Virginian-Pilot


DATE: Friday, September 12, 1997            TAG: 9709110221

SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON   PAGE: 08   EDITION: FINAL 

COLUMN: OVER EASY 

SOURCE: Jo-Ann Clegg 

                                            LENGTH:   65 lines




DEATH OF THE PRINCESS AFFECTS THE QUEEN, TOO

When I learned of Princess Diana's death, my first thought was of the young princes who adored her. Their lives, while privileged, have not been easy. And now, in a tunnel under a Paris Street, the one person who had given them unquestioning love had been taken from them.

But after my initial concern for William and Harry, my thoughts turned to another person whose life would also be impacted by the death of the glamorous young princess.

The queen - she of the iron hand, the unsmiling face and the oh-so-stiff upper lip. My heart went out to her, knowing that the decisions she would make in the days to come would be scrutinized and her motives, inevitably, questioned.

The media and the public did not fail me. Old stories were trotted out to support the premise that she was an uncaring and even vindictive person. We heard once again how she had forced her sister to give up the divorced man she loved and how she directed Charles, in writing, to leave his loveless marriage.

Old tapes were replayed in an attempt to show her shortcomings as a mother: The tiny Anne and Charles scarcely recognizing her when she returned from a long overseas trip; an obviously unhappy Charles being deposited at a remote and spartan boarding school.

My heart went out to the queen again and again in the week that followed the princess's death. She is, at the age of 71, a woman who has had to steer an uncharted course through a world in constant change. At times she has been successful, at times she has not. Her successes are buried in dusty archives, her mistakes aired constantly for all to see.

While much of the world has known only the stern monarch she has become, those of us old enough to remember the day she was wed in the same church from which Diana was buried recall something else. On that day she was a happy young princess, splendid in a frothy white gown, staring up adoringly at her tall, handsome Navy lieutenant. She was glowingly in love, marrying the man for whom she had waited just as thousands of other young women were doing in those years following the end of World War II.

Had she been of a different class, a different background, she would have settled down somewhere in the countryside to raise her family and serve her community. Instead, less than five years later, she was thrust into the role of a working mother at a time when the term had not yet been invented.

And what work it was.

At the age of 25, she became the chief executive officer of the largest business in the world: the British Empire. In the years that followed she would have two more children, watch her empire shrink and see the old ways change.

There were no magazine articles on how to balance work and family, no maternity business suits, no psychologists promoting the concept of quality time and no guidebooks for presiding over the demise of an empire.

Nor were there guidebooks for women whose careers were more successful than their husband's. The queen watched - mostly helplessly I suspect - as her husband, used to command, retreated into the background and chafed at the secondary role he was forced to play.

Now, in her eighth decade with three of her children divorced, the fourth not yet married and the future of the monarchy in question, she has become the scapegoat for all of the problems of the royals. Including their actions and inactions following Diana's death.

It is sad that so few of the young bride's dreams have been realized. It is even sadder that those who feel that blame must be placed, have chosen the narrow shoulders of a small, sad, aging woman on which to place it.



[home] [ETDs] [Image Base] [journals] [VA News] [VTDL] [Online Course Materials] [Publications]

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu
by CNB