Positively Edwardian

Hair to the throne. A bearded, pheasant shooting Prince in the future mould of an Edward VII or a George V is perfectly fine by me. Bring back the old British kings!

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The Glorious Twelfth

For liberty and livelihood! Thousands of grouse shooting gentlemen and their smiling gamekeepers will take to the moors of Scotland and northern England today for the Glorious Twelfth. For the willing and well-disposed - a day of shooting will cost you only about £7,000 - you can experience this rarest of British sporting treats. Recommended reading before you go: Better to kill a fellow gun than wing a beater.

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The Royal Shooting Party

With the Glorious 12th near upon us, the monarchist naturally looks to the English moors for a healthy crop of birds and a Royal Shooting Party. Unfortunately old Edwardian photographs of royals gathered for the beginning of the grouse hunting season are hard to come by, but I managed to find what must be one of the oldest, with the future King Edward VII seen here as a young man in his late twenties. Most fascinating is the elderly man to the far right, one Sir James Clark, Queen Victoria's famous royal physician, who was born in the year 1788! He died very close to the time this photo was taken in 1870.

Royal Shoot circa 1870: King Edward VII (as Prince of Wales) and his shooting party, General Charles Grey, Major Grey, General Seymour, the Prince of Wales, Prince Christian, Sir James Clark. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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Not Another Ghastly Fairy Tale

I don't mind the kids being captivated by all this stuff, I suppose: they're too young to understand the indignity of the tabloids, and it is a useful initiation to monarchy, as a way to popularize the institution with each succeeding generation. But please merciful God, spare the adults, or what few adults are left, to this contemptible, spit in your face paparazzi.

This is nothing but unbanned foxhunting for the Media Left, and royal foxhunting at that! - those hypocrites! - how dare they engage in this vile, animal blood sport and ignominiously corner the Prince's Royal foxes to grace their paper's cheap, smut-filled pages.

What I want is rigid, stick-in-the-mud stuffy. Give me a royal shooting party and a thousand dead grouses over another horrifically modern, glittering romance. Better yet, make it a new Edwardian tradition to invite the paparazzi to shoot the shoot. Have the grouse fly really low, such that the very best pics require the snappers to run the gauntlet. I mean, why should the royals running the media gauntlet be the only blood sport allowed in town? Fair's fair, right?

Right?

Beaverbrook

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