King Charles and coronation organisers have not blinked at resolutely sticking to the centuries worth of tradition of only choosing boys as pages, Daniela Elser writes. Photo / AP
OPINION:
When it comes to British history, the name of “Queen” Matilda is not really known.
There aren’t peppy children’s books written about her and you won’t find her portrait slapped on any mugs sold by the Hampton Court Palace gift shop.
In the gaggle of homicidal, war-mongering, gout-ridden, syphilitic, egomaniacal, expansionist mostly Kings, and a few Queens, that have run England and the UK over the last millennium, poor old Matilda barely rates a mention.
Matilda should have made history. As Henry I’s daughter, he nominated her as his heir, thus meaning she should have rightfully taken her place as the young nation’s first Queen in her own right.
Instead a bunch of barons and the church ganged up on her, not keen on having a woman running the show, thus denying her crown.
Sadly I’m here to tell you that 884 years later, the British monarchy is still doing over women. The latest culprits? King Charles and Queen Camilla.
This week, Buckingham Palace clearly woke up when their “one month away!” coronation calendar alert popped up and finally released some details, including a new photo of the King and Queen looking pleased as punch (clearly someone opened a second bottle at lunchtime).
The Palace also revealed that Prince George, aged 9, will serve as one of his grandfather’s pages of honour, along with three other boys of suitable aristocratic bearing, while Camilla has picked her three grandsons and grand-nephew as her pages.
Do you spy what is missing from all this chummy news?
Their granddaughters.
Princess Charlotte, who will be eight years old at the time of the coronation, and Camilla’s granddaughters Lola Parker Bowles and Eliza Lopes have all been totally overlooked and essentially cut out of this historic moment simply by dint of that extra X chromosome of theirs.
I generally try not to swear in stories, it feels a tad lazy generally, but I simply cannot help it here because nothing will truly convey my sheer bloody anger here: For f***ing f**k’s sake. What the f**k?
It had looked – so tantalisingly, so promisingly – like the British monarchy had vaguely cottoned on to, about 40 years after the fact, that women’s liberation had happened and seemed to want to keep pace with society.
For years now, whenever the official royal easel announcing a new Windsor baby has to be popped in the Palace forecourt, they generally find at least one female footman to do it, in a pretty obvious point-making outing.
In 1987, Her late Majesty would seem to have got around to reading that copy of The Female Eunuch Fergie had given her and decided to admit women as full members of the highest chivalric order, the Order of the Garter.
It had only taken the monarchy 639 years to let chicks in properly.
Then in 2011, after Prince William wed his university paramour and longtime white jeans ambassador Kate Middleton, Queen Elizabeth did a spot more updating the crumbling Letters Patent, doing away with male precedence in the line of succession.
When Prince Louis was born in 2018, it was the first time in the history of the monarchy a princess had not been bumped down when a younger brother arrived.
(This was not applied retrospectively which is why even though Princess Anne was born third in line to the throne, she is now 16th, with her two younger brothers and every one of their children and grandchildren shunting her further and further down the ladder. When Princess Eugenie has her second child at some stage this year, buhh bowww, Anne will fall down another spot.)
There had been plenty of other tantalising signs the royal family had come over all a bit feminist. Since nearly day dot after her marriage to Charles in 2005, Camilla has made fighting domestic violence one of her key areas of work.
In 2021, she became the first UK royal patron of a sexual assault crisis centre and since 2009 she has quietly worked with her staff to help provide 750 washbags containing toiletries which are given to women after undergoing sexual assault screening at hospitals.
In December last year, she brought together Queen Rania of Jordan, Crown Princess Mary of Denmark and Queen Mathilde of Belgium along with Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska for what I believe is the first official Buckingham Palace reception focused on awareness about violence against women.
Then there is my eternal favourite (note to ed: promise to stop talking about her soon!) Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh, whose major focus is combating sexual violence in war zones. In recent years, this campaign has seen her travel to Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Kosovo among other places.
When Meghan Markle and her well-thumbed book of inspiring Maya Angelou quotes turned up in their royal midst in 2017, it seemed like the royal family’s feminist bonafides would only be strengthened.
While that scribbling-on-bananas incident is best forgotten by all of us and scrubbed from the internet archives, the Duchess of Sussex did put women’s empowerment at the forefront of her brief stint of professional HRH-ing.
My point is, on this one front at least – gender equality – the royal family has been doing pretty darn well. Heck, Kate has even started nearly uniformly wearing smart trousers with barely a ladylike frock to be seen! (Truly warms the cockles of my proudly feminist heart.)
And now comes this dismal, depressing page news with the King and Queen’s granddaughters wholly overlooked because of their unfortunate girl-ness.
Make no mistake – history and future generations will not look kindly at this ridiculous cleaving to tradition.
Charles has already made it perfectly clear he is planning on modernising certain elements and on doing away with some of the fusty trappings of the ceremony. For example, the hoi polloi has never, ever seen the sacred moment when the King is anointed with holy oil.
However, this time around, it will be broadcast to the billion-odd people watching live.
Then there is the inclusion of Camilla’s family.
When it was first suggested that her grandchildren might serve as her pages, with a source who knows the couple well busily telling the Times that this was “another example” of Their Majesties “being unafraid to shake things up a bit to reflect the realities of modern life”.
The thing about “modern life”? Half of it, and in some parts of the world more than half, is made up of girls and women.
I find it infuriating and upsetting in the extreme that the King, Queen and Palace have been merrily updating and tweaking the bits of two-hour Westminster Abbey service wherever they want but have not blinked at resolutely sticking to the centuries worth of tradition of only choosing boys as pages.
Now sure, that’s the way it has always gone. Pages of Honour date back to at least Charles II in the 1660s and the restoration, who would seem to have come up with the idea in between his affair with actress Nell Gwyn and getting and managing to lose bits of France.
Ever since his reign, the ceremonial page roles were handed out like sweeties to the teenage sons of aristocrats and nobles and all it involves is the spotty adolescents occasionally carrying the King or Queen’s robes on occasions such as the State Opening of Parliament.
As far as I know, there has never been a female page.
Charles and Camilla’s crowning would have been the absolutely perfect moment for them to announce that they were opening up the page role to everyone, irrespective of self-identified gender.
Why if they have been so readily willing to break with tradition in other ways for the coronation could they not have done so here?
It is a huge, glaring error for the King that as he busily beavers away at slimming down and remaking the monarchy for the 21st century – including preparing to boot out extraneous relatives from grace-and-favour homes, potentially opening Buckingham Palace up to the public and having done away with bowing and curtsying – there does not seem to have been a second’s thought given to revolutionising the choice of pages.
(For Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, she chose six Maids of Honour. As they waited, moments before the ancient, lengthy ceremony kicked off, she is reported to have turned to them with a cheery, “Ready, girls?” Just love it.)
If you look at the coronation invitation you’ll notice a slightly gothic, creepy creature at the bottom which is the Green Man, a folkloric figure dating back to around the 11th or 12th centuries and symbolising rebirth and renewal.
The symbolism is lovely except when you realise that on the day, a group of teenage boys will enter the history books on May 6, while their sisters will be forced to watch on from the sidelines.
Not bloody good enough Your Majesties. Just imagine what Matilda would say.
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