First, the public fascination with foreign—especially British—royalty tells us more about ourselves, and about human nature, than about Prince Harry or his grandmother Queen Elizabeth II and her growing flock of descendants. Since the mid-19th century, the British royal family has consciously cultivated its image as a family, and not just a random assortment of wicked uncles, dowager consorts, and foreign-born claimants to a thousand-year-old throne. This has not only kept the Windsors safely in place as symbols of the state while quarreling politicians run the government; it has also generated near-perpetual public interest in the joys and sorrows, lives and personalities, of the royal clan.

So successful has this glamorous/domesticated marketing strategy proved that even here in resolutely republican America tens of millions of citizens will rise before dawn on Saturday to watch the wedding ceremony on live television.