"WHY EVER NOT?"

By JAY COCKS

And so they kissed--and set a lively royal style

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

--Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

A glance behind glass. A held hand in an open carriage. A rushed, royal reordering of family gathered for farewell. A kiss. Several smiles. Two simple vows. Twelve balloons and a hand-lettered sign.

The majesty of the royal wedding was abundant in its ritual splendors, but its soul was all in the small things.

"We do this sort of thing rather well," Prince Charles had reflected. "It's a pity we can't export it." Well, of course, they can and they did. On a rare day of sun in a sorry summer, England came alight in celebration. This was a day of rejoicing that suggested, at a time of violence and uncertainty, nothing less than a national renewal. Three-quarters of a billion people the world over watched the full panoply of the British monarchy and discovered, beyond the gilded coaches and swirling colors and delirious silks, a grand but homey occasion. A family affair, laid on for love.

The world has wondered often enough why the British cling to their monarchy. What they get out of it. Why they need it. The British have frequently bestirred themselves to reply, sounding off in essays, epistles to the Times and innumerable speeches, all of which sounded as much like pep talks to the home team as reasoned answers to a curious--and sometimes bemused--off-island audience. As Leonard Mather, 50, a spectator along the processional route, put it: "We haven't got much any more in this country, but we do have our monarchy. It's a big part of what gives us self-respect."

Lately there has been much grim news out of Great Britain. The highest unemployment figures (around 12%) since the Depression, all-out street fighting in the inner cities. Suddenly, within and without, everyone needed reminding: not only of past glories but of future possibilities. And what better reminder than a wedding--showmanship and statesmanship in high style? The whole country is invited; the world can look on. The monarchy is seen, resplendent, as what the British have long insisted that it has become: an extended, and exalted, surrogate family. "The royal scene is simply a presentation of ourselves behaving well," said Dame Rebecca West. "If anybody is being honored, it is the human race." The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, touched on the same theme in his wedding address, when he said that "all couples on their wedding day are 'royal couples' " (see box, page 30).

All the ritual and regalia of the wedding were matched in ingenuity if not in splendor by the celebrations surrounding them. Angus Henry, 25, a freelance caterer, and Gwyn Jenkins, 25, an interior designer, set up hard by Buckingham Palace with a television, three cases of sparkling white wine, masses of duck pate, a crate of salmon sandwiches, French bread, orange juice and a large black umbrella. They threw a party right there for 50 friends, and on the wedding morning Angus changed into a morning suit. All along the wedding route, spectators wrapped themselves in flags and youths painted the Union Jack on their faces. Others sang the old patriotic songs like Land of Hope and Glory, and across the park, the Dorchester served free champagne with room service.

But past all the extravagance and the socializing, what was most impressive was the pervasive feeling not only of true joy but of real union. American viewers might have remembered the Bicentennial as they watched another country --a Mother Country--united in celebration and in pride. If the monarchy can do that, then all further explanations, apologies and justifications become superfluous.

Not, that notes of skepticism did not surface here and there. "We think it's mainly a performance for the people," remarked Jiri Liska, an economics student from Prague who came to London with a friend and a sleeping bag and camped out along the processional route. "Do you think they realize that each firework that goes up is money out of their pocket?" They must realize it; the press, after all, has been keeping a running tab on the celebration for weeks. The point is, no one especially cares: not about the cost of the wedding-eve fireworks in Hyde Park ($16,000); nor the wedding cake (maybe $6,000); nor the entire jamboree (estimated conservatively at a million dollars).

The wedding seems to represent a solid, splendidly dramatic investment, like the monarchy itself. "Take away the monarchy from England and you've got just a banana republic," observes Kenneth Greenwood, 52, a former Royal Life Guard who escorted then Princess Elizabeth at her wedding in 1947. "You can screw around with the government here, but you can't screw around with the royal family." Robert Goodden, whose Lullingstone silkworms spun out the stuff of Lady Diana's wedding gown, insists that "very few, outside the extremists, would want to do away with the royal family. The fact that they need so and so much to live on--well, good luck to them. If you distributed it to everyone in England, it wouldn't be pence to them."

