Tallulah has, as of late, become quite the expert on things royal. Her expertise does not come from any extensive study but from the realization that she is a princess. This realization has shocked no one. What Tallulah does not know is that, at least in England, the Royal Family has a website. In addition to revealing an overly fond use of active server pages and Adobe Flash, these pages debunk Tallulah’s claims of noble birth.
But she is onto something in her way of blithely throwing out statements about how a princess does or does not act and expecting them to be taken at face value. The Royal website has a charming way of stating things that one could gloss right over. In the biography of Andrew, Duke of York, is the statement, “He was the first child to be born to a reigning monarch for 103 years.” That’s a very pregnant statement, don’t you think?
It gets better though. We’ll skip over the fact that there is a palace named “Frogmore” and go straight to the description of Hampton Court Palace, “Best-known as the home of King Henry VIII, Hampton Court Palace was originally built by Thomas Wolsey, then Archbishop of York and Chief Minister to the King, in 1514, probably for use a a cardinals’ palace.” Um, where is the part about King Henry VIII stripping the Church of most of its real estate holdings? The backstory to that little sentence is way interesting, not that the Church did not have it coming.
Then there is Kew Palace, which aside from obviously being misspelled was a favorite of a lady dear to Carolinians. “Queen Charlotte and their 15 children enjoyed family life at Kew Palace … and in its later years, it became a retreat for an ailing King George III.” Ok, so two things. First, Queen Charlotte did not, as far as I know, suffer from multiple personality disorder, but don’t you love the charming habit of referring to the monarch with the plural pronoun? Second, King George III may well have suffered from multiple personality disorder. Remember “The Madness of King George“? That was what ailed King George as he retreated to Kew Palace.
I’m not running down the Royal Webmaster for these omissions or shadings or whatever you want to call them. If fact, I think they are rather artful. It makes one long for a royal family in this country. That way, they could do the spin and we could have more direct questioning of the leader of the government on national tv.