Royal baby marks William’s second coming of age
How many monarchists and how many of the curious will show up when Prince William and Kate reveal their baby to the world from the balcony of Buckingham Palace for the first time?
Unusually, no bets are being taken from British punters on how big the crowd might be. But it is a certainty that the turnout will be enormous.
The birth of William’s first son or daughter — which now may be nearly one week overdue — will be a second coming of age for the 31-year-old prince. The Duke of Cambridge’s first coming of age was that brutal day in 1997, when as a 15-year-old, he joined his brother, Harry, his father, Charles, his grandfather, Philip, and his maternal uncle, Charles, the ninth Earl Spencer, in the long, grim walk from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey to attend his mother’s state funeral.
Like hundreds of thousands of others, I had camped out overnight to catch a glimpse of Diana’s horse-drawn cortege as it passed through Whitehall.
Despite all the crowds there wishing him all the best that sunny September morning, and a television audience that in Britain alone was said to number 38 million people, Wil- liam was not only bereft, he looked bewildered and unhappy with the very public life into which he had been born.
That is why it is such a pleasure to see him today. By all accounts, he is grounded, calm and happy with his lot as he prepares to open a new chapter with a young woman whom he apparently dotes on and who seems better suited to manage the turbulent life in a fish bowl than his mercurial late mother was.
I have spent some time recently in Egypt, where the size of the protests for and against the governments of the moment have been greatly exaggerated by the media. There have been absurd estimates of 30 million men and women protesting simultaneously across that country.
Even the crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square have been grossly exaggerated. Where I have estimated no more than 20,000 demonstrators, I hear on CNN or the BBC that 200,000 people were present. When half a million Cairenes have shown up, the world has been told that several million people are there.
The biggest crowd that I have ever been part of was Indira Gandhi’s funeral in November 1984. Perhaps three or four million people, many in dazzling ethnic dress, crowded a dusty, rolling landscape that was entirely blanketed by humanity for as far as the eye could see.
It has been predicted that many South Africans will turn out soon in Pretoria to honour and celebrate Nelson Mandela when his long life finally ends.
But these funerals were exceptional, one-off events. Whether it be for a funeral, a coronation, a wedding or a jubilee, nobody has been able to regularly pull a huge crowd the way the House of Windsor can.
Nor has anybody felt a need to inflate their numbers.
I first heard of this phenomenon long before I witnessed it. My mother told compelling stories of VE-Day when as a Wren serving as a codebreaker in the Royal Canadian Naval Service in London, she and hundreds of thousands of others descended on the mall in front of Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Allied victory over Hitler with King George VI, his wife, Queen Elizabeth, and Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.
I was reminded of the enduring bond between the Royal Family and their subjects, and the pomp and pageantry that goes with it, when Charles married at St. Paul’s Cathedral and then buried Diana at the abbey, when the Queen Mother was feted again and again on her 100th birthday and during last spring’s diamond jubilee celebrations when heavy rain did not dampen the ardour of millions of Britons who lined the Thames to watch Queen Elizabeth II’s slow procession down the Thames by royal barge.
It is into that grand tradition that Prince William and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge’s, baby is to be born.