Europe were cousins, nieces and nephews. Alexandra, the last tsarina, was German, and a granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England. Her cousins were (if I’m remembering correctly) royalty in Denmark, among others. I mean, these royal families were (are? How many of those people are left?) a really closed circle.

As I started sharing things with Christian, he pulled out his iPhone and started looking things up. (This happens pretty much any time we encounter something “based on a true story”.) We stayed up till 10:00 reading about Rasputin, the executions, whether Anastasia really could have survived. Did you know that the czar’s four daughters had sewn so many jewels into their clothing, in an attempt to keep them from being stolen by their captors, that their clothing repelled the bullets?

And I got to thinking: Can you imagine having enough money that you can have that many jewels? I mean, really, that money had to come from somewhere. Royalty is one thing, but they threw around jewels like they were pennies, giving them out to mistresses, giving them out as rewards to retiring servants, etc.

And then, look at this:

This is one—one—of the palaces belonging to the Russian imperial family. I believe I read that it is one kilometer around the perimeter.

The sheer opulence of that kind of life used to make me salivate. But these days, it gives me the willies. All of that had to be paid for somehow. Where did the money come from? Obviously it came from the governed. One of the stories Sharp tells in Little K is about the coronation of Czar Nicholas II. They invited the peasantry to a field for a kegger to celebrate. Only they put them in a field where the military had been doing drills, with trenches dotting the landscape. Two thousand peasants were crushed to death when there was a stampede (for lack of a better word). And the real kicker was that there was a lush party being held that night for the royal guests, and they had to drive past the field where those two thousand dead peasants lay to get to it. Nicholas was afraid of offending foreign dignitaries, so they didn’t cancel the party—they just shoved the bodies under cover so the guests wouldn’t be bothered by the sight. When you read things like that, it’s not hard to see why the Russian Revolution happened.

I’m not trying to make any connections here—far from it. Just presenting some of my varied thoughts on all the different facets of the royal experience I’ve seen lately. I think my favorite is this gem from The King’s Speech, spoken by Queen Elizabeth (played by Helena Bonham Carter):

“You know, I refused your first two marriage proposals, not because I didn’t love you, but because I couldn’t bear the royal cage. Couldn’t bear the idea of a life of tours and public duties, a life that no longer was really to be my own. But then I thought, he stammers so beautifully, they’ll leave us alone.”