Magic in the Daylight

Prince Charles weds his Lady Diana in the century's grandest royal match

Charles who?" asked the singer, forgetting for the moment the Prince's warm admiration of her top notes. Her agent hastily explained, his client hastily accepted, and this week, Kiri Te Kanawa, originally from New Zealand and lately of the Royal Opera, will let her shimmering soprano loose on a three-minute anthem by Handel. She will be accompanied by a trumpet soloist and 95 other musicians drawn from three orchestras in which the bridegroom has taken a particular interest.

Barring an act of God, the Irish Republican Army, the nation's unemployed or any combination thereof, Te Kanawa's audience will include one happy couple, 26 prominent clerics, a carefully vetted congregation of 2,500 crowding each other for pew space under the great painted dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, more than 75 technicians manning 21 cameras, and an estimated worldwide television audience of 750 million. They will be tuning in the century's greatest, grandest nuptial, the sort of love story Hollywood doesn't make any more and the kind of spectacle it can't even afford any more.

In plan and in prospect, the marrying of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, 32, to Lady Diana Spencer, 20, the well-born and distinctively dishy commoner, is a fairy tale of present pomp and past glory, a last page from the tattered book of empire with the gold leaf still intact. It is by Rudyard Kipling out of Walter Bagehot, a ceremony intended to refurbish and reaffirm tradition.

"The monarchy's mystery," Bagehot wrote in 1867, "is its life.

We must not let in daylight upon magic." This wedding on the cusp of high noon, in front of a world short on ritual and parched for romance, is in fact one grand pass of the royal wand, a masterly and pricey piece of prestidigitation in which, at once, the old values are upheld, the future is assured and everyone can be queen for a day.

Some of these values and traditions have played false—indeed, may have betrayed—those of Her Majesty's subjects who, out of rage and frustration, have been rioting in the streets, burning cars, looting stores and combatting the police. The month past has seen the worst outbreak of violence in Great Britain in a century, which has cast a long and smoky shadow over this splendid national occasion.

It seems easier for everyone, however, to give three cheers and subsume the flames that came from Brixton and Manchester and Liverpool in the more congenial firelight of the wedding-eve pyrotechnics at Hyde Park and the 101 celebratory bonfires ignited all over the kingdom, from Scotland and Wales to the Shetlands and the Scillys, even to the embattled north of Ireland. "When politics are in rather a mess," remarks Lady Elizabeth Longford, a historian and biographer, "any institution that is above politics gets an extra dose of glamour."