Every so often the public surprises an established class by a great display of public grief for a figure who has died. The funeral takes on the quality of a demonstration. One such occasion was the funeral of Cardinal Manning--an unlikely public hero, you would think, if you read about him today: the old Harrovian Archdeacon of Chichester who converted to Rome and became a man who in his rigid religious orthodoxy was almost more Catholic than the Pope.
But Manning was a political radical, and when the dockers went on strike, causing the possible ruin of themselves and their families as well as disrupting trade on an unparalleled scale in 1889, it was Manning who intervened and eventually settled it. A "toff" had never shown the common touch this way in English public life. And it was to this the public responded. He had the largest crowd at his funeral of any figure in the 19th century--bigger even than Queen Victoria's. People queued and stretched all the way from the Brompton Oratory to Kensal Green.
The novelist Colette was a very different figure. Indeed, her private life was so irregular by Catholic standards that the church forbade her a Catholic funeral in Notre Dame. The French government, sensing a public outcry, responded with the unprecedented gesture of giving sexy, wild, outrageous Colette a state funeral.
Princess Diana's funeral was of this order. Of course it was a spontaneous outburst of grief for a much loved young woman who died too soon and with hideous violence. But if it was also something of a demonstration, it was not necessarily a demonstration of anything except howling grief.
Journalists are paid to have opinions, and so they have tried in the past week to make this demonstration articulate. They have tried to say the crowds that have gathered in London to mourn the Queen of Hearts arrived there, like the followers of Wat Tyler in the Peasants' Revolt, with a list of articulate demands.
One of the ideas that such clever journalists have tried to put into the mind of the mob was that this was some kind of demonstration against the royal family. The monarchy is under threat, say the pundits. The crowds loved Princess Diana's common touch. Unless the Queen can adapt herself and become more like Princess Di, then the monarchy will crumble.
Before Her Majesty starts acting on this idea, we should earnestly advise her to pause and think. Maybe if she exercised each morning at the Chelsea Harbour Club, Her Majesty would rate higher in the popularity polls--but I somehow doubt it. Maybe if the Queen came on telly to say how difficult she had found married life with Prince Philip, she would win many admirers, but again, I rather doubt it. Maybe if she had an affair with an army captain, and then a rugby footballer, and then the son of an Arab shopkeeper, and if she spent her last day on earth in Paris shopping till she dropped, Her Majesty would become an icon. But again, perhaps not.
The point is that no one really wants the royal family to be even remotely like our late beloved Princess Di. We should be horrified and amazed if any member of the official "firm" behaved as Di has done over the past five years. Nor would it be possible, without some constitutional problems, for the Prince of Wales or his sons to adopt good causes in quite the way that Di did.
Don't forget, only a little while ago she abandoned nearly all the charities that were represented in her funeral march. She suddenly wanted, like Garbo, to be alone. Then she changed her mind and emerged again as the friend of those charities that particularly engaged her attention or concern.
There is only one category of person in whom you tolerate the degree of caprice that Diana showed throughout her public life. That category is: women with whom you are in love.
The British public was in love with Diana. Men loved her for obvious reasons. Women loved her, as has been said many times since she died, because she went public with many of their concerns. She was not afraid to moan and cry and admit her vulnerability. She wasn't afraid to behave badly.
She was just as popular for her so-called faults as for her alleged virtues. She was, as so many of the cards and posters and messages on the railings of the palace aver, one of us.
You could say, if you wrote down Diana's life story on the back of a postcard, that no one ever lived who was less like one of us. She was born into one of the oldest and grandest aristocratic families in England. She was always very rich, and in latter years she was extravagant on a scale that would have made Marie Antoinette blush. But the crowds were not wrong to suppose that she was one of us--any more than an earlier generation was wrong to feel that the Queen Mum (equally aristocratic and remote in reality from the concerns of us ordinary mortals) really cared, really understood.
"Do you think the King knows all about me?" asks the child of Alice in A.A. Milne's poem. Diana's star quality was that she made us all believe, in our fantasy life, that she did know all about us.
It's as simple and as personal as that. And that is why we weep for ourselves and for her.
A.N. Wilson is the author of The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor and, most recently, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle.
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