How to write royally

Why does the British monarchy sometimes seem at odds with the modern world?Maybe it begins with the language they are bred to use

What we wear has a lot in common with the way we write. It’s no coincidence we use the same word –‘style’ – to signify the choices we make about our clothes and our words. 

Imagine you’re a member of the British Royal Family. Think of how you dress. Formally, in a word. Not just formal 21st century-style, but in clothes that would have passed as formal in the 1950s – or, if there’s a really grand dinner, the 1890s.

Now imagine you are meeting a member of the royal family. You wear your best, and also most conservative, clothes. Think of the way you’d speak to that royal personage. You will be excruciatingly polite. You will use the nicest, poshest words you can think of. You will also try hard not to say anything common, or controversial, or coarse. In fact, you might try to speak as if it’s 1951 rather than 2021.

All their lives the royals are immersed in the language of formality and restraint governed by protocol, code and tradition. It’s a language that has its own rules and tropes, passed down from generation to generation, courtier to courtier. And when they meet ordinary people outside the palace walls, those people are not being their ordinary selves, nor will they speak in their ordinary way.

Now imagine you’re a member of the royal household and you've got to go on television and talk sincerely about deeply personal and difficult subjects.

How is that likely to go?

An unequal match

We’re not taking sides in the Meghan + Harry v The Royal ‘Firm’ debate that’s been raging all week. But we are very interested in the weapons they use: their media strategy, their visuals and most of all, their words.

The contestants are not well matched. 

Think of the world Meghan Markle and her interviewer, Oprah Winfrey, inhabit. This is a world where your entourage includes scriptwriters, directors, researchers, and strategists who are paid top dollar to know what people – audiences – want. Every line, every attack, every moment of ‘private’ revelation will have been tested, rejected, rewritten and rephrased until it is pitch-perfect.

It’s also a world where people do their soul-searching in public. There they are, searching, searching, searching on our screens, all the time, however much of their private life and thoughts that requires them to reveal. We’re reminded that the need to reveal comes at a great personal cost, but that the alternative – bottling it all up – is much, much worse. Taciturnity and self restraint mean you are repressed – you might be repressing yourself, or someone may be repressing you. Either way, repression is a cage we must escape from.

It’s not quite like that with the British royal family.

7 ways to write royal

You can see why the ‘dignified silence’ lobby is so persuasive in royal circles. They know they are utterly outclassed by Hollywood and TV royalty, where the methods and language of escaping repression have been perfected over millions of words on TV and in movies and tell-all books. 

We’ll look at the codes and styles of celebrity self-exposure another time. But first, let’s look hard at the language of royalty. 

We need to understand that royal language is part of the ‘mystique’. It isn’t how you and I speak down the pub: nor do we want it to be. 

Here’s one small example: the adjective ‘joyous’. I guarantee you will only see that word in one context: a royal occasion, usually a wedding. ‘Joyful’ is too ordinary-sounding. Joyous, with its latinate ring, its air of being lifted from a Victorian hymnal, has mystique, a word we only use ‘for best’ 

The idea of keeping things 'for best’ is a weirdly powerful one in British culture. It definitely includes words. We’d no sooner use ‘joyous’ about, say, Gran’s birthday party, than wear a tiara to McDonalds.

And that’s fine. Archaism, Baroque formality – it’s part of the package. It’s when we demand that the royals speak like human beings about normal human situations that they invariably come unstuck. You are asking people to tell all when they have been bred to say very little.

But should you desire, as it were, to ‘communicate’ in what one might, at a stretch, call or term a ‘royal manner’, perhaps I might be so bold as to suggest some potential, or even practicable, expressions which one could, in certain circumstances, usefully employ. 

ONE: Remember – expressing yourself is painful

To speak like a royal, you should cultivate a strangulated delivery that suggests to the listener that your words would rather stay where they are – safely inside. However, once they are forced to emerge, you can choose ones that at least show their, and your,  reluctance to be in the public domain.

Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, began his notorious interview with Emily Maitlis by saying ‘I'm delighted to be able to see you today’. There wasn’t much of a sense of delight in the excruciating minutes that followed. Note how many times he used the phrase ‘I’m afraid to say’. It’s a stock expression in the genteel passive-aggressive vocabulary. In this case, it revealed more than the Duke knew. 

The interviewer and the Prince: he’s afraid, very afraid

TWO: It's not polite, and it’s certainly not royal, to be definite about things

Even the most straightforward expressions can be made more royal by inserting needless qualifications. 

Here is Prince Charles sympathising with the people of an Australian state at the height of their COVID outbreak.

[The year] has certainly been a tremendously difficult one for Australia, and especially, if I may say so, for Victoria.

He may say so – he’s the heir and he doesn't need to ask permission. But in royal writing, you never know who might take offence, so best to add that little tic, what the French call a  formule de politesse. After all, there may be some  Australians who think it hasn't been an especially difficult year. 

THREE: when in doubt, reach for an adverb

The royal are addicted to adverbs. In the short sentence above we get three: certainly, tremendously, especially. Adverbs describe how things are and how they are done, not the doing and not the thing. They’re the parts of speech which are often at one remove to the action. I suspect that’s why royals revere them.

The other problem with adverbs is they are multisyllabic and have a weak ending. Here, Charles (Chuck, as they universally call him in Oz) is talking to a country where plain, even terse, speaking is valued.

How about,  It’s been a bloody difficult year. And you’ve really got it in the neck down in Victoria, haven’t you? 

