A recent opinion poll showed that the British monarchy is now supported by a minority of its subjects. Since the poll was conducted, a proliferation of news stories about the liaison between Diana, Princess of Wales, and Mr Dodi Fayed, can only have served to diminish further the respect of the British people for the royal family.
The economist, philosopher and journalist, Walter Bagehot, neatly described an essential difference between monarchies and republics more than a century ago. Monarchies, he said, appealed to the heart and to the emotions; republics to the head and the strength of human reason. If Mr Bagehot was correct, it must be certain that the response of the British public to recent events regarding the royal family, has been negative in the extreme.
Tearful press conferences in California held by scorned models who flash outsized diamond-and-sapphire engagement rings do not quite conform to the dignified image the House of Windsor wishes to present. Neither do seaside photographs of the princess and Mr Fayed engaging in real or imagined embraces.
Most important of all, an expensive helicopter trip to visit a soothsayer in Derbyshire by the princess and Mr Fayed must have pushed every wrong emotional button in the entire United Kingdom. Relationships between soothsayers and ruling families have historically been disastrous from the time of Julius Caesar to the present. The princess's mystic consultant, Madame Vasso, who wrote a book about royal misdemeanours, betrayed the current Duchess of York. More dramatically, the Windsors' cousins, the Romanovs, can hardly be said to have benefited from their links with their own "psychic adviser," Grigory Rasputin. The employment of soothsayers, whether by princes or presidents, has usually been symptomatic of moral or cultural dissolution.
Emotions, however, are noted for their tendency to swing backwards and forwards and on that count, the British monarchy is far from finished. The current spate of fairytale marriages ending in squalid divorce settlements could be replaced, in the next generation, by golden coaches and coronations and christenings and weddings and solemn funerals to make British hearts swell once more with pride.
In the meantime, Britain's first family will have to live with an insidious paradox. They need to encourage publicity to maintain and increase their popularity but they need to discourage the type of publicity that tends to diminish them in the eyes of their people. Should the solution be sought merely through the cultivation of image, the result could be disastrous. Simple, straightforward good behaviour on the part of royal siblings might provide a more effective remedy.
In republics there is a tendency to view the problems of Britain's royals with a certain bemused detachment. It is on this island, however, as many opinion polls have shown, that the House of Windsor has its strongest and most loyal supporters. Loyalty in Northern Ireland is tied up, not merely with the concept of monarchy, but with the very essence of national and cultural identity. Its dissolution cannot all be blamed on Irish nationalism.