There is
already so much commentary in the American press about the “Royal Wedding” that
I know that my own positive impressions are widely shared among my
compatriots. It is pleasant to be in the
social mainstream for a change, though my “take” may be a little
eccentric. I am of course not
anti-British—how could I be?—but in general I deplore what might be called
“aristocracy creep” in America. Our country fought and won a revolution to
overthrow the hereditary principle, and to establish democracy as a goal with
republicanism as its instrument. The
great George Washington refused coronation, but we got only as far as John
Adams before the dynastic imperative reappeared in another form. As we entered our most recent campaign season
the two presumptive “front runners” were—out of a hundred million eligible
candidates—a Bush and a Clinton.
Some
significant portion of the wedding’s American viewers must have also fairly
recently watched the fabulously successful British television drama series Downton Abbey. Its subject is life in a (fictional) great
stately home in Yorkshire in the early decades of the twentieth century—a time
during which an essentially eighteenth-century social model was threatened and
eventually quelled by new social and economic realities. Like most viewers I was fascinated in an
almost prurient way by its “upstairs-downstairs” social hierarchies and its
depiction of the domestic rituals and the minor melodramas of the idle rich and
their adherents.
But there
was some serious social history as well.
The industrial revolution and mercantile capitalism were unforgiving to
wealth mainly derived from large land-holdings.
The upkeep of a seventy-two bedroom house with a domestic staff of
thirty is substantial, and many of the titled grandees of the shires, though
half buried in social cachet, were short of cash. So many of them went where the money
was. In this instance that was not the
bank, but watering holes such as Newport, R. I., where there was a certain
supply of the nubile daughters of rich, often nouveau riche, American tycoons.
It was the inherited fortune of the American-born Countess of Grantham
(Cora Crawley, played splendidly by Elizabeth McGovern) that rescued Lord
Grantham’s great house and continued to bankroll it through fifty-two
episodes. Thus had a certain segment of
the waning British aristocracy turned in “real life” to the New World for
redress of the ills of the Old. Read
Henry James, especially Portrait of a
Lady, for some of the moral
niceties of the situation.
Well,
American womanhood came to the rescue of distressed British bigwigs again last
Saturday. There is capital, as in
financial, and capital, as in social.
The fictional Countess of Grantham was happily endowed with money
capital, megabucks. She had other things
going for her as well, but the conduit to her man’s heart had been a
checkbook. Meghan Markle, now to be
styled the Duchess of Sussex, is loaded with social capital. Admittedly she had been earning 50K a pop in
one of her recent acting gigs—not exactly chicken feed—but what she is bringing
to the House of Windsor is a treasure more precious than pearls, a steamer
trunk full of American social capital—sharp intelligence, real modernity, celebrity
with an egalitarian aura tinged with feminist consciousness, a fundamental
genuineness so far triumphant in face of the weirdness of the life she now enters.
The latest
Duchess is a wind tunnel of fresh air. The
British “royals” are not under imminent threat of extinction, but they are not
wildly popular either. A lot of
contemporary Brits feel about the monarchy more or less the way I feel about
Las Vegas. It has little to do with me,
but I can appreciate that it’s a big money-maker in the national tourist
sector. It does take a lot of good will
to accommodate the anachronisms of the setup.
Queen Elizabeth is the only monarch the large majority of her subjects
has ever known. On the whole she has
done an amazingly dutiful job in a situation no thoughtful person would wish
upon an enemy, but she is a woman in her nineties whose early cultural formation
is literally from a bygone era. Her son
and heir, who is considerably less popular, already looks like the Ancient of
Days, and his comparative modernity includes unhelpful eccentricities. This is a point made by the Economist in what is the best of the
analytical essays I’ve read arising from this marital moment.
Given the current
urgency of racial issues both in Britain and America, and the attention given
to them by many prominent journalists, I suppose it was inevitable, as well as
a good thing on the whole, that the racial theme should loom large in the
punditry. Yet much of what I have read
was written by people more familiar with critiquing the Oscar awards than delving
into the symbolism of religious liturgies.
The “royal wedding” was a hugely public celebration of a Christian
sacrament according to an Anglican rite.
The ministers of the sacrament of
matrimony are not the officiating clergy in the big hats and cool capes but the
marrying couple themselves—in this instance an international couple with
slightly different melanin levels. I
presume they had a lot to do with the planning.
The service featured a range of excellent Christian music, though of
course it would be impossible to suggest the vastness of the range to be heard
in churches across the globe. A gospel
choir sang of a love that would sustain even should the mountains fall into the
sea (Psalm 46:2). An English boys’ choir
sang of love that demands moral action (John 15:14). The remarkable feature of the repertory was
not the color of the singers but the unifying theme of love. The preacher said the
whole thing was about love. One doesn’t
need to contrive a racial “angle” in Christianity. The world-wide Anglican Communion alone has
upward of a hundred million members, a numerical majority of whom are black and
brown people.
Since it
was a royal event at which the queen was present, the singing of “God Save the
Queen” was a must. But I also want to
say God save the Duchess of Sussex, whose social capital may cooperate with the
Deity to that end.