FOUR: A sentence must be properly dressed

A royal would no sooner offer up a sentence containing no subclauses than appear at an opening ceremony tieless or with trainers on their feet. 

Here is Andrew on his friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell: 

I'd known her since she was at university in the UK and it would be, to some extent, a stretch to say that as it were we were close friends.

He might have said: 

I have known her since she was a student. But we are not close friends. 

In some circumstances (and this – I’m afraid –  is one of them), excessive royal verbiage can end up sounding evasive and shifty. 

FIVE: Delay the personal pronoun for as long as you can (or avoid it altogether)

For many years, royals distanced themselves from the messy business of expressing feelings or a personal opinion (however bland) by using the neutral ‘one’ for ‘I’ or ‘we’. That usage began to decline in the 1960s, at which point their subjects started to laugh every time they said something like ‘one prefers to have one’s breakfast in one’s bed’. 

If they are stuck with the grubby ‘I’, the best they can do these days is to push it so far back into the sentence you hardly notice it’s there. 

Here’s Charles on his experience of the virus:

Having recently gone through the process of contracting this coronavirus, luckily with relatively mild symptoms, I now find myself on the other side of the illness, but still in no less a state of social distance and general isolation.

What a treasure-trove for would-be royal writers this is. We get not one but two sub-clauses before we reach the ‘I’: and even that ‘I’ is encountered almost like a stranger in one’s own sentence. And what a royal adverb-fest! Recently, luckily, relatively, all before we reach the start of the sentence proper.  

But here’s a thought: in a world where personal pronouns have become a sensitive and contentious area (how do you prefer to be identified?), maybe ‘one’ will make a comeback as a way of evading all those awkward she/hers, they/thems.

SIX: Careful when you’re defining ‘ordinary’

Even the richest and most privileged member of the Celebrity Aristocracy learns the art of identifying with the experiences of ordinary people. Royals find this hard. Emily Maitlis asked Andrew about his throwing a party for Ghislaine Maxwell at Sandringham Castle. The Duke corrected her: it was a shooting weekend.

‘A shooting weekend?

‘Yes, a straightforward shooting weekend.’

That a ‘straightforward’ weekend for most of us is going down the garden centre, taking the kids swimming and cleaning the windows will not have occurred to him. Still, he is ‘like everybody else’ in one respect, he says: ‘I will have to take all the legal advice that there was’. I’m not sure every one of one’s subjects can entirely afford that, Sir. 

SEVEN: Feelings are vulgar and so is expressing them

Sorry to keep on Charles’s case. But he manages to add overthinking and intellectualising to the other royal verbal habits. This happened most notoriously when a journalist asked of him and his new fiancee, ‘are you in love?’

DIANA: Of course!

CHARLES: Whatever ‘in love’ means.

It was a simple question requiring a simple answer. He struggles with those, poor man. 

EIGHT: By order of the Royal Euphemism

Prince Andrew: Do I regret the fact that he [Epstein] has quite obviously conducted himself in a manner unbecoming? Yes.

Emily Maitlis: Unbecoming? He was a sex offender.

There’s something painful about the way royal-speak crashes into 21st century sentiment here. If it weren’t for the fact Andrew seems to be downplaying his friend’s crimes you'd almost say it was poignant. 

I just don’t think a man bred to royal speak can bring himself to use a phrase like ‘sex offender’. So we get a polite euphemism: ‘a manner unbecoming’. I half wonder whether he expected a well-spoken woman like Emily to join in with the ‘code’. 

NINE: Nothing is that serious

Charles has been a great force for good in campaigning on environmental issues well before it was fashionable and popular to do so.

I am sure he believes this is the greatest emergency of our times. But royal-speak sometimes inhibits him from sounding as if he believes that. 

Here he is, making a speech in New Zealand :

That I have been invited here today, to offer a few of my own observations about the State of the Global Environment, is a particular honour for me but, more than this, I fear it is a rather worrying indication of just how devastatingly serious the situation has become!

I fear… rather worrying… and that jokey exclamation mark at the end. Greta Thunberg it ain’t.

61 very pregnant words

The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan. The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning. Whilst some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately. Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved family members.

Buckingham Palace statement, issued 40 hours after Meghan and Harry spoke to Oprah

Well, they did a pretty good job and managed to avoid the worst excesses of royal-speak (see above).

It’s not the most elegant piece of writing, in truth. ‘The full extent of how challenging the last few years have been…’ is ungainly.  A good sub-editor would say ‘past’ rather than ‘last’ and hyphenate much-loved. ‘Whilst’ is a bit fusty: modern writers prefer ‘while’. 

But when we get to the point, they make it count.

Whilst some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately.

Again, we could quibble – it’s a bit odd to talk of taking varying recollections seriously. You take allegations seriously, but of course they don’t want to use that word in a statement designed to lower the temperature without conceding anything. 

And here, for once, the adverbs really count for something. I’d usually advise against using two so close to each other: you get a chiming noise from those -ly suffixes (especially following the -ry in ‘vary’: has Buck House got a rapper on the staff?) 

Usually it’s the verb that’s the meat of the sentence. Will be addressed is good – well done for keeping that simple and not hedging that around (see below) with an ‘in due course’ or a ‘steps will be put in place to…’

Yet it’s ‘seriously’ and ‘privately’ that do the punching. ‘Privately’ is a knock-out. That one simple word makes us think again about that compulsion the couple felt to ‘tell their truth’. Fine. But why in public? What’s the real motivation here? 

Let’s end with that classic Oscar Wilde line about  speaking your truth

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Oscar: try telling that to Oprah