Death of Diana changed monarchy, Britain itself
After the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, 20 years ago, London felt like a city on the verge of a revolution. Suddenly everything was up for grabs, even the monarchy itself. For a few crazy weeks, this most enduring of institutions looked as if it might actually implode under the weight of so much emotion.
For anyone there at the time, it was as electrifying as it was bewildering. The mood was febrile, angry, reckless. Flowers were piled knee-deep at the gates of the royal palaces; grown men wept in the streets; mild-mannered citizens inveighed against the usually blameless queen for what they believed was an inadequate response to a national crisis. Centuries of stiff-upper-lipped repression boiled over in a great howl of collective anguish.
Eventually the public regained its grip, and the monarchy — chastened and battered, but a monarchy nonetheless — endured. But as Britain on Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death with commemorations, documentaries and books, a central, if unlikely, piece of her legacy is how she reshaped the monarchy that rejected her, and how she reshaped Britain, too.
Diana in life was a loose cannon, an unpredictable wild card; in death, she had a galvanizing effect. Britain is already very different from what it was in Diana’s era, partly because of a younger generation less enamored with old conventions. But her death also opened a door, for better or worse, for the country to become more emotional and expressive, and more inclined to value gut feeling over expert opinion even in such matters as Brexit, its vote last year to leave the European Union.
Faced with a clear choice — modernize or die — the monarchy decided to modernize, led by Queen Elizabeth II but bolstered by a new generation of betteradjusted, better-prepared royals.
“The Windsors, whose most perilous moment came at Diana’s death, in fact owe their endurance to her example,” said Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian, a left-leaning newspaper. “The queen is particularly alert to learning lessons from experience, and in this case the lesson was, ‘Don’t get on the wrong side of public opinion.’ ”
Diana was glamorous, magnetic, photogenic, mercurial, manipulative and intuitive; media victim and media perpetrator; the Real Princess of Kensington, a reality star before such a thing existed. If she is a less-defining figure to the generation that has grown up since her death, she still is an object of fascination for the generations who were stunned when she died two decades ago, at 36.
“We gossip about her as if she had just left the room,” novelist Hilary Mantel wrote recently in The Guardian.
During the days after her death, known now as Diana Week, a nation that had always appreciated the monarchy’s adherence to tradition was suddenly demanding that it tear up the old rules and learn new ones. “Show Us You Care,” the Daily Express said in its emblematic headline, imploring a staid queen, who had never once let down her guard in public, to address the nation and lower all her flags to half-staff, even as every fiber of her deeply conservative being militated against it. Seriously shocked by what they encountered, the royal family had no choice but to respond. “The times were changing, and they were not keeping up with the times,” Freedland said. “But the truth is, they did manage to modernize.”
As an example, Freedland pointed to the queen’s brief, witty appearance in a film for the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, in which she greeted actor Daniel Craig in his guise as James Bond and then appeared to parachute into Olympic Stadium (the first part was real; the parachuting was done by a stuntwoman).
The new generation — namely Diana’s two sons, William and Harry, and William’s wife, Kate — has put a youthful, modern spin on what it means to be a royal person in 2017. They exude asexual wholesomeness (in the case of William and Kate) and bad-boy cheekiness (in the case of Harry), and give the appearance of working alongside, not in opposition of, public opinion. They present as both curiously formal and relatively normal, considering how not-normal their lives are.
Diana was considered disloyal and unhinged, an unguided missile, when she went on the BBC in 1995 to talk of her emotional distress (“There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”). In a sign of how much things have changed, William and Harry are marking the anniversary by speaking publicly about her, with royal approval.