LONDON — Fair warning, as Paul Revere once said, the British are coming. Not redcoats, but royalty.
It is soon time for another royal wedding, coming to a TV near you. Brace yourself for hours of coverage as the wedding unfolds next Friday. One would expect to find London agog and happy, especially with all the tourist dollars flowing in. But the mood seems a lot more apprehensive and it goes like this: Will this finally be the royal marriage that takes?
It is a fair concern. Consider the bittersweet saying that a second marriage after a divorce is the triumph of hope over experience. This is a nation holding its breath in hope after some truly bad marriage experiences.
It makes sense when you think back on how the last two major royal weddings turned out. Charles and Di went through an agonizing period of her loneliness and his indifference. “Di,” a royal watcher once told me, “is in love with the one man in England — Charles — who is not in love with her.” Then came divorce and then came tragedy.
Royal wedding watchers also got to meet Sarah Ferguson — Fergie — when she married Prince Andrew and became Duchess of York. That, too, ended in divorce and seemingly unending tawdriness. The most recent chapter saw Fergie trying to sell a fake businessman access to her former husband for something in excess of $800,000 in a wine-soaked sting set up last year by a British newspaper.
And just to show that bad manners aren’t forgiven, her two daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, are both invited to the wedding, while Fergie is not.
The British are at pains to draw a distinction between Di and Kate. Di was 19 when she married. Kate is a wiser, more mature 29 — a year older than William. Her every word about the wedding is seized and reported by an adoring press that finds no fault. Once again, hope springs eternal.
At Kate’s last public appearance two weeks before the wedding, opening a local community academy, a woman in the crowd asked if she was nervous and Kate’s answer, reported in virtually all of London’s roughly dozen daily newspapers, was: “Of course I am.” How normal! How like any of us!
There were many, many stories about how she’s lost weight, attributed to pre-wedding jitters. Isn’t that just like any bride to be who, according to one newspaper, has given up take-out pizza to “cook traditional British meals with fresh ingredients for her and William.”
But before women dissolve into Kate envy, here’s a reality check: The British royal family is an institution with no power, whose only reason for being is to keep on keeping on. Its decline from real power started in the 1500s during the reign of Henry VIII, when Parliament began taking over and eventually the monarch became a figurehead. Henry VIII also had the unhappy habit of beheading wives he didn’t like (Anne Boleyn, his second, and Katherine Howard, his fifth), and that royal prerogative is also thankfully gone.
And if you can see past the charm of the movie “The King’s Speech,” it is worth noting that the role of George VI during World War II was a completely moral one, to reassure and hopefully rouse the nation. Decisions of strategy or tactics, such as when to invade Germany, were not his job.
And for all those women dreaming of marrying a prince, consider the realities of “happily ever after.” Kate’s life could well mirror that of the current queen — days full of events that involve shaking hands while opening this new business or that new zoo and endless waving. It is what most ambitious women these days might call a really bad career move. And, should the marriage work, Kate’s job is for life.
There is some optimistic news for Kate and Wills. The divorce rate in Britain has been falling these past few years, and is now at levels not seen here since 1974. Perhaps that is a good omen, that two people really can be married in front of 2 billion television viewers and find happiness ever after.
This bruised and battered nation of nervous wedding watchers can only hope.
CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen was based in London from 1991 to 1995 and is currently there again for a brief stint. He lives in Denver.
