The wedding: Can Kate save the monarchy?

last updated 8 January 2015

Every marriage takes work, said John Burns in The New York Times, but by becoming Princess Catherine, the former Kate Middleton has taken on the added burden of saving “the anachronism of the monarchy in a democratic age.” The British are still reasonably fond of their royal family, but the institution was badly damaged by the disastrous marriage of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer—with its multiple affairs, its intercepted phone calls with “excruciating expressions of sexual yearning” for other people, and its awful, soap-opera ending. Indeed, a long series of embarrassing divorces and personal and financial scandals has shaken the royal family’s foundations “as never before in modern times.” Can Kate, along with her new husband, Prince William, rebrand this inept family of oddballs for the 21st century?

So far, Kate has not made a single false step, said Lauren Collins in The New Yorker. She has expertly climbed Britain’s social ladder, emerging from a middle-class family of “arrivistes” who became wealthy through a party-supply business. At posh Marlborough College, Kate’s friends say, she put up a poster of William on her dorm-room wall, like a target, before the two met and fell in love. When they briefly broke up, Kate kept her mouth shut, gave William the space he craved, and went out on the town in “a spray-on miniskirt.” Sure enough, he came back. Most important of all, Kate knows that her public role is to look beautiful and let William take the lead—unlike Diana, who hogged the spotlight. “Queen Catherine, as she one day will be, seems to have what it takes,” said Andrew Roberts in the London Spectator. The snobs who are aghast that William chose a “commoner” will soon “be lost in admiration of her poise and professionalism.”

Still, I pity her, said Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com. Every decade or so, the pathetic bunch of scandal-prone, dowdy misanthropes Britain calls “the royals” seems to require a “human sacrifice”—a fresh-faced outsider like Diana or Kate who is forced to live an unendurable existence of constant scrutiny, and then is “punished or humiliated when they crack up.” If I could offer the newlywed Kate one piece of advice, it would be to flee this gilded cage before it destroys her. “If you really love him, honey, get him out of there, and yourself, too.”