London:
Outwardly, at least, this week's royal pageant will bear a strong resemblance to the last of the great royal weddings, when Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Now, as then, a tall, slim young man in a crisply tailored military uniform will wed a bride so striking she has launched 10,000 magazine covers, offering to Britain and the world the promise of a monarchy alluringly renewed.
This time, as last, the congregation will be led by an assembly of the world's crowned heads, with a worldwide television audience of tens of millions. Once again, cheering crowds in central London will greet the newlyweds as a gilded carriage conveys them from their vows to a reception at Buckingham Palace.
Like that other happy dawn 30 years ago, too, Friday's marriage will offer a respite, albeit fleeting, from a public mood weighed down by recession fears, unemployment and a government austerity program that has labor unions edging toward a season of paralyzing strikes.
But in other ways, the Britain of William and Kate is startlingly different from the country that celebrated so extravagantly, and so guilelessly, in 1981. For one thing, the monarchy's survival is being questioned in a way it was not when Charles wed Diana. Among many in Britain, Friday's ceremony, more than a rite of renewal, is viewed as a step toward saving the monarchy -- and a far from certain one, at that -- after a quarter of a century in which its foundations have been shaken as never before in modern times, by the soap opera that Charles and Diana's marriage became as well as the dissolute behavior of many other royals.
Not that crowds are likely to storm the barricades. Still, there have been signs, among them a tepid take-up of Prime Minister David Cameron's challenge to communities across the country to organize street parties, to suggest that the jubilation may be more muted than in 1981 -- and for that matter, than amid the postwar gloom of 1947, when William's grandmother Queen Elizabeth married Prince Philip.
For years, polls have been showing support for the monarchy running at levels that have made republicanism more than the marginal phenomenon it has been for most of modern times. While many Britons retain a bulletproof affection for the 85-year-old Elizabeth, their support beyond her seems conditional. This is especially so in the case of Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall; they stand first in line to the throne on Elizabeth's death, but far behind Prince William and Miss Middleton in public preference. A clear majority in the polls favors the younger couple's jumping past Charles and Camilla and acceding directly to the throne.
Often enough in English history, there has been more than a whiff of republicanism in the air -- from Cromwell and the civil war in the 1640s to the decades of turmoil that followed Charles II's restoration in 1660, and, in modern times, the public distemper that greeted Edward VIII's abdication to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson in 1936. But in recent years, the royals have learned the hard way what the 19th-century constitutional scholar Walter Bagehot meant when he wrote of the imperative of mystery in the workings of the monarchy: "Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it," he wrote. "Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic."
But daylight -- a blinding searchlight, more like -- has been thrown on the royals in recent times, and there has been much for the British public to dislike. There have been the serial divorces, with three of Elizabeth's four children having abandoned their first marriages, exceeding the par set by surveys that show more than 40 percent of all British marriages failing. In the 1990s, there were sundry indiscretions, including the publication of the "Camilla-gate" tape recording of an intercepted cellphone call, in which Charles offered excruciating expressions of sexual yearning for Camilla. Most recently, there have been the tabloid revelations about dubious financial deals involving Prince Andrew, Charles's younger brother, and some of the foreign potentates he has courted as Britain's highest-ranking trade envoy.
But even without the embarrassing miscues, the reverence Bagehot deemed critical to the monarchy's well-being would have been hard to sustain in a society that has become markedly less deferential. The culture of 1981, in Britain, bore many hallmarks of the class-based nation Britain had been in an earlier age. The age of the cellphone and cable television, and the new horizons they opened, was yet to dawn. The vastly expanded choices in television, and fleets of jumbo jets, carrying millions of Britons across the Atlantic, were to lead to a significant Americanization of British culture, in idioms, dress and attitudes. But those, too, still lay ahead.
Along with all this, the '80s, '90s and the last 10 years have seen in Britain, as elsewhere in the Western world, a rapid rise in wealth and household incomes that has bred a new mood of self-confidence, dented but not reversed by the current economic woes, and brought with it an abandonment of many of the attitudes that sustained the old order. Other factors, too, have worked against things as they were: a relaxation -- some would say collapse -- of the old standards of discipline in the state schooling system, and in the influence of the Church of England, the nominal faith of more than 70 percent of the population, but so weakened now that less than 5 percent of all nominal Anglicans are regular churchgoers.
Along with this, the population itself has been changing. The current count of 60 million includes more than 3 million new immigrants who have arrived in the past 20 years, mostly from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa; many have settled in the London area, where nearly a third of the population is now foreign-born. Among these have been many Muslims, members now of a community estimated at 2.5 million, with community groups that have called for an end to the monarchy, or at least for an end to the primacy of the Church of England, the "established church" since the days of Henry VIII, with the monarch at its head.
It is a new, more cosmopolitan Britain, and one the principal royals have worked hard to nurture. Prince Charles, in particular, has been a tireless supporter of inner-city causes and interfaith initiatives. Some years ago, he braved the mockery of traditionalists when he said that as king, he would like to be seen as "defender of the faiths" -- all faiths -- and not alone as "defender of the faith." That title was bestowed on Henry VIII by the pope before Henry's break with Rome over Henry's divorce from Katherine of Aragon, and has been inscribed ever since on British coins. Cranky as he sometimes seems, with his acknowledged habit of talking to plants and having his valet squeeze his toothpaste onto his brush, as one of his former aides has claimed, Charles's openness to the new, multiracial Britain is a major string to his bow.
But only time will tell whether the anachronism of the monarchy in a democratic age can be rescued by the modernizing changes that seem certain to follow when Prince Charles or Prince William ascends the throne. One of the things that generated passionate support for Princess Diana, when she was alive and after her death in a Paris car crash in 1997, was the sense that she, above all the royals, empathized with the afflicted and downtrodden, perhaps because of the emotional deprivations she had suffered as a child, and later as a royal bride.
Two years before her death, but after her break with Prince Charles, Diana told a television interviewer that she aspired to become the "queen of people's hearts." Today, that stands as a challenge to Miss Middleton, in her role as consort to the future king. So far, the palace has seen to it that she remains pretty much a blank page, at least as far as any ideas she may have about how the monarchy might change. But on her success and Prince William's, first of all in making a happier marriage than Prince Charles and Princess Diana, may rest, in good measure, Britain's chances of retaining a monarchy that has withstood all other vicissitudes for more than a thousand years, and with it the institution that inspired Shakespeare to call his native land "this royal throne of Kings, this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty ... this blessed plot, this earth, this Realm, this England."
For all the disappointment of recent years, those words, written at the height of the first Elizabethan age, capture the deep affinity and affection many in this country still feel for the monarchy. For them, this week will bring new hope that the wedding will lead on, while Prince William and his princess are still young enough to make a difference, to a new chapter for the crown that will yield the contentment -- for the nation, and for the couple themselves -- that was so cruelly promised on the halcyon day that saw Prince William's parents wed.