Royal Gossip Mondays Resume

Now I can breathe again after all the promo for Naughty in Nice, I'm going back to my Royal Gossip Mondays, sharing little snippets about the royals from recent news or things I've uncovered from royal history.

Last week the big news was that the Line of Succession is to be debated and reconsidered. Until now a son always took precedence over a daughter. Elizabeth only became queen because there was no son. Now I believe the plan is to overturn that three hundred year old statute and replace it with one that gives a female child equal right to the throne.

So if Will and Kate have a girl first, there will be another queen in our future. Makes sense, doesn't it? I think a queen has more press appeal and glamor and one has to admit that the whole royal thing is great for tourism. Also she is not as likely to have sexual flings as princes seem to be.. and thus disgrace the royal name.

This whole tradition of the heir and the spare seems strange now, but birth order and sex really made a huge difference to lives in the past. Remember Pride and Prejudice--Mr. Collins was going to get the family home because the Bennetts had no son. My husband's grandfather was a second son--the spare. Thus he was sent out to the colonies and when he returned late in life and in ill health, he lived fairly simply in a rented house (okay it was a big rented house and I'm sure there were plenty of servants) BUT his older brother got the property, the money, the title, EVERYTHING.

Today that seems so unfair, doesn't it. My brother-in-law has inherited a large family property. They have eight children and I believe a trust has been set up so that they will all inherit the property equally. How that will work, I'm not sure. Open to squabbling.

The most interesting speculation about the line of succession at the moment will be whether Charles will step aside in favor of his more popular son?

Royal Gossip Mondays. On The Duke of Cambridge, what to call Kate, and the royal life.

You all know by now that Prince William and his wife have been made Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. So Kate is not officially Princess Kate and I realize that I must turn to my trusty book to look up forms of address in case I meet her. One addresses a duke and duchess as "Your grace." However not a royal duke. He is "Your royal highness," and thereafter "sir."

Kate is not a princess so I"m not sure whether she is an HRH (Her Royal Highness) officially. I'll need to check on that. Does one call her "Your grace?"  One must be correct about these things. Too many historical novels have been hurled across the room by me because someone calls a king "Your highness."  (He's Your Majesty) or gets the whole thing wrong with Lady Jane Phipps, Jane, Lady Phipps and Lady Phipps.   (It is the difference between the wife of a peer, a baronet and a knight)

I have a book with a wonderful table of precedence--who goes into dinner before whom, who sits where at the dinner table--is a bishop above a duke? Tricky question. Bishops rank equally with normal dukes, but below royal dukes. It's amusing for people outside England to read this but I suspect it still matters to those people who are giving dinner parties for dukes and bishops. And of course in the time I was writing about, the early 1930s, it mattered an awful lot. This is still the time of the great houses, oodles of servants, idle young men like Bertie Wooster, hunts, croquet parties, tea on the lawn and that enviable lifestyle of the aristocrats.

Or was it so enviable? My granddaughter and I were watching Pride and Prejudice for the zillionth time this weekend and she commented how everybody played the piano. I pointed out that girls were not educated, apart from playing the piano, speaking French, sketching and embroidery.

"How boring," she commented and she was right. Their lives were mainly ones of boredom, of filling in hours until the next meal and hoping that someone would come to visit and someone would eventually marry them. Preferable to the lives of those who worked in the dark satanic mills but not enviable to most of us.

Of course the current Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are not living this kind of life at the moment. They are in a four bedroom house without servants in one of the more desolate parts of Britain. Okay, I know as a Welsh person I should be extolling the beauties of Anglesey, and it is very lovely, but it can be extremely wet and windy too. I remember countless summer holidays when it was too wet to go out and we were forced to take walks anyway.  So Kate is facing a few gales, shopping at the supermarket, cooking their meals and I expect she's loving it.

I don't know how I wound up here when I started with the Duke of Cambridge and I was going to share some snippets of delicious gossip about another Duke of Cambridge. But that will have to wait for next Monday now.