A few more pence is just the start of what would right the grievances of the hundreds of young people who rioted in Liverpool on the eve of the wedding. Not even the shock of the first riot death --David Moore, 22, run down by a police van during what was officially termed "mobile pursuit tactics"--could take the edge off the festivity. Australia's Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Patrick White suggested that the wedding was "a kind of rosy women's weekly romance to lull the more soft-centered among us and distract us from reality." There was, however, no sense that anyone wanted to forget the country's troubles. Said Donald Williams, 18, a skinhead who came to London from his native Portsmouth to celebrate the nuptials: "I was standing next to a black, and when he cheered I said, 'You're my mate--but only for today, mark you.' " Rather it seemed that the country was, on this day of symbolic union, drawing together to celebrate the traditional values that might, if anything could, surmount its growing problems.

From the general jubilation it seemed that confidence about the national past might stand at least as good a chance of turning things aright as members of the left do. Whatever else it may have been, surely this was not their day. Ken Livingstone, radical leftist leader of the Greater London Council, spurned his invitation to the wedding and spent the day in an empty office building doing "paperwork." Up in Derbyshire, in the town of Clay Cross, residents resisted the plan of the left-dominated town council to hold a "republican day" on the 29th and instead festooned their buildings with red, white and blue bunting and covered the windows in the town center with Union Jacks. Local Leftist Leader Cliff Fox had previously gone on record calling the royal family "a bloody parasite on the backs of the working class," with the result that several residents suggested that he be run up the pole instead of the town's red flag. Fox made himself scarce on the wedding day. Even in Brixton, scene of London's worst rioting, residents bedecked a street that had recently been a battleground and partied next to gutted stores.

So the Prince got the most invaluable of exports--prestige--and with it a new confidence, fresh hope. Britain, like his bride, seemed to bloom. And like the bride, most of the celebrators who showed up to cheer the couple to the church and back from the altar of St. Paul's were young. They will be the foundation on which will rest Charles' eventual rule, and they show every sign of standing firm. There were plenty of punks and skinheads reveling along the wedding route, cheering beside their more conservative contemporaries. If anything, the new Princess seems to have stirred a heightened interest in the monarchy among the young, probably because she gives them, at last, some representation. "Since Lady Diana has come on the scene the royal family have sort of come alive for me," says Rosemary Harrison, 18, who spent three nights with her mother camped out along the mall. "Before, the royal family were something your parents were interested in. But Lady Diana seems so natural and young. We were all a bit jealous, to be honest."

The outpourings of universal regard and good-fellowship may have come as a slight surprise even to the British. The night after the wedding, the commissioner of the metropolitan police and the commissioner of the City of London police, who shared responsibility for the massive security arrangements, issued a statement saying simply: "We hoped for a happy day to mark an historic occasion. Our wildest hopes have been exceeded." Total arrests for the wedding day: ten, all for such minor offenses as pickpocketing or indecent assault. Along the length of the processional route, the rudest sign that greeted the royals was HI, MUM--which could have been, given the circumstances and the spelling, either a message directed via TV toward home or a chummy salute to the Queen Mother.

Still, the police took no chances. Not only did they comb St. Paul's daily for bombs but, the night before the wedding, prowled miles of sewer system under the city looking for explosive devices. For extra precautions on the big day, the Queen's Household Cavalry rode an unusually tight formation around her coach. Her personal police officer, Commander Michael Trestrail, sat near Charles in the cathedral, dressed appropriately in morning clothes, and the bride and bridegroom had a detective disguised as a footman riding their coach (not to mention the 400 plainclothesmen mingling with the onlookers). A team of top surgeons and a supply of blood plasma were waiting in a special emergency unit at a nearby hospital.

