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One of my minor obsessions is European royalty, the British monarchy being the one about which I know the most. For this reason, ever since Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, I’ve been idly wondering when, exactly, Elizabeth would pass her great-great-grandmother Victoria’s length of reign. The answer—as the whole world now surely knows—is this Wednesday, September 9^th, on which day Elizabeth will become the longest reigning monarch in all of English history, which, if one counts in the Anglo-Saxons, and the Celts before them, disappears eventually into the misty reaches of the long ago legendary past. (William of Normandy, the conqueror of 1066, is the first king we know of who reigned over a unified island—Scotland and Wales of course, excepted.) 

The Daily Mail online, in honor of Elizabeth’s achievement, on Sunday posted pictures from each year of her reign, some of which are more interesting than others. The one that really caught my attention, though, was a picture of the queen smiling with unusually genuine feeling just after the quiet wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Camilla Parker Bowles. It was accompanied by a comment that was also unusually fervent and earthy from a woman who takes extraordinary care to be bland in public utterances. “My son,” the queen said, “is home and dry with the woman he loves.” 

These words opened for me a window into the misery she must have felt during the 15 years of Charles and Diana’s very publicly horrific marriage. (It also helps, perhaps, to explain why Elizabeth failed at first to catch the depth of public grief at Diana’s death—a failure which some believe put the monarchy at risk.) 

I see Diana as a sacrificial figure, the last woman in European royal history to be wed for reasons of state. Remember that she was a Spencer, from “one of Britain’s preeminent aristocratic families” (Wikipedia). As the late Alexander Cockburn liked to point out—he hated the entire Windsor clan and was an open Diana partisan—her ancestor was one of those who, passing over numerous closer, but Catholic, claimants, invited Charles’s ancestor, the non-English-speaking but Protestant George of Hanover, to come rule in England after Queen Anne died without heir (1714). 

Apparently it was on her honeymoon that Diana learned she had been selected to carry on the role of dynastic wives throughout history, that is, to produce an heir and a spare and accept that she would be seeing very little of her husband, who was in love with someone else. We all know how this turned out. 

We also know—at least those of us who have ever seen the cover of a celebrity magazine while waiting in the supermarket line—that Diana’s son Prince William married Kate Middleton, whose great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side was a coal miner. What may be less well know is that virtually all the members of Europe’s remaining royal houses of William’s generation, and even some who are older, are married to commoners. 

Prince Albert of Monaco, for example, (himself the son of American Grace Kelly) sired two illegitimate children (a highly traditional behavior) before (untraditionally) marrying in his fifties a 20-years-younger South African, a former Olympic swimmer, who swiftly produced twins, thus doubly settling any issues of legitimate succession. 

King Felipe VI of Spain is married to a former television news anchor (and divorcée). Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark, is married to an Australian he met in Sydney while attending the Olympics in 2000. Haakon, Crown Prince of Norway, is married to a woman he met at a rock festival. She was, when they met, the single mother of a child whose father had been convicted of drug-related offenses. Although adopted by Haakon, her son cannot inherit the throne. 

King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden is himself married to a commoner and so are all three of their children. Crown Princess Victoria married her personal trainer (the entrepreneurial founder of a chain of health clubs). Prince Carl Philip married his long-time girlfriend, a model, in June. The most interesting case, though, is that of Princess Madeleine. She is married to a British-American businessman who rejects the entire royalty thing. Since he refused a title, the couple is referred to as Princess Madeleine and Mr. Christopher O’Neill. They have recently relocated to London since, as O’Neill told an interviewer, he is the family breadwinner and he wants to sit down to dinner with his wife and children, not live in hotel rooms. 

I feel very much that it was Diana’s openly miserable marriage—and perhaps even more her horrifying death in the post-divorce company of the totally unsuitable Dodi Fayed—that gave impetus to this extraordinary change: royalty marrying for love without respect to bloodlines. Certainly Queen Elizabeth’s words about “home” and “dry” and “woman he loves” (echoing her uncle’s speech of abdication) implies a conviction that marrying a commoner for love—even a divorced commoner—may well prove to be a better option than marrying an aristocrat for other reasons. When we remember that once upon a time Elizabeth refused her own sister permission to marry the—divorced—commoner her heart desired (another reason why Cockburn hated the queen), we can see that a huge attitudinal shift took place in the half-century between 1953 and 2005. 

