The Royal Scandal | Prince William |

You Misunderstand Me

(parts of this opening article are taken directly from the review Mantel wrote regarding Kate and royal bodies for the London Review in 2013. Other parts have changed to better suit Jac's personality and this storyline.)

ROYAL BODIES
By Hilary Mantel

I fear we've caught ourselves in a lapse, even more I fear it's one that will repeat until the end of time. The Duchess of Cambridge is possibly the most talked about woman in the world right now. Love or hate her, everyone can't help but gawk at her. She's a show pony paraded around the streets, and people flock just to catch a glimpse of her.

We've always been obsessed with royalty: even today we marvel at the mysteries of the past, and before there was a duchess there was a princess. The world started anew in 1980 with the discovery that Diana, the future Princess of Wales, had legs via a flash illuminating her silhouette through her skirt.

In the next stage of her story, she passed through trials, through ordeals at the world's hands. For a time the public refrained from demanding her blood so she shed it herself, cutting her arms and legs. Her death still makes me shudder because although I know it was an accident, it wasn't just an accident. It was fate showing her hand, fate with her twisted grin.

Jackie was introduced to the world during a raging time of sexual awakening, and was vulnerable to overly bold men with the ability to stick their cameras up her skirts, and the gangly but flexible limbs of a seventeen year old girl were the talk of a nation. She was a desire more than a person in those days, degraded to a whore for existing, for performing in a way that required her skin to be exposed. We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all.

I remember little Jackie Webber, a child being abused by the world and already villainized to play this generation's Wallis Simpson. She was unpolished and awkward with her gaping smile and loud laugh, her awful clothing and unflattering youthful blotchiness. She was so free, so human, so un royal.

These days she appears as a shop window mannequin with no personality of her own, defined by the man she walks behind and the clothing she wears. It's a sad truth, but she is not the first one to succumb to royal pressure. Before her there was Marie Antoinette, Anne Boleyn, even her mother in law herself.

Antoinette as a royal consort was a gliding, smiling disaster, much like Diana in another time and another country. Jaclyn never had that problem lacking sophistication and pedigree; the royal machine would've been pleased to let her go. And go she probably should've gone. Once she had purpose and passion, defining herself in history as a landmark dancer, and now if her fans were to draw back the curtains they would be sorely disappointed. Now her only point and purpose is to breed.

But love, unlike in past situations, was a powerful ally in her cause. Her prince charming fought to keep her, and in doing so he doomed her to a life where she has been scrubbed clean of any remnants of her old self. Damned to forever be breeding stock despite the fact that her body clearly can't handle that pressure.

It makes one wonder if that will be her end. If, like Diana, her end will come by her own machinations. If child number four or five will come along and Jaclyn will be forced to play out a modern day scene of Jane Seymour, despite her French nickname coming from one Anne Boleyn.