Ambassadors From The

By Pico Iyer

They are, on the face of it, a rather conventional bunch, not greatly distinguished by sex appeal or intelligence or wit. Movie stars have glamour at least, and champion athletes grace. But what do the ruling Windsors of Britain have above and beyond their right to rule? This week, as Queen Elizabeth marks her official birthday, one may well feel justified in asking what divine right inheres in her -- an almost powerless figurehead in a country now past its prime -- to command the attention of the world, let alone its enthralled admiration?

The simple answer, of course, lies not in her person but in the position she occupies, the throne behind the power. Queen Elizabeth II need merely play her ceremonial part -- Britain incarnate -- as you or I might play King Henry V in some amateur theatrical. If Britons will die for Queen and country, they will surely live for them too; to inspire that devotion, the Queen need only be seen and not heard.

On a broader scale, royalty commands loyalty perhaps because monarchs are the last great icons of our secular age, the only larger-than-life figures who can still quicken belief while dwelling in mystery. If God is dead, long live the Queen! Their titles alone suggest that kings and princesses are ambassadors from the realm of fairy tale: Who ever heard of Good President Wenceslaus or The Prime Minister and the Pea? And if the very rich, as Hemingway said, are different from you and me, then the royals are different from the very rich, separated by some indefinable chasm from those who have merely money or power or fame. Japan's Emperor Hirohito is sometimes known as Ohoribata (the honorable personage across the moat).

Yet if royals must be somewhat extraordinary to win our faith, they must also be rather ordinary to hold our sympathy. Humanity is the one thing they can never abdicate. So it is that every king proverbially longs to see how the other half lives: the tiny Dalai Lama, installed as God-King of Tibet at the age of four, used to stand on the roof of his palace and wistfully gaze through a telescope at the other little boys playing in the streets of Lhasa; the British rulers faithfully follow the trials of everyday drudges on the local soap opera Crossroads. The screen that separates us from royals is, after all, a two-way illusion. When the Queen Mother decided once to drop in on a typical French bistro to dine in the company of ordinary folk, her security-conscious host promptly filled the place with policemen dressed up to look like ordinary folk.

In a sense, then, our monarchs are in fact our subjects, hostage to the dreams we wish them to enact. Axel, the wan hero dreamed up by the French symbolist Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, famously suggested that he and his fellow aristocrats leave the messy business of living to their servants; these days, we would just as soon leave it to our monarchs. We demand of them, moreover, a double role: they must be godlike mortals, fallible gods. Upon peering into their closets, we wish not only to marvel at the gowns but also to revel in the skeletons that hang there.

Thus royalty is the plaything of public demand, obliged to sustain a fabulous soap opera that never ends and always, always sparkles. "There is an argument for no Court," as Walter Bagehot, British royal watcher supreme, once wrote, "but not for a measly Court." Small wonder that the Windsors have begun to co-opt the media, taking them to be their consort in the global village and staging the highlights of their lives as made-for-TV spectacles, photo-ops on an epic scale. The magic of TV, after all, is to make its subjects special, even as it makes them human.

And part of the magic of royalty is to conceal just how much coordination ordination requires. Courtiers, couturiers and consultants from Vogue worked long and hard behind the scenes to transform a shy, slightly chubby teenager into Princess Diana, later voted the most famous and envied woman in the world. To those in the distant gallery, however, it seems that royalty alone achieved the miracle, with a nonchalant flick of its wand. Queen Elizabeth, the subject of her first biography before she was five, glides through her part so seamlessly that we hardly notice she has covered more miles than any other ruler in history. And her immediate relatives are impeccably trained to make us forget the strange metaphysical pressures to which their roles entitle them: one prince whose ceremonial position is roughly two paces behind his wife, another who could spend more than half his life just waiting.

To recall how treacherous the tight-rope act can be, consider some of the other pretenders to the throne. The Grimaldis of Monaco have box-office glamour to spare. Thirty years ago, indeed, Prince Rainier, well aware that princesses can bring riches to a tiny state, sent out his advisers, as in some fairy tale, to secure him a Hollywood queen. Today, however, show biz has come back to haunt the royal house: Rainier's daughters are so relentlessly linked with movie stars' sons that they now seem little more than overexposed starlets themselves.

Other monarchs are more diffident about exploring the power within the throne. After 60 years as ruler, Hirohito still remains a silent, otherworldly presence, or absence, hidden in the very heart of Tokyo. The bicycle-riding monarchs of Scandinavia are apt to seem too close to us, and Jigme of Bhutan, ruling his Land of the Thunder Dragon high in the Himalayas, a little too remote. And the Kings of the Arab world -- Hassan of Morocco and Hussein of Jordan -- are so deeply entangled in politics that they owe their legends mostly to their gift for surviving attempts on their lives. It is a register of Queen Elizabeth's peculiar strength that loonies do not want to shoot her so much as steal into her bedroom for a chat.

In the end, then, the sovereign power of the Queen lies mostly in her glittering powerlessness. And the crowning paradox of her difficult position is that it is probably the envy of the more, as well as of the less, powerful. How happy Ronald Reagan might be -- not to mention some other Americans -- if he were allowed to reign without ruling, to forget about Congress and contras and controversies and simply concentrate on doing what he does so well: giving banquets, greeting Super Bowl champs and charming his people with rocking- chair stories. Not head of state, perhaps, but heart.