How to Tell What People Are Thinking by Peter Collett

Author:Peter Collett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2016-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

There was a time, during the Middle Ages, when it was widely believed that people who suffered from scrofula, a glandular disease which was called ‘the King’s evil’, could be cured by being touched by their monarch. This belief in the ‘royal touch’, as it was called, lasted from the time of Edward the Confessor right up to 1714, when Queen Anne performed the last royal touch by an English monarch.11 Although people no longer believe in the curative power of the royal touch, there is something very primitive about the desire to touch and be touched by royalty. That’s why so many people reach out to shake their hand. In these situations, touch becomes a medium of assimilation – by touching a member of the royal family people feel that they are incorporating some of the royal magic into themselves and connecting themselves to something that’s timeless.

The way people touch each other sometimes exposes things about their relationship that they would rather keep hidden. A dramatic case of this occurred in 1953. At the time Princess Margaret was having a secret love affair with Group Captain Peter Townsend, who had been equerry to her father, the King. The secrecy was necessitated by the fact that Margaret was only twenty-two, while Townsend was thirty-eight. To complicate matters further, he was divorced. The romance became public knowledge during the coronation. Before the ceremony began, Princess Margaret was waiting in Westminster Great Hall. Townsend was standing nearby. She turned towards him and absentmindedly brushed a piece of fluff from his lapel. It was this tiny gesture – this tell of intimacy – that revealed to the world that Princess Margaret was in love with Peter Townsend.

One of the things that made Princess Margaret’s gesture so noticeable was the fact that she belonged to a family that was not given to public displays of affection. Even to this day, the royal family rarely touch other people, except to shake hands, and there’s very little physical contact between the family members in public. In fact, if it were a foreign country, psychologists would probably refer to the royal family as a ‘non-contact culture’ – that is, a society where touch is reduced to the bare minimum. For example, when the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh went on a round-the-world tour of the Commonwealth in 1953, they left Charles, who was five years old at the time, in the care of his nanny. When they returned six months later, Charles was taken to the airport to greet his parents. When his parents appeared, they didn’t lift Charles up and give him a big hug or a kiss; instead they greeted him with a handshake – in other words, they resorted to a greeting that most people would reserve for strangers and acquaintances, even in those days, but not for children, and certainly not for their own child whom they hadn’t seen for half a year!

The low frequency of touch within the royal family is

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