Essay: Ambassadors From The Realm of Fairy Tale

They are, on the face of it, a rather conventional bunch, not greatly distinguished by sex appeal or intelligence or wit. Movie stars have glamour at least, and champion athletes grace. But what do the ruling Windsors of Britain have above and beyond their right to rule? This week, as Queen Elizabeth marks her official birthday, one may well feel justified in asking what divine right inheres in her -- an almost powerless figurehead in a country now past its prime -- to command the attention of the world, let alone its enthralled admiration?

The simple answer, of course, lies not in her person but in the position she occupies, the throne behind the power. Queen Elizabeth II need merely play her ceremonial part -- Britain incarnate -- as you or I might play King Henry V in some amateur theatrical. If Britons will die for Queen and country, they will surely live for them too; to inspire that devotion, the Queen need only be seen and not heard.

On a broader scale, royalty commands loyalty perhaps because monarchs are the last great icons of our secular age, the only larger-than-life figures who can still quicken belief while dwelling in mystery. If God is dead, long live the Queen! Their titles alone suggest that kings and princesses are ambassadors from the realm of fairy tale: Who ever heard of Good President Wenceslaus or The Prime Minister and the Pea? And if the very rich, as Hemingway said, are different from you and me, then the royals are different from the very rich, separated by some indefinable chasm from those who have merely money or power or fame. Japan's Emperor Hirohito is sometimes known as Ohoribata (the honorable personage across the moat).

Yet if royals must be somewhat extraordinary to win our faith, they must also be rather ordinary to hold our sympathy. Humanity is the one thing they can never abdicate. So it is that every king proverbially longs to see how the other half lives: the tiny Dalai Lama, installed as God-King of Tibet at the age of four, used to stand on the roof of his palace and wistfully gaze through a telescope at the other little boys playing in the streets of Lhasa; the British rulers faithfully follow the trials of everyday drudges on the local soap opera Crossroads. The screen that separates us from royals is, after all, a two-way illusion. When the Queen Mother decided once to drop in on a typical French bistro to dine in the company of ordinary folk, her security-conscious host promptly filled the place with policemen dressed up to look like ordinary folk.

In a sense, then, our monarchs are in fact our subjects, hostage to the dreams we wish them to enact. Axel, the wan hero dreamed up by the French symbolist Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, famously suggested that he and his fellow aristocrats leave the messy business of living to their servants; these days, we would just as soon leave it to our monarchs. We demand of them, moreover, a double role: they must be godlike mortals, fallible gods. Upon peering into their closets, we wish not only to marvel at the gowns but also to revel in the skeletons that hang there.