The royals - Kitty Kelley [97]
“This wedding marked a new chapter for royalty,” said the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post. “Like the seventh son of the seventh son who eventually marries the beautiful Princess, the bridegroom was a new and magical link between Court and people. On pavement level, the marriage of Royalty with Royalty is a spectacle; but the marriage of a Princess with a photographer is a party.”
Less enthusiastic were a few Scottish aristocrats north of the border, who watched the wedding on television. They professed astonishment when the young Prince of Wales walked down the aisle dressed as a Highland chieftain. The BBC broadcaster said he thought Prince Charles looked delightful in his green doublet, lace jabot, and Royal Stuart kilt, but several Scots pointed out that the eleven-year-old Prince was improperly dressed in evening attire. They became even more indignant when Antony Armstrong-Jones appeared at the Royal Highland Games at Braemar in Scotland wearing trousers instead of a kilt. The nobility of Scotland had looked down on the House of Windsor ever since the Queen showed up for her Scottish coronation wearing a street dress instead of her coronation gown.
For everyone else, the wedding was a dazzling spectacle of royalty, from the bride’s diamond tiara to the five gold carriages transporting members of the royal family. Inside Westminster Abbey, the setting sparkled with more shades of gold than a Fabergé box. From the Queen’s gilt chair to the Archbishop’s polished miter to the solid gold altar plate, everything gleamed, reflecting immense wealth. A crowd of more than one hundred thousand people lined the procession route to cheer the Princess, whose wedding was the gayest and grandest ever staged by the royal family. Three million people watched on television, and schoolchildren were given the day off. For the first and only time in her life, Margaret was transported in a glass coach escorted by one hundred horsemen in gold braid. Awaiting her arrival, the crowds screamed: “We want Margaret! We want Margaret!”
Her state allowance was raised by Parliament from $18,000 to $45,000 per year. After a forty-four-day honeymoon in the Caribbean on the Britannia, which cost $30,000 a day, she and her new husband would return to a ten-room apartment in Kensington Palace that cost taxpayers $180,000 to renovate. British servicemen had had a portion of their wages deducted as a contribution toward a wedding present. The wedding itself had cost $78,000, which made the Queen uneasy. The Queen Mother shrugged off the expense, telling her daughter that she had to learn to live up to the lavish style people expected of royalty.
“There was nothing like it,” wrote Eve Perrick in the Daily Mail. “I have been to highly publicised weddings before. I was outside the Abbey when the Queen married Prince Philip. I saw Prince Rainier marry film star Grace Kelly. The unique quality of yesterday’s semi-state occasion was that it combined the best elements of both. It was a right royal affair.”
“The Queen alone looked disagreeable,” Noel Coward wrote in his diary. “Princess Margaret looked like the ideal of what any fairy-tale princess should look like… Prince Philip jocular and really very sweet and reassuring as he led the bride to the altar. The music was divine and the fanfare immensely moving. Nowhere in the world but England could such pomp and circumstance and pageantry be handled with such exquisite dignity… it was lusty, charming, romantic, splendid and conducted without a false note. It is still a pretty exciting thing to be English.”
Noel Coward would not live long enough to realize that what he had just seen was the beginning of the end. Royalty was unraveling. Within a few years this wedding would push the House of Windsor into what it feared most.
TEN