An Ode To Love

The Age

Saturday April 2, 2005

JAMES BUTTON

Next week two "boring old gits" are getting hitched, and it's a real love story, writes James Button.

IMAGINE him in his book-lined study, pen in hand, paper blank, small beads of perspiration on his forehead. His wages are ##500 a year and 700 bottles of sherry; one lies empty on the floor. Andrew Motion, Britain's poet laureate, is labouring to produce a poem to commemorate the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.

If Motion is struggling, it won't be for the obvious reason - what rhymes with Camilla? - but because it's not easy finding soaring words and sentiments to shake Britons out of their apathy towards next Friday's royal wedding.

"Boring old gits to wed" (by "Hugh Cares") ran the headline in The Daily Star tabloid on February 11, the day after the wedding's announcement. Most Britons are kinder, with 57 per cent approving of the marriage, according to a poll in The Daily Mail this week.

Yet the same poll revealed their wariness: 65 per cent think the marriage will damage the monarchy - 16 percentage points more than six weeks ago. Not only do 71 per cent say Camilla must never be queen, but a previous poll, taken after the announcement, found that two-thirds of the population now think Charles should never be king.

It would be wrong, therefore, to see the event as inconsequential. When Charles and Camilla ride in the late Queen Mother's Rolls-Royce to a civil ceremony at Windsor town hall, the very future of the monarchy may be riding with them.

Last week, pre-empting Motion, The Daily Telegraph commissioned four poets to write the couple a wedding ode. If poets are prophets, the news is not good, not only for Charles and Camilla but for "the Firm" as a whole.

Hamish Robinson, poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust, hoped for "a jeering crowd" and hordes of photographers gatecrashing the honeymoon. He saw the wedding as a parable of modern Britain:

"Now hunting's banned, and guns, and dogs

And ID cards are carried,

It's only right a prince should ride

To the Town Hall to be married."

The punk poet Attila the Stockbroker - John Bain to his mother - was even more savage:

"It really doesn't matter who is sitting on the throne

They're all as dull as dishwater and should be left alone.

I don't care what their hamster's called or whom they are a-bedding:

I want some interesting news, not Chas and Millie's wedding!"

Just what you'd expect from a punk. But even Pam Ayres - "comic poet/priestess to middle England," as the Telegraph dubbed her - titled her poem Dejected Thoughts on the Royal Wedding. And it ran to just four lines:

"My mother said, 'Say nothing

If you can't say something nice'

So from my poem you can see

I'm taking her advice."

But are the polls and poets wrong? Could the marriage of two ageing baby boomers who have both been round before be a great love story for our times?

Like Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers, they have faced terrible trials, though it's unclear whether they're Romeo and Juliet or playing in The Comedy of Errors. First they were unable to marry at Windsor Castle, as they had intended, because a few days after their announcement it emerged that if a civil ceremony was held there then, under the law, any commoners could marry there, too. That just wasn't on.

Then 11 people - reportedly including two members of the Diana Circle, a group devoted to the memory of Princess Diana, and an 80-year-old Queen Victoria impersonator - challenged the Prince's right to wed in a civil ceremony. Some objectors cited the Marriage Act of 1836, which allowed non-religious marriages for everyone except royals.

NO SOONER had the British Registrar-General dismissed their case than the law loomed again. Clarence House, the Prince's official residence, had maintained that Camilla would not become queen but merely take the title of princess consort on Charles' accession to the throne. Not so, said the Government when pressured for an opinion. Camilla would automatically become queen unless legislation in Britain and 15 Commonwealth countries where the monarch was head of state - including Australia - expressly ruled otherwise. The legal mess, which is still unresolved, suggests a society that is confused about where its royal family stands. But the biggest blow came from Mummy. Moving the ceremony to a town hall was too much for the Queen, who made it known she would not come, though she would be at the blessing and host the finger-food buffet reception at Windsor Castle. The apparent snub has been linked to Charles' relationship with Camilla, which has long incurred Her Majesty's displeasure. A courtier - anonymous but highly placed, as they always are - told a newspaper that the Queen thinks Charles has "put his own gratification and interests before duty by pursuing his relationship with Camilla, and she can never forgive that".

But far more than a personal feud is at stake, royal observers say. In 1981, Charles married Diana in St Paul's Cathedral before a global TV audience of 750 million. On Friday, he will marry in a makeshift registry office before 30 people and no cameras. The change worries both palace courtiers and the Queen herself, according to her biographer, Brian Hoey.

"There is a very real danger that by scaling down the grandiose spectaculars that we've come to expect, the royal family run the risk of further distancing themselves from an increasingly indifferent public," he writes in the BBC's Radio Times magazine. "This wedding could be a pivotal moment in that process of estrangement."

Among monarchists, pessimism reigns. "I suspect not many people will watch it," says Cathy Brooks-Baker, a director of Burke's Peerage, the published guide to the aristocracy. "From the welcome the Prince of Wales received in Australia, it seems he is not a very romantic figure."

She says the wedding could weaken a monarchy already "so vulnerable to public opinion". While the cost of dismantling it would be too great, she thinks that over time "it will be downsized, becoming more like the Netherlands and Spain. They are already having to go in for belt-tightening."

The tabloids rough up Camilla nearly every day. In a mild example this week, The Daily Mail used an unflattering photo of her to launch a feature on whether older women should wear jeans. Charles was showing the strain at a photo-call on the Swiss ski slopes on Thursday. When BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell asked how he felt about the wedding, he turned to his sons, William and Harry, and muttered: "Bloody people. I can't bear that man. He is so awful, he really is."

But while Charles apparently believes the British people have "tortured" him over his relationship, Camilla has maintained a public silence. Times columnist and longtime royal reporter Andrew Pierce says she doesn't play Diana's game privately, either: she never briefs reporters anonymously.

Brooks-Baker thinks that "sensible" Camilla, for all her current unpopularity, might even be good for the monarchy and for Charles' image. While she doesn't know Camilla, "people who know people who know her say she's an extremely lovely person and very witty. In an English way she's very sexy, too. The fact is, she's not beautiful. Some people say she looks disagreeable, but you become rather disagreeable if you have flashbulbs thrust at you all the time."

Through all this, and through 34 years, the pampered, aloof, eccentric Prince has stuck with the woman he calls "the one non-negotiable fact" in his life. This, more than anything, is what Friday's marriage is about. Yes, it's a comedy of errors, and probably much ado about nothing, but it's also a story of two people who love each other and want to get married, against a host of others who want to meddle or stop them. It's Romeo and Juliet, too, just a little less sexy.

The Telegraph's fourth poem - by Todd Swift, Canadian poet-in-residence for Oxfam - makes a simple point: let them be.

"The churchmen and attorney-generals who say

Which couples should be united and which separated

Are forgetting that in love the only power is love."

Swift called his poem Fool's Wedding. But if the lovers are fools, it's only because:

"All love is foolish, it ignores the laws of nature

To stray in fields of flowers, stars, above legality

Let those who mock the powers that be praise

Loving, even in hearts as old and unwise as these."

© 2005 The Age

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