Friday, June 10, 2011

Duchesses & dresses

According to the report in the paper the Wedding Dress is to go on display at Buckingham Palace this summer at the specific request of the Duchess of Cambridge.

My, that sounds confident of her. But then I did think she looked triumphant as she turned & waved to the crowd when she arrived at the Abbey on the day.

Which reminds me of an earlier report about why she could not have become a Princess.

As things stand she would have had to be, officially, Princess William; you have to be born a princess to be able to keep your own name, which would not have gone down at all well at a time when some have been agitating for the line of succession to be changed to ensure that their first born child, whatever its gender, should be next in line to her father for the throne.

Reportedly the question of changing this fuddy-duddy rule was considered, but vetoed by the Queen.

In making this decision Her Majesty may have been being both wiser & more kind than the report implied.

One of the reasons given for stripping Diana of part of her royal status after the divorce was to do with protocol & precedence, in particular the delicate question of who – in the royal family – would be obliged to curtsey to her every time they met.

Although the Queen long ago made it clear that she does not expect people to curtsey to her (so the rather ostentatious declarations by some that this is something they will not do are superfluous), there are still some delicate family issues.

The Duchess of Cornwall is not called princess, although she is legally The Princess Charles, Princess of Wales; she uses the title Duchess of Cornwall, & to suggest that she should do other at this time would stir up an awful lot of rather unnecessary & hurtful trouble. It would also be unnecessarily hurtful to make her new daughter in law her senior in this regard.