WE WERE told that 85 per cent "approved" of Princess Diana's appearance on
Panornma, airing her woes, three months ago. I never met any of the 85 per cent, at home or abroad Everyone thought she had been dreadful, and any commentator who addressed the subject thought that she should get divorced and be put out of her misery. Now, at last, that is going to happen.
It has been a dreadful episode, reflecting discredit upon everyone concerned (except me when that marriage happened, my wife and I went to Paris to escape the ballyhoo). The advisers of the monarchy decided to stage a fairy-tale marriage and got it wrong. There is an old, old saw if you want to know what the wife will be like, look at her mother. In the case of the very good-looking Mrs Shand-Kydd, former Countess Spencer, it is Evelyn Waugh's Bolter, on her third marriage. The Windsors should know about blood-lines. Why was this elementary rule broken?
I think the original fault lay "with Mountbatten, a man from a dynasty, the Battenbergs, whose record in Protestant marriages is as disastrous as that of the Bourbons of Parma in Catholic ones. The Battenbergs showed off Russia and Spain with a glancing blow at Finland and Bulgaria (as well, of course, as their own Hesse). The Bourbon-Parmas did for Austria-Hungary, Italy and Rumania.
Highly respectable blood-lines, on their uppers, have a weakness for Hello magazine, and that was the problem with Princess Diana. The sooner she is disposed of, and some properly dowdy, well-meaning woman moved in, the better.
There is another important thing to be done. When the Hanoverians were acceding, the religious divide between Catholic and Protestant was all-important. Provision was therefore made that the crown should not be worn by a Catholic (my constitutional experts disagree as to which precise document provided for this, the Act of Settlement or whatever). When this was done, keeping out Catholics made some sense: their countries tended to be backward and tyrannical.
As so often happens in this country, we never bothered to tidy up this business, even though it has become utterly anachronistic, and, in the case of the Princess of Wales, positively harmful. Catholic girls will go a very long way before they consider divorce ii convent education will see to that.
Royal marriages, in the past usually arranged, made sense only in terms of each party getting on with its life discreetly, in different wings of a palace the women, more often than not, just putting up with things for the sake of the children and the religion. Yet Prince Charles could not marry a Catholic princess of this kind because of our stupid old acts instead, he had to marry, ostensibly for love, but in reality for Hello magazine. It is a considerable irony that the British monarchy should have tried to prolong itself with a marriage that was both morganatic and obstinately loveless and now that episode should be brought to an end. As a matter of some priority, the Act of Settlement should now be repealed.
As for Princess Diana, what happens now? The Ottoman Sultans would have had her strangled in a bag, and thrown into the Sea of Marmora. The Russians would have had her in a nunnery. Earlier Hanoverians would have imprisoned her in a castle tower in Celle; the Italian Renaissance would have slipped her a Borgia Special.
Those options are not open to us, nowadays, and, since she is the mother of a future king, she will have to have some sort of public role, if only because, without reward, she will be in a position to blackmail her son as well as her husband, with yet more snivelling indiscretions.
She must be found a job. Edward VIII was eventually made Governor-General of the Bahamas, to keep him out of harm's way during the war; maybe, with proper advice, Princess Diana could be made Governor of the Falklands. It would be a Poor Cow ending, as she surveys all those sheep and penguins, but the irony would be lost upon her, and it might even, for a change, be real work