The headless Anne Boleyn would struggle to get her point across, but any one of Henry VIII’s other five wives could sympathise with Kate Middleton in these last, frantic, nerve-inducing weeks before their “big day”.
The 16th century princesses would be right at home with all the fanfare and ever-expanding array of royal memorabilia, albeit with a few medieval modifications.
Lego-sized replicas of the royal couple would more likely have been in bronze or bashed copper, decorated with a bit of horsehair. And the royal Pez or Union Jack-embossed shortbread replaced by a boiled sweet. But not everything’s changed for the better.
With the wedding day over, the 29-year-old the British public nicknamed “waity Katie” will be expected to pop out a baby or three – Princess Mary style - as soon as possible. And the pressure is incomparable.
Cue the Build A Royal Baby, a seven-part application running on all News Ltd websites from today that allows you to select and combine the main facial features of the most famous British royals and predict what Baby “Wills and Kate” will look like.
But if Kate is apprehensive about how the next Royal generation will turn out, this won’t help.
For a start, it shows that if you mix Royal attributes up, the result is spectacularly repulsive.
On top of that, this idea they should head straight for babies is a pretty archaic reflection of the expectations of women in modern life. The average British female has her first baby at twenty nine-years-of-age. She’s also lived with her partner for at least three years and put off marriage until her early 30s.
Rushing the decision to start a family could also undervalue their independence and time alone, as a young couple facing a pretty serious public life together.
History shows us that couples under immense public pressure – from the Charles and Di to Courtney Cox and David Arquette and Delta Goodrem and Brian McFadden– often fall apart. Happy famous couples are the minority, while most suffer from their exposed lives, with dire consequences.
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