The royals - Kitty Kelley [92]
Mountbatten took charge of his daughter’s wedding like an impresario staging a theatrical production. He selected her royal bridesmaids—Princess Anne, the Queen’s ten-year-old daughter; Princess Clarissa of Hesse; and Princess Frederica of Hanover. He summoned Owen Hyde-Clark of the House of Worth to design her wedding dress and promptly put his daughter on a diet so that she would look sleek and slim on her wedding day. He relegated the incidental details to his future son-in-law, the decorator, who was eager to please his future father-in-law. Hicks decreed that everything should be white—”all white, all white”—from the mink cuffs on the bridal gown to the bridesmaids’ coronets of hyacinth petals.
“As mother of the bride, Edwina was delighted to have her future son-in-law flying about attending to everything,” said a friend, “because she was already overexhausted planning her charity excursion to the Far East. She left a few days after the wedding, and, sadly, died in her sleep on that trip while touring Borneo.”
The press coverage of the Mountbatten wedding conveyed the impression of a glorious union between a nobleman’s daughter and the common but worthy man of her dreams. The bride’s entrance into Romsey Abbey was heralded by trumpets playing “O Perfect Love.” And at the reception later, surrounded by members of the British and German royal families, the Duke of Edinburgh toasted the future of the bride and bridegroom.
“As long as they produce children and keep the bloodline going,” said Gwen Robyns, “that’s all that’s required. Whether the bridegroom is homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual doesn’t matter, as long as the marriage looks good on the outside and is kept up for public appearances. It’s worse for gay men within the aristocracy because it’s the duty of the oldest male to produce an heir to pass on the family name, the property, and the title. So they’ve got to get married, no matter what their sexual orientation is, which accounts for the long established tradition in Britain of homosexual men marrying women simply to breed. Makes no difference what they do later on the side as long as they do it discreetly. That’s the hypocrisy of it all.”
In his memoir, Palimpsest, writer Gore Vidal reflects on the homoerotic preference of men for each other that is accepted as a fact of life in Great Britain, especially in public schools. “Most young men, particularly attractive ones, have sexual relations with their own kind,” Vidal writes. “I suppose this is still news to those who believe in the two teams: straight, which is good and unalterable; queer, which is bad and unalterable unless it proves to be only a Preference, which must then, somehow, be reversed, if necessary by force.” Within the British aristocracy, marriage was the force.
“The love that dare not speak its name” was the way Oscar Wilde’s young male lover had described men’s sexual preference for one another in 1895. At that time, men like Oscar Wilde, who married women but loved men, were considered degenerates whose sexual acts were punishable by imprisonment. Sixty-five years later nothing had altered that concept in England, and in 1960, after the announcement of Princess Margaret’s engagement, sexuality again became an issue.
The whispering started soon after the Queen Mother announced her daughter’s engagement and impending marriage in May. Ordinary people were pleased that the twenty-nine-year-old Princess, who had partied aimlessly for five years since renouncing Peter Townsend, seemed to have finally found happiness. For the public, her marriage to a commoner would lower a class barrier between the monarchy and the people