The Princess, the Fairytale, and the Blood Sacrifice

29 July 1981; London was as deserted as if a neutron bomb had hit it. My wife and I (also newly married that year) cycled up to her aunt’s house in Highgate to the Royal Wedding party she had organised for her show-biz pals; we had the normally traffic-thronged streets to ourselves.

We all laughed, drank and ate extravagantly, sunning ourselves in her huge and luxuriant garden. Show-business seemed the best way of framing this event, which a normally sceptical and hard-to-move British public had become more engaged with than anything, by all accounts, since the Queen’s Coronation nearly 30 years previously.

So what was it the captivated so many of us about the Royal Wedding? It certainly wasn’t the groom – the heir to the throne has never been enormously popular. It was of course Diana who did it, a myth in the making when the media referred to her as “Lady Di”, before she even became Princess of Wales. Shy, elegant, beautiful, innocent and unassuming in her manner despite her impeccable pedigree (her mother was a personal friend of the Queen’s), she was a better fit for the role of fairytale princess than anyone Hollywood could have come up with – the charismatic unknown who rescues a tottering movie.

I hardly need to recap the story of possibly the most written- and speculated-about person on the planet for the rest of her short life. The point of bringing her up is to focus on the symbolic dimension of her life and death, as the sacrificed princess who dies in order to perpetuate the dynasty. In the royal houses of pre-Roman Britain a son could only inherit the kingdom from his father if his mother had been a ‘throne-princess’ – a virgin descendant of the same royal house; in other cultures the virgin princess is literally sacrificed – it’s her blood which guarantees the longevity and survival of the kingdom.

When Diana died in 1997 the conspiracy theories abounded; many friends of mine were convinced that she’d been murdered by the British Secret Services because she was about to marry a Muslim (the Egyptian playboy Dodi Al-Fayed). Others locate the ‘blood conspiracy’ on a more occult and symbolic level; for a detailed account of these see this link .

Whether one believes any of this or not isn’t the point: what clearly happened to Diana was that she was the recipient of a huge volume of projections, acting out the unlived, unexplored and disowned areas of people’s psyches in the same way that movie and music stars do – and that this was also her downfall. Young and inexperienced herself, and lacking effective support and guidance from her stuffy new ‘family’, she was overwhelmed by the vortex of incoherent but powerful emotions that swam around her.

And today, of course, another Crown Princess is to be installed, when Kate Middleton marries Diana’s elder son. But the circumstances are very different from those of William’s parents: they’re the same age, and have been lovers for eight or nine years. The excitement of the public seems to me much less; William and Kate seem more like a typical “we might as well get married” 2011 couple than the stuff of fairytales. Mindful of his mother’s fate, William has asked that they be allowed to live ‘a normal life’ – a strange request from a man who will one day wear the crown of England. But we can take this too on a symbolic level – he and Kate are refusing as far as they can the projections which destroyed his mother, to ‘desacralise’ the monarchy in a sense.

A columnist in the London Guardian suggested as much: that what William had in mind was to bring the British monarchy closer to the Scandinavian model: the Kings and Queens of Denmark, Norway and Sweden – which are among the most open and egalitarian societies on the planet – minimise protocol and in some cases even have normal jobs.

However, as Timothy Garton Ash went on to point out, he has plenty of time to think about it; his grandmother is likely to rule for another 5-10 years, after which his father will take over. Though Charles will be an old man by then, the Windsors are long-lived, and we’re likely to have to wait till 2035 or 2040 before we see King William V (aged nearly 60 by then). Who knows what, if anything, will be expected from him at that point?

Personally, I wish them well. Refusing other people’s projections is a good way to embark on any of life’s adventures, marriage very much included. May the tragedy of his mother’s short life not be visited upon William or upon his family.