Family drama
The British royals may have weathered centuries of scandal, but their dynasty keeps on rolling along
Murder and mayhem. In the past, this system had the great merit of simplicity and helped to provide some kind of firm baseline, without which a country might be in a permanent state of civil war as powerful families or feudal leaders fought one another for control--hence the bloody histories of the Italian city-state republics. Even with a hereditary monarchy in place, English history, as everybody knows, is an endless tale of usurpations, assassinations, wicked uncles and helpless children, forced marriages, factional disputes, family feuds, beheadings, and bitter civil wars--it is the subject, after all, of many of Shakespeare's bloodiest and most popular plays and surely ranks among the cruelest histories ever recorded and still remembered, after that of the Old Testament and the Roman Empire. Still, when possible, the idea of hereditary succession provided at least some form of stability that far outweighed in importance the merits, or the lack thereof, of the individual monarch. Theoretically, a clever man might make a better king than an idiot, but the whole moral of Shakespeare's Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, is about the price to be paid by everybody, including the usurper himself, when a clever man usurps the throne--a moral repeated in Henry VI, parts 1 and 2, when a simple man who inherits the throne as an infant is undermined by his stronger, cleverer relatives, a process that eventually leads to the fratricidal War of the Roses and to the evil, murderous, hunchback Richard III's taking the throne.
Thus, no matter how much of a tactless buffoon Prince Harry may seem to be, it doesn't matter. His role in life is his place in succession, period. After all, George III went on as king for decades, despite losing the American Colonies, going mad, and finally going blind. His eldest son, the Prince of Wales (later the prince regent), made an inappropriate and (at that time) illegal secret marriage to a Roman Catholic, then married Princess Caroline of Brunswick as the condition for having his debts paid off, sued her for adultery in perhaps the most sensational and lurid trial in English history, and was mad enough to believe that he had led a cavalry charge at the Battle of Waterloo, but he nevertheless carried on as King George IV. He was succeeded by his brother the Duke of Clarence, who was crowned in Westminster Abbey as William IV, surrounded by his many illegitimate children. And why not? They descended from George I, who was brought over from Hanover to assume the throne, although he spoke little English and was widely (and correctly) believed to have locked his wife up for life in his schloss after having her lover murdered in front of her eyes and buried beneath the floorboards of her bedroom. George I spent his years as king of England in the company of his German mistresses, with his bags packed full of crown jewels and silverware, in case he had to make a run for home to escape from an angry mob, but in fact nothing of the sort happened, and he died peacefully.
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