by The Laird o’Thistle
December 18 2005

According to news reports Ms. Kate Middleton will be joining the British Royals at Sandringham for Christmas.  It is another strong indicator that Ms. Middleton may well be on her way to becoming a princess and, in due course, a queen.  And somehow she and Prince William have managed all of this without sparking all the media frenzy that surrounded the ill-starred courtship of Wills’ parents.  In my opinion, this is all to the good, and I wish them well.

What strikes me, though, is how emblematic the relationship of these two young people is in relation to most modern royal romances.  A century ago it was virtually unheard of for a prince or princess to marry anyone other than a prince or princess.  The marriage of one of Queen Victoria’s daughters to a mere duke, albeit the Duke of Argyll, was not well received in some quarters.  But as time progressed marriage into the aristocracy and gentry became more common for the British and other continental royals, so that throughout the twentieth century that became the order of the day.

The late Queen Mother was the first British Subject to become Queen of England since Catherine Parr, the sixth of Henry VIII’s wives, approximately four hundred years earlier.  It seems likely that Prince Philip will be the last foreign-born royal, at least for the foreseeable future, to be the consort of a British Sovereign.  Except for the Queen’s own marriage, the last British royal marriage to another royal was that of her uncle, the Duke of Kent, to Princess Marina of Greece in 1934.

The transition in the twentieth century from royal to aristocratic marriage partners, or at least to landed country families and/or ranking military, persisted up until the marriage of Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, to Sophie Rhys-Jones.  (And even Sophie is distantly descended from the aristocratic Molesworth family.)  Lord Snowdon, Princess Diana, Sarah Fergusson, and Camilla Parker Bowles all came to their marriages with ties to pedigrees and armigerous lineages.  (Ha!  I always wanted to use the word.  It means the family had a coat of arms.)  Captain Mark Philips’ family was part of the hunting set, and his maternal grandfather had been an ADC to George VI.  Admiral Tim Laurence comes from a long line of Naval officers.  Diana Spencer, like Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon before her, was almost more royal than the royals with an aristocratic and semi-royal “Who’s Who” populating the extended family tree.

Currently a new demographic seems to be emerging, not just in Britain but throughout Europe.  The Crown Princes of Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, and Spain have all in recent years chosen wives whose backgrounds are neither royal nor aristocratic.  Both Prince William and Prince Harry seem to be casting their eye in similar directions.

I really like what I have seen and learned of Kate Middleton.  And I am very fond of Mary Donaldson over in Denmark.  The others I can take or leave.  But I am growing a bit thoughtful over the possible long term effects of class-blind royal marriages for the institution of monarchy.  And it may show the fatal flaw in trying to maintain hereditary monarchy in the emerging egalitarian world.

Simply put, a core part of what hereditary monarchy is all about is lineage.  The very principle of the monarchial rule is that you are descended by blood from the greats of past centuries.  The Scots, for instance, have a historic attachment to the “blood of Bruce” — King Robert Bruce, that is — that buoyed up the rather disappointing Stewart dynasty for over three centuries.  Ever since the days of Charlemagne, over a millennium ago, European and British ruling families have intermingled and intermarried.  And while it is true that even the most pretentious pedigrees sometimes include the “Cinderella” who served as the Duke’s laundress or the Earl’s chambermaid, those instances are relatively rare.

The challenge presented by Cinderella (or, Cinder-fella, in the case of Princesses marrying commoners) becoming the norm for royal spouses is that generation by generation the historic hereditary and lineal prominence of each royal family now becomes diluted.  What does it do to royalty as it moves from being one-half to one-quarter to one-eighth to one sixteenth, to one thirty-second royal?  When does royalty cease to be royal by the simple process of dilution?

Now, please don’t think me a snob!  My ancestors were just small struggling Ayrshire farmers, after all.  My interest is not to preserve a repressive class system or any such thing.  But I am simply raising the question of how hereditary monarchy can meaningfully configure itself in a world where class structures and pedigrees are increasingly meaningless?  Fairy tales won’t necessarily work forever.

My own tentative solution – what a surprise! – would be to look to the way in which the Scottish clans have based themselves in a fairly egalitarian point of view, with the Chief simply being the hereditary first among equals.  Every Campbell is a Campbell, but the Chief is the first among all equal Campbells.  (And I particularly like the tradition in those clans where the Chief is simply THE Chisholm, or THE MacIntosh, etc.)  This tendency has increased in recent times as fewer of the clan chiefs have landed estates, peerages, or great wealth to set them much above and beyond their clans-folk scattered over the face of the earth.  This notion is not flawless, but the only alternative I see to this sort of pragmatic ideology for the modern monarchy is for the historic monarchies to simply fade out altogether over the next few generations, and I heartily hope that does not come to pass.  Then we would just be left with the politicians.

But for now, I hope the young lovers have a grand time at his granny’s house over Christmas.  I hope someone thinks to put up some mistletoe.

A happy Christmas, and a guid New Year, to ane and a’!

Yours aye,

– Ken Cuthbertson