A Royal Wedding, a Tarnished Crown

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.

  CELEBRATION The wedding day of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, in 1981.

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.