It is not automatic and it is not inherited. There have only been seven, and the current one has to wait for the last one to die.
The Princess Royal holds a 4.4 from six hundred and seventy-seven people, and it is a pub with rooms – a format that Britain nearly lost and has been quietly rebuilding for twenty years.
And the title on the sign is stranger than any other royal title in this country.
How it works
Princess Royal is not automatic. It is not a rank you are born with, and it is not conferred on every eldest daughter of a monarch.
It is granted, at the monarch’s discretion, to the eldest daughter – and once granted, it is held for life.
Which means that if the current holder is still alive, the new monarch’s eldest daughter simply cannot have it. She must wait. The title is occupied.
There have been seven Princesses Royal in nearly four hundred years. Seven. It is one of the scarcest titles in Europe, and the reason is not policy or prestige – it is mortality.
The comparison
We wrote in Covent Garden about the Princess of Wales, and noted that it is a courtesy title held only by marriage, which evaporates the moment the marriage does – enormous visibility, no security whatsoever, and a historical record of what happened to the women who held it that reads accordingly.
Princess Royal is the opposite. It is held in one’s own right, it cannot be taken away, and it does not depend on a husband.
It is, as far as the Prat can establish, the only significant royal title available to a woman in this country that she holds because of who she is rather than who she married – and it can only be given to one woman at a time, and she has to wait for the previous one to die.
The pub with rooms
Which is the actual subject and which deserves its paragraph.
The coaching inn was the original hotel in this country – a pub, with beds, on a road – and the railways killed the format almost entirely within a generation, and the twentieth century finished the job.
It has come back because the economics changed. A pub in an expensive postcode cannot survive on drink alone; we have made this argument at the Richmond and the Stewart Arms and the Cock and Bottle. But a pub with eight rooms upstairs has a second income, and the rooms subsidise the bar, and the bar stays open.
The Prat’s economics desk regards the boutique pub-hotel as the single most effective survival strategy available to a London pub, and notes with some regret that it is only available to the ones with a staircase.
Verdict
Good pub, good rooms, and a title that only one woman in Britain may hold and only when the last one has gone.
The seven
Since 1642 there have been seven, and they are a strange group.
The first was Charles I’s daughter Mary, who was married at nine to the Prince of Orange and died of smallpox at twenty-nine. The title was invented for her by her mother, Henrietta Maria, who wanted a French-style equivalent of Madame Royale.
So a title held by seven British women in four centuries was imported, by a French queen, for a nine-year-old, to make a marriage look grander.
And Henrietta Maria – unpopular, Catholic, and blamed for a great deal – is the same queen who pawned the Crown Jewels in Amsterdam to fund her husband’s war, and whose husband we have just watched walk out of a window onto a scaffold.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
