The Royal Family is becoming increasingly open as it modernises – but we will never really know the inner-workings of The Firm due to tradition, says a royal expert.
Sarah Lyall, author of Unroyal: Three Women Who Shook the Monarchy, ponders: “Who knows what they really think?”
In a wide-ranging interview with Daily Express US, Lyall talks about the value heritage has on royal life in 2024 – and why some aspects of the routine will forever be unbreakable.
She also discussed why divorce is such a sensitive subject in the family.
Lyall said: “I think the whole point of the Royal Family, is that it’s a link to the past, it’s something that’s been going on for centuries, and I think they carry that burden and take it very seriously.
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“That’s why the Queen was into tradition so much, that’s why King Charles, even though he’s more modern, that’s why, at his Coronation, he went right back to the old style of it.”
Lyall, a writer-at-large for the New York Times, says their interest in privacy is also driven by heritage and how involved they are in the history that lines the walls of Buckingham Palace – long-held royal beliefs established hundreds of years ago.
She continued: “I think they all care very much about The Office and the heritage of it and the tradition.
“They come from a country that values those things, they put real stock in doing things the way they’ve been done before, and that really, really feels the weight of history on everything they do.
“So, I don’t know how much they learn (from history), but they are deeply embedded in these institutions, and they know the through line of the institutions.”
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Discussing why divorce is such a sensitive topic for the royals, Lyall points out: “One of the traumatic experiences for the Royal Family was the abdication of King Edward, after he met Wallis Simpson, and that event, thrust his younger brother on the throne, who was quite ill and couldn’t really handle the job, and died a few years later.
“And that’s why Queen Elizabeth was queen, she was the daughter of the younger son (George VI), and she never really forgave her uncle, King Edward, for doing that to her father, and it also engendered in her, clearly, a lifelong horror of divorce.
“She wouldn’t let her sister, Princess Margaret, marry a divorced man, [but] ironically, three of her children got divorced. It made her feel, adherence to the institution was the most important thing you could do, because her uncle had not done that and look at what happened.”
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