In Britain, all is not as it seems, nor ever has been. As they viewed the preparations for the royal wedding, with all its pomp and circumstance, the non-British seemed to willingly buy into the idea that the monarchy — and popular reverence for it — has been a fixed point in the British firmament for centuries, a source of stability however the nation’s fortunes may have ebbed and flowed.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The monarchy does not symbolize some deep sense of tradition; on the contrary, it has long been a contested element of what it means to be British. In the 17th century, revolutionaries turned the world upside down and deprived Charles I of his head more than 100 years before the French did the same to Louis XVI. The Crown was restored in 1660, but 28 years later another King was sent packing into exile. By the early 19th century, the scandal-stained Hanoverian dynasty was widely loathed. In his great sonnet “England in 1819,” the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley described George III and his sons as “An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king, — / Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow/ Through public scorn — mud from a muddy spring.”