There was a time in European history—not all that long ago—when even aristocrats would not do. Royalty married only royalty. On the eve of the First World War, the English king, the Russian tsar, and the German kaiser were all first cousins, grandchildren of Queen Victoria. The tsar and kaiser addressed each other fondly as Willy and Nicky, and King Edward VII and Tsar Nicholas II looked so alike that it’s hard to tell them apart in photographs. 

In that sense World War I was the last feudal war of Europe, a quarrel amongst hopelessly intermarried families. But the scale of death, the industrial killing process with tens of thousands of men dying in a single day for no discernible advantage, put paid to that romantic state of affairs forever. Unfortuately, it was war that continued unabated and became (and becomes) ever more technological and deadly; it was the marriages of cousins that ended. 

One last story of what serious havoc royal love can cause. For whatever his reasons, Crown Prince Rudolph, heir to the Habsburg throne (Austro-Hungarian Empire)—unhappily married, but with a mistress—convinced the impressionable teenager, Baroness Mary Vetsera, with whom he was also having an affair, that it would be glorious to join together forever in death. On January 30, 1889, at his hunting lodge in Mayerling, he killed her and himself by gunshot. 

As a result, Emperor Franz Joseph’s nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, eventually became heir apparent. The two men hated each other for many reasons but the major point of contention was Franz Ferdinand’s marriage. Over the emperor’s ferocious objections, he insisted on marrying the woman he passionately loved, the Hungarian countess, Sophie Chotek. 

The Habsburg court was the most Catholic, reactionary, hidebound, protocol-ridden court in all of Europe—and Sophie was not royal. Although the marriage was finally begrudgingly permitted, it was morganatic, and Sophie, due to her lowly rank, was forbidden to participate with her husband in any royal duties or pleasures. She could not enter a room with him, nor stand in a receiving line, nor attend state dinners. She was not allowed to ride in the royal carriage or sit in the royal box at the theater, und so weiter. 

Needless to say, Franz Ferdinand stayed away from Vienna as much as possible, preferring domestic life at his country estate. Nevertheless, the desire to have Sophie by his side as the recognized and admired consort of the future emperor must have been strong indeed. I can think of no other reason why, when Franz Ferdinand in 1914 was due to visit Bosnia-Herzogovina for his annual inspection of the Austrian troops stationed in that restless province, he went out of his way to convince his uncle to let him add on an official visit to Sarajevo—with Sophie. Everyone knew the city was riddled with irredentist Serb assassins and, thus, highly dangerous for Austrian officialdom. 

But there, on the far fringes of the empire, where protocol did not quite reach, Franz Ferdinand’s beloved Sophie could put on a pretty dress and a big hat and for one day ride in an open car next to her husband, waving to those who had come to see them as royalty does and should. If you go online, you can find a photo of the couple, seated side by side, smiling, on the day of their deaths. Franz Ferdinand’s last words were, “Soph! Soph! You must live for the sake of the children.” 

The consequences of World War I are almost incalculable: the collapse of three empires and the remaking of Europe’s map, the Russian revolution, the Versaille treaty and German reparations, the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the greedy and heedless carving up of its former territories, the rise of the Axis Powers and World War II, the worldwide post-war anti-colonial struggles, the Cold War and the bomb, the age of U.S. dominance and neo-colonialism. What Gavrilo Princip’s act set in train has by no means come to an end. 

Many historians believe that, given the rigid alliances and mutual suspicions of pre-1914, the war was inevitable and would have been triggered, if not by the assassination, then by something else, but Christopher Clark in his (enormous and exhaustive) book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 argues no. It always seems rational, he says, after the fact, to believe that what happened could not have been otherwise, but while it is happening, history is always contingent. There are always other choices at the moment of choosing and other choices lead to different results. 

As a general rule, I do not care for counter-factual narratives, but I feel I can state with complete certainty that if Franz Ferdinand had not been in Sarajevo on June 28^th, 1914, he would not have been killed there—and at the very least that would not have been the day on which the horrific history of the 20^th- and (so far) 21^st-centuries was given the push which started it rolling. Perhaps Clark is right and a different incident somewhere else, on a different day, with other people in other offices responding, would have led to an entirely different future. That we will never know. But as far as I’m concerned, the true beginning of this story, the one that happened, wasn’t that summer day in Sarajevo. It was fourteen years earlier nearly to the day: July 1^st, 1900, when a royal heir, his entire family conspicuously not in attendance, despite them all married the woman he loved.