The British media must secretly hate Kate Middleton. Why else would they poisonously misquote the brilliant Hilary Mantel? Ok, some context. Mantel is an extraordinary woman, who has won the Man Booker prize twice (a unique achievement) for her novels about Tudor England – I am reading the first now (Wolf Hall) and I can’t wait to finish so I can start the second (Bring up the Bodies).

In a lecture republished in the London Review of Books, Mantel says that she chose Kate Middleton (in an interview) as a famous woman she would give a book. The book is Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, although Mantel insisted “It’s not that I think we’re heading for a revolution.” She continued in a more controversial vein:

“I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung. In those days she was a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore. These days she is a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions. Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant.”

In short Manet’s brilliant essay is a decoding and deconstruction of royalty, a subject that deluxewords has recently dissected at length for Pernod Ricard.

One could look at a million photographs of royals in the gutter press and receive zero insights – whereas one carefully reading of Mantel’s story (she describes fashion plate Marie Antionette as having been “eaten by frocks”) will provide a million clues about what it means to be a monarch, or at least a future monarch’s wife.

The truth is that just as contemporary British journalists, most with Oxbridge pedigrees, affect a dull estuary accent to avoid charges of elitism, so Kate and William are busy dumbing down the Windsors so that they become a nice and unthreatening middle class couple with a wardrobe full of Zara and Kent & Curwen.

 

What I love about Mantel’s piece is not the bowdlerized versions of her lecture used by Sky News to boost their couch potato ratings, but rather these words she wrote about Princess Diana:

 

“Diana was more royal than the family she joined. That had nothing to do with family trees. Something in her personality, her receptivity, her passivity, fitted her to be the carrier of myth. She came near to claiming that she had a healing touch, the ancient attribute of royal persons. The healing touch can’t be felt through white gloves. Diana walked bare-handed among the multitude, and unarmed: unfortified by irony, uninformed by history. Her tragedy was located in the gap between her human capacities and the demands of the superhuman role she was required to fulfill.”

It’s that kind of writing that has made Mantel a revered novelist and why, when it comes to separating royal chaff from Royal wheat she knows of what she speaks.

 

 

I will given Mantel the last words, for in these she defines the qualities that prove Kate Middleton (commoner) and her Death of a Salesman– style husband can never be the real thing: “In looking at royalty we are always looking at what is archaic, what is mysterious by its nature, and my feeling is that it will only ever half-reveal itself.” Unfortunately William and Kate are fully revealed and they have no more mystery than a Vauxhall Astra.