Awaiting A Stable Marriage
From Woking to Newcastle--and in hundreds of working and middle-class towns in between--English housewives were planning tea parties and lunches around the telly. Limousines were parked in front of smart stores throughout London's West End, while their owners shopped for silver trays and crystal decanters. Throughout the kingdom, pensioners were wrapping handmade doilies and dainty little handkerchiefs monogrammed "A" and "M." At Buckingham Palace a special office was set up to inspect and display the vast piles of gifts. The occasion: this week's wedding in Westminster Abbey of Princess Anne, 23, and Captain Mark Phillips, 25, of the 1st Queen's Dragoon Guards, the son of a wealthy and socially ambitious pork-sausage manufacturer.
For the first wedding in the Queen's immediate family since 1960--when Princess Margaret married another commoner, Antony Armstrong-Jones --commemorative stamps were issued and commemorative medallions struck. Britain showed the loving couple in a tooth-studded closeup (3 1/2p. and 20p.). Stamps issued for such far-flung corners of the Commonwealth as Aitutaki and the Pitcairn Islands displayed Anne and Mark with heads touching and happiness, as one newspaper put it, "welling from their smiles and expressions." For the occasion, the Courage Ltd. brewery issued a "royal wedding ale"--light in color, but extra strong.
About 1,500 people have been in vited to the wedding, including Mark's saddle maker and the village blacksmith from the Phillipses' family home near Great Somerford, Wiltshire. Of Europe's surviving monarchs, only Monaco's Prince Rainier will be present. Television cameras, though, will provide live coverage for a potential audience of 500 million around the world.
Royal Groupies. Yet for all the official homage and the dutiful, excited chirping of thousands of gray-haired royal groupies, the wedding has generated more sniggers than sighs. The British army, following a long tradition, ordered every officer and enlisted man to "voluntarily" ante up (75-c- for officers, 12-c- for enlisted men) for a gift for the couple. Following an angry outcry in the press, the contribution was made truly voluntary; the gift dropped from an expected $40,000 to a plebeian $15,000. Some Labor M.P.s protested the Treasury's raise of Anne's allowance from $37,500 to $87,500 because of the marriage. They also objected when the army offered the couple an 11-room house at Sandhurst, the British West Point--where Mark will take up duties as a teacher of military skills in March--for the unprincely sum of $20 a week. "She's getting [the allowance] for riding and falling off a horse and nothing else," sneered Labor M.P. William Hamilton, a longtime royalty baiter.
The truth is that Anne, who ranks after her three brothers in the line of succession, is not popular in Britain. In a recent opinion poll of royal favorites, Anne ranked third from last, topping only Princess Margaret (who has a special haughty flair for alienating the public) and her cousin the Duke of Kent (who is known in court circles as "the chinless wonder"). Like her father, Prince Philip, Anne has always enjoyed needling reporters and the English paparazzi. Unlike her father, she seems to have no saving wit. When she fell off her horse during a jumping competition in Kiev last August, she angrily turned on the watching reporters: "Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not seriously hurt."
Her one interest, which she carries to the point of obsession, is horses. "You ride horses, you talk horses, you think horses," Prince Philip reportedly once told her. "You may end up looking like a horse." Kinder commentators say that she has her ancestors' "Hanoverian features," meaning that her nose is some what larger than average and her chin somewhat smaller. If the couple's marriage was not made in heaven, it was, by their standards, made in the next best place-- the stable. They met in 1968 at a dinner party for Britain's Olympic competitors; Mark was an alternate on the equestrian team. He is as keen on horses as Anne is, and some of their dates were fox hunts.
The wedding may well be the last time the spotlight shines on Anne. Fearful of her sometimes quite visible boredom at official ceremonies, Buckingham Palace has seemingly given up on her as a royal standardbearer, just as it has on Princess Margaret.
Mark, who is both handsome and amiable, could conceivably add some sheen to her image, and the two of them could further cement the royal family's relations with the "county" set--the rich, landed gentry of tweeds, hounds and horses. No one in the palace, however, is hoping for too much. "This is not a bright boy," says one royal-family observer, "but a good, clean English boy." An English boy without, so far, an English title. Already the curious are wondering when the Queen will see fit to elevate Mark Antony Peter Phillips, who is Anne's 13th cousin, three times removed, to the peerage.
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