In February 1542, Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, was executed under the terms of speedily concocted legislation that made it a capital offence not only for the Queen to have committed adultery, but also for her “handlers” to have concealed that she had had sexual liaisons before her marriage. Henceforth it would be treasonable to keep from the king information concerning any “will, act or condition of lightness of body in her which for the time being shall be queen of this realm”. The penalty for said light bodies and those who didn’t rat on them was to be the same: death.
Half a millennium later, another Kate is getting hitched to an English monarch (albeit one in embryonic form); and while physical death probably wouldn’t be Ms Middleton’s penalty if it were discovered that she had spent her student days at swingers’ clubs swigging back liquid Ecstasy while taking on all comers, she would certainly endure the modern equivalent: death by media. This Kate’s head would be digitally severed from her body and pasted on to a billion tabloids, and the sanctity of public opinion would be withdrawn from her – a latter-day excommunication.
Sadly, we can be reasonably sure this ain’t gonna happen. Ms Middleton’s old linen has been thoroughly mediatised already, while MI5 will have gone over all her known associates with the proverbial pubic lice comb. Unlike poor Katherine Howard (or, indeed, her groom’s late mother), no one is saying that the soon-to-be Princess of Wales should be virgo intacta, and yet the phrase “a past but no history”, has been used approvingly of her.
Some may feel that my concentration on the sexual hinterland of the royal bride is a little prurient, but let’s get this perfectly straight: this royal wedding, like all other royal weddings that involve the line of succession, is all about sex and nothing else. I say sex but what I really mean is procreation – I say procreation but what I really mean is breeding, although not “breeding” in the sense used by old-fashioned snobs, but breeding as practised selectively by members of the Kennel Club, or, indeed, adherents of a satanic cult that uses a so-called “broodmare” in its rituals.
It is difficult in the early 21st century to account for the stands along the Mall, the bunting here, there and every-bloody-where, the memorabilia, the unmemorable blether, and all the other manifestations of hysterical approbation that float around these nuptials in a great cloud of unknowing. Most Britons are pretty clear-sighted folk: they know there’s nothing special about members of the royal family in and of themselves; they also understand that, in constitutional terms, the monarchy is a kind of feint, designed to distract us from our gerrymandered electoral dictatorship.
William Windsor seems to be a fairly decent young man, especially considering his upbringing; and while Kate Middleton is ostensibly blameworthy – having chosen to get mixed up with this farrago – she, too, is young and probably wouldn’t take much deprogramming. Still, I’ve known crack dealers with a more aristocratic bearing than this heir to the throne, and I’ve consorted with prostitutes who were almost certainly wittier and smarter – and who indisputably have far better dress sense – than our future queen. I’m sure that so have most of you. How then do we account for this marriage madness?
The answer is that, just as with that founding father of serial monogamy, the reginacidal Henry, the British crowd is driven mad by the quest for an heir. And so, at a subconscious level, this perverse exercise in humans being treated as if they were miniature Schnauzers grips a good part of the nation.
To themselves, and to anchorwomen from the American TV networks whose visages closely resemble cling film stretched over cold chicken, the royalists will stolidly proclaim the virtues of the couple: their exemplary capability for public service, charity, forbearance, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, they will be unable to view the ceremony except through retinas and camera lenses smeared with royal sperm.
Freud viewed the hysteria of his female patients in fin-de-siècle Vienna as the result of suppressed sexual desire – in his memorable coinage, such phantasmagorical symptoms resulted from a failure to achieve “full genitality”. The British body politic is similarly afflicted by delusional thinking. Due to a repressive convention that makes the statement “I want a republic” as unutterable for front-bench politicians as “I want to get laid” would have been for Freud’s patients a century ago, the entire nation has become unable to achieve what we might term “full constitutionality”. And so the people fall prey to voyeurism and other perversions, seeking their jollies in the consummation of the royal couple’s union. Following the days of Pearly Spencer and her genuinely adulterous hubbie, the whole miserable syndrome seemed to be fading away. We had the Prince of Biscuits to thank for this, as his egregious exploits helped expose the grotesque chauvinism that lurks beneath all that satin, silk and tulle. I used to deride Chucky as “Prince of Tampons”, but I now think there’s something rather affecting about his leaked sex talk, and his blatant refusal to do only who was expected of him – by the public, if not the court.
Now his son is riding to the rescue and the whole storybook phantasia is under way once more: the queen-to-be is a clotheshorse to be serviced, the institution of monarchy is a honey trap for tourists, and so we carry on sending our armed forces – of which the prince is an exemplary officer – off to impose our ways on the Mad Mullah de nos jours.
With lunacy like this abroad in the land, now is not the time to be cutting down funding for mental health services, is it?