Fleet Street had the scene almost as well staked out. The Sun stationed 40 reporters with walkie-talkies all along the route, and the Daily Mail had 25. The only crime story remotely connected with the wedding broke on the day itself. It came out that ten days earlier, in Gloucestershire, two Buckingham Palace footmen, Stephen Beevis, 20, and Andrew Gildersleeve, 22, had been nabbed in a stolen Land Rover carrying 80 sticks of gelignite, batteries and assorted pieces of mining equipment. The story was kept under wraps, but Scotland Yard searched the Buckingham Palace quarters where Beevis and Gildersleeve lived before handing the case over to the Gloucestershire police to be treated as a local theft.

The wedding pyrotechnics remained entirely benign: the chain of bonfires lit all over the United Kingdom; the fireworks display, which also helped raise money for disabled people, who are one of Prince Charles' particular interests; and the subtle shimmers of graceful light from thousands of mother-of-pearl sequins on the bride's wedding gown. Designers David and Elizabeth Emanuel ultimately proved to be more adept at keeping close to the ground than Gildersleeve and Beevis. After putting the word around that they had prepared several back-up dresses in case of a security breach, they finally fessed up that there was only one after all. But it was enough, and then some. It balanced stately splendor and storybook fantasy and was altogether a knockout. "The fairyness was us," David Emanuel said. "The regalness was her."

A perfect match, then, which took 40 yards of pure silk taffeta, 100 yards of crinoline netting, and some old Carrickmacross lace given by Queen Mary to the Royal School of Needlework and used for the bodice. For borrowed, the bride wore a diamond tiara from the Spencer family collection, clasping her silk tulle veil, and a pair of diamond-drop earrings lent by her mother Frances Shand Kydd. Blue was a bow sewn into the waistband. For luck, there was a tiny 18-karat gold horseshoe tucked away in the voluminous skirts. The anxious Emanuels were stationed just inside the entrance of St. Paul's to give the bride the final once-over before she took the 3 1/2-minute trip down the aisle on the arm of her father Earl Spencer. "Am I ready?" inquired the Princess-to-be. "Oh, no," gasped David Emanuel, fussing with final adjustments. "She was incredibly calm," he recalls. "We were the ones who were nervous."

The bride and groom let butterflies best them only when they bobbled their vows a little. The bride transposed the first two of the groom's royal collection of names (Charles Philip Arthur George), and the groom omitted the qualifier when he promised her his "worldly goods." This was a charmed couple on a charmed occasion, and everyone, accordingly, was charmed by the mistakes. They were, in fact, almost a relief in the flawlessly directed proceedings, which managed to accommodate pomp, circumstance and the circumference of the King of Tonga, who settled his abundant frame into a chair he had ordered especially for the occasion.

Like the ceremony, the program of music relied heavily on the traditional with a felicitous overlay of the modern. There was everything from Handel to favorite hymns of Charles (Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation) and of Diana (I Vow to Thee, My Country) to a lilting yet regal new anthem by Welsh Composer William Mathias, 46. The ceremony ended with God Save the Queen, newly arranged by Sir David Willcocks, director of the Royal College of Music, who worked the oceanic swell of that great melody into a kind of coda of moral grandeur. As the anthem died, cheers penetrated the thick cathedral walls as if the world outside had got a celebratory jump on the congregation.

There were very few no-shows.

King Juan Carlos of Spain, still steamed that the royal couple were departing on their honeymoon cruise from the contested Rock of Gibraltar, stayed away as announced, but send a gift. The Rev. Ian Paisley, an Orangeman of the deepest hue, was dismayed that the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Basil Hume, had been asked to say a prayer during the ceremony, and made his displeasure known in a rhetorical thunderbolt: "May God bless the Prince and his bride-to-be, but may God deliver the House of Windsor from the conspiracy of Rome to subvert the Protestant monarchy."

America's official representative was a never-stop. From the moment Nancy Reagan arrived in London she kept a hectic social pace, which included a meeting with the Queen at which she failed to curtsy. Fleet Street regarded this as a snub, although Buckingham Palace made it clear that Mrs. Reagan was not required to bend a knee. With that settled, the spiffy-looking President's wife quickly turned the tide, and by the time she appeared for the Hyde Park fireworks display on Tuesday night she received an ovation second only to the Queen's.

