Part of this obsession reflects the perseverance of an older emotional and highly ceremonial bond between the monarch and his or her subjects.
Americans Have a Long History of Royal Watching
Arianne Chernock, an assistant professor of modern British history at Boston University, is the author of the forthcoming "The Queen and I: The Right to Reign and the Rights of Women in Victorian Britain."
Updated July 24, 2013, 10:46 AM
While it might seem strange that the descendants of George III now routinely grace the pages of Us Weekly and People magazine, this fascination is in fact nothing new. Fawning over the dress choices and breeding habits of the royals has been a longstanding American preoccupation.
As scholars including Brendan McConville and Elisa Tamarkin have shown, almost as soon as David Hartley, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay had signed the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Anglophilia, including a reverence for the British monarchy, began creeping back into American culture. People who lived in the early American republic, like us, pored over periodicals that presented the Hanoverians’ successes and failures in highly personal terms, a fascination that continued through the 19th and 20th centuries.
Little surprise, then, that Americans closely followed Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838, even if publications like The Jeffersonian scoffed at the cost. “The crown worn by Victoria alone cost $500,000,” complained one journalist. Or that Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, was greeted by adoring crowds during his visit to America in 1860. Or that “Princess Elizabeth’s” own early education was “anxiously” monitored in the United States during the 1930s.
Part of this enduring obsession, surely, has to do with curiosity about the path not taken, the what-ifs and might-have-beens. But it also reflects the perseverance of an older emotional and highly ceremonial bond between the monarch and his or her subjects, a bond that applied even to those colonists who settled on lands far removed from Hampton Court and Kew Palaces. In 1776, Americans may have been fed up with royal politics, but most were anything but tired of royal pomp and circumstance.