Volume 33, Number 10 · June 12, 1986
The Merry Wives of Windsor
By David Cannadine
The Selling of the Royal Family: The Mystique of the British Monarchy
by John Pearson
Simon and Schuster, 350 pp., $17.95
On July 29, 1981, a wedding took place in a large and well-known London church between two members of the English upper classes. He was a well-meaning man in his early thirties who came from a good family with unusually extensive Continental connections, had been educated at Cambridge University and had served in the Royal Navy, and after having discreetly sown his wild oats, had finally found an appropriate and acceptable bride, to his parents' great relief. She was thirteen years his junior, with an unimpeachably aristocratic pedigree. Her beauty was more renowned than her brains, her virginity had been publicly vouched for by her uncle, and her fertility had been privately verified by her gynecologist. The wedding itself was faultlessly planned and executed: the groom's family turned out in formidable array; the bride's parents, although divorced, appeared together for the occasion; and the honeymoon was spent on a cruise.
Review, 3673 words
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