Michael Nash explores how far the customs & conventions of the Royal Family have evolved
Two weddings and two royal biographies* this year seem to have lifted the Royal Family into yet another circle of democratisation, a movement which began in the last third of the nineteenth century. But the question remains: does the public want the Royal Family to be like the rest of us? Surely their whole raison d’etre is to be different, to be other, to be ‘on another planet’?
In modern times the question has not gone beyond marriages to the aristocracy, something begun by Queen Victoria in 1871 and confirmed by George V in his various Letters Patent in 1917. The marriage of Princess Louise to the Marquess of Lorne in 1871 was the first non-royal marriage since Stuart times, if one excludes various mésalliances of the Hanoverian princes. It was popular though, simply because the princess was not marrying yet another German. The princess was given away by her own mother, the queen, her father being dead. Queen Victoria was a woman singularly free of most of the prejudices shared
