Duty calls: it certainly calls Elizabeth II--but what about her eldest son?

IN the latest episode of the British Royal Family Soap Opera, the Crown Prince has finally got his girl. In short, Prince Charles is to marry Camilla Parker-Bowles, the love of his life, and his mother, the Queen (who is also head of the Church) has given her blessing to the union.

It is a truism that it isn't easy being a Royal Family these days. It used to be so much easier. When the existence of social hierarchy was taken for granted, someone had to be at the top of it, rather like Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. But nowadays, not only is Jack as good as his master, he also insists upon repeated public recognition of the fact. How, then, can a Royal Family be justified? What is it for? Upon what sentiments may it depend for its support among the population?

Certainly, it can no longer count on the discretion of the press. Difficult as it may be now for the average Briton to recall it, there was a time not so very long ago when the press would report nothing about the Royal Family except in blandly respectful or gushingly obsequious prose. The life of the Royal Family was portrayed as a fairy tale with the witches removed, a kind of eternal happy ending. Completely and self-consciously unrealistic, this reportage was so dull that only bored housewives could read it. But now we live in an age when everyone has a right to full knowledge, down to the most intimate details, about anyone in whom he takes an interest. The Information Age is also the age of tittle-tattle; and tittle-tattle is the enemy of mystique.

If the Royal Family is no longer protected by mystique, but rather is a group of hereditary celebrities competing with other celebrities for space on the front page, what can protect it from the kind of carping criticism that must ultimately destroy it? Can it claim to incarnate the nation, and thus act as a focus for patriotism? But British patriotism is dead--although a nasty form of nationalism remains a minority interest--while Welsh and Scottish patriotism consists mainly of self-pitying hatred of the English. There is no quicker way of emptying a room in Britain than to play the national anthem, which causes the acutest embarrassment. How can a God in whom no one believes be invoked to spare the life of a woman to whom all now believe themselves equal or even superior?

Is, then, the Royal Family supposed to act as moral exemplar? The historical precedent in this regard is not altogether encouraging; and the idea is in any case antithetical to the hereditary principle. The monarch is monarch because she is the last monarch's closest descendant, not because she never omitted to say her prayers or clean her teeth, or put away her toys at night. It is possible for a perfect swine to have a better claim to the throne than a veritable saint.

It is true that several of the past few monarchs have behaved well to the point of dullness or impersonality. It would be difficult to find a duller or better-behaved man than George V, for example, the most interesting aspect of whose life was probably his manner of leaving it. Rumors persist that his doctor gave him an overdose of morphine so that he would die in time for his death to be announced in the august pages of The Times, rather than in those of the more demotic Evening Standard.

The present queen has behaved so well, for so many years, that she represents the greatest modern exemplar of devotion to duty known to me. She has been diplomatic and charming to people she must have abhorred from the bottom of her heart; she has endured thousands of the dullest events of which it is possible to conceive, all without so much as a yawn; she has had to eat disgusting food as if with relish; and not for half a century has she once said in public what she really thought. These feats of iron self-control have been performed because of her conception of her duty towards the nation as constitutional monarch. By comparison with her, mere ambassadors have carefree, bohemian lives.

It is not so much that she has no actual, real, personal personality, as it were: It is that that her public personality is entirely coterminous with her public duty, to which she has subjugated everything else. Modern people cannot understand this: They cannot conceive of a duty so imperative that the expression of one's own personality--beautiful and unique, as almost by definition it must be--is unimportant beside it. From this fundamental incomprehension comes the now widespread criticism that the Queen is a cold, unemotional person. But she believes that it is not her job to be emotional: Her emotions are for strictly private occasions. Her job is to perform her duties to the best of her abilities, and never mind what she is feeling.

Needless to say, this is not a view of life with which much of the population below the age of 60 now sympathizes. The Queen spent many of her formative years during the war, when there was much talk of duty. Prince Charles spent many of his formative years during the 1960s, when there was much talk of self. The Royal Family, however abnormal its world may be, has not proved immune to generational change. Prince Charles is a child of the Sixties: He believes that his personal drama counts, and he therefore feels the need both to express and to explain himself: not as deeply as his first wife, Diana, did, but much more deeply than his mother.

The Prince's position is a very difficult one; it is not impossible that he will be 75 when--or perhaps I should now say if--he inherits the throne (I mean if there is a throne to inherit). Three-quarters of a century is a very long time to wait to do the only job for which one has been destined since birth. But this is not the only explanation of his personal difficulties. As a child of the Sixties, he has difficulty in entirely suppressing his personality in public in the name of public duty. He, like all the rest of us, is too important for that. He needs causes--some of them well-chosen, like that of the disastrous state of architecture in Britain, and some ill-chosen, like that of alternative medicine--to express himself; but he also needs from time to time to bare his soul. For modern man, baring his soul is the only proof that he actually has one. The Queen, his mother, is deeper than that.

The Prince's own son, Harry, is further proof that the Royal Family is not immune to generational change or wider cultural influences. Pictures of Prince Harry, with his vulgar snarling expression, and reports of his less than amusing exploits, prove that he is fundamentally no different from so many of his British compatriots: drunken, arrogant, violent, and charmless.

When and where will the British Royal Family Soap Opera end? Sooner than I once thought possible, or than the Queen deserves. Unless there is cultural reversal, her descendants will one day move among the Umbertos, Farouks, and Zogs of the world.

Dr. Dalrymple is the author of Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass and of Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, due from Ivan R. Dee in May.