The recent news that the Princess of Wales is undergoing treatment for cancer landed with shocking impact in recent days. Within hours, the attitude towards the situation of her seeming disappearance from public life has shifted from conspiracy and constant Internet jibes to one of awkward reflection and increasing anger directed towards those who have been perceived as bullying the Princess into disclosing a diagnosis before she was ready. It’s easy to point the blame about what happened on many parties: the palace for their amateur Photoshop, the press for fanning the flames, and the people of the Internet for using this as a springboard for bizarre conspiracy theories (ranging in severity from death and divorce, to BBLs and an appearance on the Masked Singer). But the more arresting question perhaps is, why did this disappearance become such a pressing issue and what does this suggest about what we want from our Royal Family? 

How the public reacts to the health of the monarch is a topic with a long and storied history in Britain. Royals in the past have often been anxious regarding their health as it pertains to public perception, with a sickly king being linked to the idea that the nation itself was sick. Royal portraits were painted to impart an idea of strength and youth onto their subjects regardless of reality, which is why Elizabeth I looks much younger than her fifty-five years of age when the Armada portrait was painted (as well as suspiciously lacking in smallpox scars). Such was the importance of projecting health for the monarch that even in modern times, King George VI was not told that he had lung cancer despite undergoing an operation, instead being told that he had ‘structural abnormalities’.The fact that he even had lung cancer was not disclosed to the public until 1986, over thirty years after his death. By the metrics of this example, both the King’s announcement of his cancer and Kate’s recent video are a step in the right direction. Indeed, some have called Kate’s video announcing her diagnosis a ‘royal revolution’. Consider the way it’s laid out: the casual mum clothes she’s wearing, the outside setting, the fact that she’s talking directly to us about something deeply personal. But is this the revolutionary act that it’s been painted as? 

Hardly. Despite the seeming candidness of the video, there is an obvious design to it and tension running underneath. The late Hilary Mantel once described Kate as feeling ‘designed by a committee’, without ‘quirks, without oddities, without the emergence of character’. Although this may seem harsh, we can carry this understanding over to this video. The mum clothes are chosen to make her look approachable, the background of spring flowers sends a message of hopeful new beginnings, the fact that she appears to be talking to us frankly is only because the Royals have been successfully backed into a corner in recent weeks. It was do or die — come out and speak to us in a video filmed by the BBC, or risk being accused of being replaced with AI or a clone. 

Our late Queen knew that she had to be ‘seen to be believed’. This is the fundamental dilemma of royal health and even having royals in the first place. The human message that Kensington Palace has hoped to spread has succeeded. Many people now feel guilty for making jokes and conspiracies regarding the health of a woman who we now know to have cancer, particularly as part of the privacy was said to be because she was struggling to tell her children in the right way. This guilt comes from a fundamental human decency that I assume the majority of us share.  

The problem with the royals however, is that they are not portrayed to be human like the rest of us. By elevating them to the position they are in, their whole operation relies on the assumption that they are superhuman. Although very few of us now believe the royals are chosen by God to lead our country, there is still a deep-seated awe of monarchy embedded in the nation, even if we would prefer to pretend otherwise. To many, the way in which people mourned the Queen by queuing around London for hours on end to see her coffin seemed ridiculous, an act of performative bereavement that could be perceived as out of touch from a 21st century perspective. 

But the truth remains that even for people who claim to be ambivalent towards the monarchy, there is a need to know their whereabouts, to be assured of their wellbeing, to have the ability to see them in their golden cage whenever they desire. A good deal of this is motivated by tax — if we’re forced to pay for the upkeep of an obscenely wealthy and undemocratic family, shouldn’t they at least be upfront about where our hard-earned money is going?  

But this is the underlying conflict in having a royal family. Our instinct is to treat them as people deserving of basic privacy, but since they are not ordinary people and have an elevated status, they must be open to scrutiny. In the era of never-ending surveillance and misinformation, this paradox might one day prove too much for the Royal Family as they struggle to justify their contradictory existence. We might not permit them to recover from being ‘sick’ on taxpayer money, only to rediscover that they are ‘radiant’ (to paraphrase Mantel). All we can do for the time being is honestly assess what we want from the House of Windsor by analysing what it is their existence stands for.