In addition to the no-shows and the never-stop was one guest who was almost a nogo: Sir Dawda K. Jawara, President of Gambia, who lingered a day in England after being regretfully informed by the Foreign Office that he had been deposed in a coup -- but who at week's end returned to Africa to try to unseat the rebels.

The groom himself had to put up with a little good-natured palace revolution. His brothers Andrew and Edward got hold of a dozen balloons emblazoned with the Prince of Wales emblem, borrowed lipstick from a lady-in-waiting to scrawl a JUST MARRIED sign, and got up the royal buggy so that Charles and Diana looked like a couple of nine-to-fivers heading for a week at Brighton.

Well, not quite. But that gesture may have had a significance beyond amusement. At once witty and a little sentimental, the improbably bedecked coach was a sturdy vehicle for the royal couple to take into the future.

The Windsors have an almost acrobatic talent for letting down even while they stay aloof. This explains why it was noted with pleasure that on the wedding night, with bride and groom safely off on the first leg of their honeymoon, the Queen showed up at Lady Elizabeth Shakerley's "do" at Claridge's and danced to Lester Lanin, while her sister Princess Margaret arranged a couple of chairs, put up her feet and, according to a waiter, "had a good rest." It also shows why Princess Anne could have appeared the next day at a Royal Navy ceremonial and apologized: "Please excuse me if I sound somewhat different today, but I am suffering from a hangover after a very enjoyable wedding--but it is a lot less painful than normal ones."

Prince Charles is a monarchical Zen master of this kind of deflective gesture that establishes both closeness and distance. The former comes from the actual doing or saying; the latter from the perpetual surprise that it should have been done at all. Until last week's historic smooch on the palace balcony, no one could recall anyone in the royal family kissing on cue from the crowd. Lip readers who watched the scene on television reported to London newspapers this completely unverifiable exchange. He: "They are trying to get us to kiss." She: "I tried to ask you." He: "Well, how about it?" She: "Why ever not?"

Yes indeed. There are many conventional answers to that question, but fortunately the Prince had the sense not to come up with any of them. It seems likely that not even the best of reasons could have dissuaded the bride. Husband and wife know their duty, but they know their own minds as well. They realize that they represent not only a great tradition but a particular generation. The monarchy they inherit will, accordingly, undergo certain modifications. These may be most strikingly of style, but most deeply of substance.

In a 1964 essay titled "On Being English but Not British," Novelist John Fowles equated Englishness with tolerance, reserve and justice; Britishness with imperialism, conformity and arrogance. "The Great English Dilemma," wrote Fowles, "is the split in the English mind between the Green England and the Red-white-and-blue Britain... The agonizing reappraisal we English-Britons have had to make of our status as a world power since 1945 in fact permits us to be much more English again."

Charles was a very young firsthand witness to that reappraisal; Diana was a child of it. Despite the prevailing celebratory colors, this wedding suggested--in Fowles' sense --an especially English occasion.

It was not a celebration of aristocracy or privilege, but a reaffirmation of a tradition so deeply rooted in the landscape that it seemed less social than spiritual.

After their first two days at Broadlands (home of the late Earl Mountbatten of Burma) and two weeks aboard the royal yacht Britannia in the Mediterranean, the Prince and Princess will try to keep to themselves until late September, when what Charles calls "the family business" will start up again in earnest. Banquets, speeches, presentations, appearances: at least 200 official functions a year, plus one major foreign trip. The monarchy, it is said repeatedly, is above politics. But the monarchy has a political effect and the wedding demonstrated it, in the same way that it suggested the promise of a new England born out of a renewed--indeed, a re-wed--past.

"Green England is far more an emotional than an intellectual concept," Fowles wrote. "What we have done is to transfer the England of the trees to our minds." There, for an instant, we may see--and thus hope for--the England this Prince and Princess will one day rule. It will be far from the New Jerusalem. But still it may be close enough to catch a phantom glimpse of the greenwood. --By Jay Cocks. Reported by Bonnie Angelo, with the London bureau

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo

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