None of this is Catherine’s fault. She may have had some inkling, when she married into the royal family, of the level of objectification she was in for (the press had not been kind to her, remember, not only branding her “waity Katy”, but also weaponising her class background to imply she was a prince-hunter and a social climber), but she still deserves compassion – it has been a rough ride, even before her serious illness. Objectively, people know that princesses have bodies like the rest of us, but do they really know? Perhaps, the fairy tale has been too successful, the transformation of an ordinary girl into a goddess too complete.
It’s been over 10 years since Hilary Mantel wrote her controversial essay “Royal Bodies”, which was read in bad faith as criticism of the Princess when it fact it was a far more interesting plea for the reader to think about what having a monarchy reduces us to. Raising the complicity of the public in the treatment of royal women is never comfortable, and yet we all know that the public appetite for news headlines and photographs directly contributed to the death of Princess Diana, as well as the Duchess of Sussex’s mental health crisis and decision to leave the country. It was far easier to paint Mantel as a mean old bluestocking than it was to properly engage with what she was saying, which is that the institution of monarchy not only dehumanises those forced to inhabit its gilded cage, but also those standing outside it, gawping inwards and treating them as public property. It’s actually a hugely compassionate essay, one that captures the essential loneliness of the monarch; of the Queen, she wrote: “… monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.”
The essay is worth rereading in full. It reminded me that it is not the Princess’s unwell body that the public wishes to dissect, but monarchy itself. “Royal persons are both gods and beasts. They are persons but they are supra-personal, carriers of a blood line: at the most basic, they are breeding stock, collections of organs.” These are not, perhaps, easy sentiments to read, when connected to an unwell woman for whom there is also, rightly, huge public sympathy. But they are important to remember, because Mantel’s analysis concludes with a plea for people to “back off and not be brutes”. I’m a republican who believes the monarchy entrenches social inequality, but I can’t help but agree with her. I don’t believe that people will learn anything from this, because the dynamic itself is too dysfunctional. How much more human pain and suffering will ensue, both for the Princess and for her children, remains to be seen. At the very least, those of us who have loved and lost someone with cancer can grant her what anyone with this awful illness needs: rest, and respite.