We all dream of being a secret royal baby

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/04/dream-secret-royal-baby

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The birth of a new royal baby always stirs up all manner of fantasies and wild stories, but there’s a new one doing the rounds that really takes the biscuit, if not quite the crown.

The US gossip supermarket rag Globe has published a story about how Prince William is not, in fact, his parents’ firstborn child. There was an elder sister, apparently, the result of in vitro shenanigans that happened during Princess Diana’s pre-wedding gynaecological check-up. Eggs were extracted and fertilised with Prince Charles’s sperm to ensure that pregnancy between the two lovebirds was technically possible. One of the resulting embryos somehow found its way inside the womb of the wife of one of the attending doctors. 33-year-old “Sarah” – or perhaps that should be “Princess Sarah” – is now living incognito in the States.

Here in a nutshell, or a test tube, is the contemporary version of all those old stories about royal heirs being smuggled in or out of the royal bedchamber inside a warming pan. The best-known occurred in 1688, when crypto-Catholic James II was rumoured to have introduced a male baby into his wife’s birthing chamber to replace a stillborn child.

Where is the person who did not grow up feeling different from their peers, set apart, the odd one out?

In 1688 the constitutional stakes were sky high. This was the moment when Britain might return to the Roman Catholic fold, or carry on with its idiosyncratic brand of nationalistic Protestantism. And it’s this note of jeopardy that Globe insists on injecting into its story about “Sarah”. The magazine maintains that, following the Succession to the Crown Act of 2013, which allows an older sister to rank above her younger brothers, “Sarah” is actually Prince Charles’ first heir, ahead of William.

This is all wrong – the act only applies to babies born after 28 October 2011. Still, the need to believe that there might be a pretender to the British throne runs so deep and strong that it seems almost churlish to mention that, even if Globe can actually produce “Sarah” (so far there’s just a badly Photoshopped picture), it has created a storm in a commemorative royal teacup.

Popular royal history abounds with phantom babies and lost children who have a habit of popping up at moments of social and political instability. The republican movement of the early 1870s, which looked for a while as though it might topple the British throne, came up with a baby story for Queen Victoria and John Brown that continues to be revived every three years or so. Currently, there’s a 60-year-old accountant from Jersey called Robert Brown who is fighting to prove that he is Princess Margaret’s illegitimate child, possibly by Robin Douglas-Home.

Brown’s documentary evidence for his claim may be patchy, yet he doesn’t come over as either mad or a fantasist. Rather, he argues that his lifelong sense of feeling unloved can only be accounted for by the fact that some royal sleight of hand attended his birth in 1955. He explained that his mother, a former house model for the royal dressmaker Hardy Amies, was distant towards him in comparison to the way she treated his siblings. Sometimes his birthday was forgotten and his parents never talked about his birth.

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And here, surely, we have stumbled across the powerful, inexhaustible, archaic driving power for all these phantom royal baby stories. Where is the person who did not grow up feeling different from their peers, set apart, the odd one out? And where is the child who does not at some point fantasise that she must have been swapped at birth? Her real parents could not possibly be the ordinary, disappointing mortals who share her name but who, now she comes to think about it, don’t really look very like her at all. Someone more important must be waiting in the wings with her true birth certificate.

Freud had a name for this wishful thinking – the family romance – and called it “one of the most necessary yet one of the most painful” phases through which all children must pass. And most of us do, most of the time. But being a grown-up is a difficult business, especially shorn of the consoling fantasies that all of us build at one time or another. Even if we are too sensible to imagine that we are the offspring of royalty, then please at least allow us the proxy fantasy that somewhere out in the world “Princess Sarah” is waiting to meet her new baby niece.