Sex and the British royal family have always been uneasy bedfellows. Charles II ennobled his royal bastards and benefited from the indulgence an autocrat can expect. But George IV's cruelty to his wife rightly earned him the contempt of many of his subjects. And when the future Edward VII lost his virginity at the Curragh Camp, the subsequent rupture with his mother, Queen Victoria, who believed than his misdemeanours in Ireland had hastened his father's death, led to his almost total exclusion from affairs of state. He was one of the most ill-prepared kings in history when he came to the throne 40 years after his brief fling in Co Kildare.
But the end of Prince Charles's marriage to Princess Diana today evokes a different comparison. Sixty years ago, his great-uncle, Edward VIII, was forced to abdicate because of his insistence that he could not reign "without the help and support of the woman I love". At a time when divorce was an insuperable barrier to being admitted to the royal enclosure at Ascot, it naturally followed that it was more than a small impediment where kingship was involved. Mrs Wallis Simpson, who had been divorced not once but twice, was obviously not a suitable consort.
Prince Charles's misfortune is that, though the times have changed and divorce, while not yet the rule, is common in Britain, his marriage went from fairy-tale romance to unutterable shambles in 12 years under the remorseless glare of a deeply interested public and media. Sex may no longer shock, but other people's sex is undignified and often comic to the onlooker. After the publication of the tape of Prince Charles's intimate conversation with Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles, many people must have wondered how long he could survive as the prospective heir to the British crown. The question now, 3 1/2 years later, extends to the survival of the monarchy itself.
"Let them hate, provided that they fear", was the motto of a Roman emperor. George IV could survive contempt because of the awe his office inspired. Respect and example have been the stock in trade of the British monarchy since Queen Victoria. Nevertheless, sociologists might find more than one reason for the cataclysmic decline in support for it since the glory days of the royal marriage and the almost contemporary flag-waving binge for the Falklands war barely 15 years ago.
Royal misbehaviour is one ingredient certainly, but those who detect little evidence of a reduction of class-consciousness in Britain or of serious political concern about constitutional reform may suspect that there is also an element of national inferiority complex derived from the fundamental change, politically and economically, in Britain's standing compared with its European neighbours and with the world.
With the exception of the losers in the two world wars, no monarchy in western Europe has lost its throne this century (apart from Portugal, where the king was ousted by a revolution in 1910). Belgium, the Scandinavian countries and Spain have seen profound democratic changes in the institution with a consequent reduction of debate about its future. What will decide the fate of the British monarchy is likely to be not, so much the titillating activities of Prince Charles as its own ability to adapt. Its flexibility and readiness for genuine change are certainly in doubt after the proposals made last week by a royal committee. But without consensus on an alternative, republican form of government, its demise could signal a period of political division and instability for Britain.