And, it seems, no one cleaves harder to the myths than the royals themselves. The monarchy is theatre, the monarchy is storytelling, the monarchy is illusion.Īll this explains why royals are so irresistible to writers of fiction, from Alan Bennett to Peter Morgan: they are already halfway to myth. Ceremonials such as the late queen’s funeral are not merely decorative they are the institution’s means of securing its continuance. Nowadays it relies on the much frailer foundations of habit, the mysteries of Britain’s unwritten constitution, and spectacle: a kind of symbolism without the symbolised.
Once, this fiction rested on political and military power, supported by a direct line, it was supposed, to God.
It is a constructed reality, in which grown-up people are asked to collude in the notion that a human is more than a human – that he or she contains something approaching the ineffable essence of Britishness.
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