So who does Kate curtsy to if William is on the loo?
Robert Crampton
The answer is good news for us republicans. No denying it, it’s been a rough old time for us republicans, this last year or so.
That wedding last spring, then Harry touring the West Indies, hanging out with Usain Bolt and practically copping off with Miss Bahamas, then the triumph of the Jubilee, Suggs, Spitfires, street parties and all. Add in the usual seasonal hammer blows of Trooping the Colour and Royal Ascot, and there hasn’t been a great deal around to warm the Cromwellian heart.
Although I can’t help but note that the appeal for us to pay for a new Royal Yacht as a Jubilee gift to the Queen has gone quiet. Perhaps after all there are limits to the British people’s admiration for their monarch.
This weekend, moreover, the roundhead tendency got the first decent break we’ve had in ages. Buckingham Palace, by which I mean the Queen, has updated, in the light of Kate Middleton’s arrival, a document called the Order of Precedence in the royal household. Last revised in 2005 to accommodate Camilla, the Order of Precedence ranks all the members of the Royal Family, Queen at the top of course, the others jostling beneath.
This ranking matters to the Windsors because it clarifies who has to grovel to whom, in the form of a bow or a curtsy. Yes, they bow and curtsy to each other, not just to the Queen, not just for public show, but in private, even when they’re just chillin’ at Balmoral or Sandringham, shooting stuff. Sophie Wessex apparently has to bend the knee to pretty much everyone. Barely ever upright, poor Sophie.
How the Republican soul leaps at this intelligence. First, because it shows how deeply weird this family at the head and heart of our country actually is. Imagine bowing to, say, your brother-in-law whenever he walked into the room. Second because the update downgrades Kate, who is popular, in favour of the “blood princesses,” namely Anne, Beatrice, Eugenie and another one called Alexandra.
Kate, the Queen has made clear, has to curtsy to them. Except when William is present, because then Kate, given the impressive sexism of the monarchy, assumes her husband’s status. So she curtsies to Anne when William’s not there, but not when he is. What Kate does if Anne walks in when William is struggling with constipation in the loo, all too audible but not visible, is anyone’s guess . . . although there’s probably a handbook on the correct protocol somewhere in Windsor Castle.
I wasn’t sure, incidentally, if this Alexandra person is the nice one who does Wimbledon and the FA Cup or the pushy one with the Nazi dad, so I checked, and it turns out she’s neither, she’s just some random cousin of the Queen. I don’t know if Alexandra’s popular or not, but Anne is respected rather than loved and Beatrice and Eugenie are only ever one bad outfit away from total derision. Not fair, perhaps, but then nothing about royalty is fair.
In the Kremlinology of the Windsors (substituting the palace balcony for the roof of the Lenin mausoleum) this Order of Precedence leak looks like Andrew fighting back after he and his girls were sidelined at the Jubilee. Good for him, but still, in terms of the bigger picture, to make Kate curtsy to Beatrice and Eugenie is utter madness.
But curtsy she must, because they’re “blood princesses” and she isn’t, she was born a “commoner”. And right there we see the third reason this ranking news is good for republicans, and not just because those twin chilling phrases sound like something Draco Malfoy or Heinrich Himmler might have come out with.
Very few of us think that who your parents happen to be should determine the rest of your life. Yet that’s not just what the Queen symbolises, that’s what she fervently believes. She has to believe it, it’s the basis of her whole existence. Anything that makes this more obvious is welcome.
Yeah, but no matter what way they greet, be it in a form of a bow or a kiss, it's still pretty confusing.
