Hilary Mantel has been at it again.

[RickiTarr]

She reckons the monarchy is unlikely to outlast William.

I’ve softened my position compared to 10 or 20 years ago, but I do still hope she’s right. The monarchy has had its day - we are supposed to be a democracy - and it doesn’t seem very good for the royals, psychologically, either.

I’m a bit suspicious that she only issues these controversial comments on royalty to boost her profile, though.

www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/monarchy-prince-william-dame-hilary-mantel-b932873.html

She doesn’t need her profile boosted, though. She has a long-standing interest in the rf as an institution and spectacle, and the LRB lecture that article refers to isn’t from ‘last month’ but from 2013, when she was writing fiction about the royal bodies of Anne Boleyn, Katherine of Aragon (both valued mostly for their wombs) and Henry VIII, and was in fact extremely personally sympathetic to both Catherine Middleton, PrincessDiana and the Queen, and critical of the conviction that royal bodies are public property because of the cruelty it can unleash..

I loved the wolf hall trilogy and imagine she has an instinct for how the monarchy might operate in the future based on her understanding of the past. On hearing the context of what she said about KM and not just the misquoted sound bites she obviously gets what it must really be like

@Rupertbeartrousers

I loved the wolf hall trilogy and imagine she has an instinct for how the monarchy might operate in the future based on her understanding of the past. On hearing the context of what she said about KM and not just the misquoted sound bites she obviously gets what it must really be like

Yes the KM thing sounded fine and perfectly reasonable. The headlines extracted from it didn’t.

I think Canada, Australia and New Zealand won't survive the shift to Charles, anyway.

An extract from the original Telegraph interview, which is behind a paywall;

And as far as the future of the monarchy goes? I persist. She pauses. ‘I think it’s the end game. I don’t know how much longer the institution will go on. I’m not sure if it will outlast William. So I think it will be their last big era.

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‘I wish the Queen had felt able to abdicate, because Charles has had to wait such a long time. I understand that she thinks of this as a sacred task, from which you simply cannot abdicate, whereas the rest of us think of it as a job, from which you should be able to retire.

‘I wonder if she’s the only person who really believes in the monarchy now, and I’m sure she believes with all her heart. She believes that she cannot cease to be a monarch – she made those promises to God. It’s such a cliché to say, but what a lonely position to be in. It’s a conflict, because most of the world sees the Royal family as a branch of show business. And I’m sure that is very far from the Queen’s own thinking.’

@Postern

She doesn’t need her profile boosted, though. She has a long-standing interest in the rf as an institution and spectacle, and the LRB lecture that article refers to isn’t from ‘last month’ but from 2013, when she was writing fiction about the royal bodies of Anne Boleyn, Katherine of Aragon (both valued mostly for their wombs) and Henry VIII, and was in fact extremely personally sympathetic to both Catherine Middleton, PrincessDiana and the Queen, and critical of the conviction that royal bodies are public property because of the cruelty it can unleash..

Well she is giving interviews by zoom instead of undertaking her US book tour. She is also promoting the upcoming dramatisation of (the middle?) book. So her PR and her publishers clearly don’t think she’s too big for publicity. Fair play, they ask her about the monarchy and she just opines. She does seem to have an ear for an headline, though.

I suppose it’s irritating that we don’t get a proper public conversation about the monarchy, we just get Hilary Mantel’s thoughts when she is on the promotional trail (fabulous though HM and her writing is).

It is odd that Standard made such a glaring error about the date of her previous comments, though.

I suspect that, like her ‘royal bodies’ LRB lecture — which was brilliant and also completely misinterpreted and siphoned off into deeply misleading tabloid headlines — this will have been excerpted and twisted to be headline-grabbing.

And I’ve yet to meet the author, however big, whose agent doesn’t think they should be doing publicity, but HM, whose health has been bad for decades, is at very high risk for Covid, partly of her high BMI caused by drugs she was given for misdiagnosed endometriosis — and has been shielding for a year, and was aghast at the way her 2013 lecture was touted by the tabloids, so she’s highly unlikely to be out looking to get headlines via Zoom. I don’t think she’s at all keen on publicity, anyway — she’s said several times that the problem with success is that it takes you from your desk — but she seems to have real sense of responsibility towards the team involved in the Cromwell dramatisations (which I don’t think are much good...) And, as you say, she’s written so much fiction and non-fiction about royalty, royal bodies, royal mythology, women’s bodies and royal women’s bodies, infertility to that she does get asked a lot.

She’s far from any kind of royal apologist, though, and her portrayal of the ghost of Princess Diana in her novel Beyond Black is cruel.

But to anyone who doesn’t know her ‘Royal Bodies’ lecture, it’s worth a read. I hope this isn’t behind a paywall — I can read it:

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies