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If London were a ship, she would have listed. Days before the wedding of His Royal Highness Prince William Arthur Philip Louis and Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, it began: the inexorable buildup of spectators along the ceremonial route, at first a straggle of flag-bedecked diehards, then the crowds and finally hordes, all intent on squeezing into the same small corner of a sprawling city. Some were locals, but many had traveled across countries and continents. Those lucky or determined enough to grab the best vantage points caught fleeting glimpses of oxblood-colored Rolls-Royces and open carriages and their smartly dressed occupants. The greater press of people, their views obscured, raised smart phones like periscopes. What mattered was not seeing the pageantry but living it.

You can understand why Britons and the 54 nations of the Commonwealth would take more than a passing interest in an event attended by their head of state, her immediate heir and the heir's heir. Brits observing the bobbies keeping order on the ceremonial routes may also have wondered how much of their taxpayer cash had been spent on what was, after all, described by palace officials as only a "semi-state" occasion. Citizens of Bahrain could take heart that even amid the cheers, their clamor for reform was audible, forcing the Gulf state's Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa to send his regrets.

Yet this wasn't a spectacle of interest only to audiences with tangible links to those present. The marriage of the Prince and the commoner gripped a global audience, reaching places not represented at the ceremony and without historical ties to Britain or, like the U.S., long independent of its Crown. The world loves a love story, and we're thirsty for narratives of hope in difficult times. But more than that, the wedding, though it left some people cold and overheated a few — police arrested 55 people before and during the ceremony — achieved something exceptionally rare.

Some 750 million people watched Prince William's father, the Prince of Wales, marry Lady Diana Spencer in 1981; 2.5 billion were drawn by Diana's 1997 funeral. Many commentators perceived in Diana's death a second death — of our unfathomable but undeniable fascination with Britain's monarchy. Then came news of her son's engagement, and the fascination kindled again. Estimates suggest that in addition to the London throngs, upwards of 2 billion people saw the wedding on TV or online, triggering the mysterious alchemy that turns spectators into participants in their own history. As the bride stepped out of the car, you knew that a huge chunk of humanity was watching as you were, straining for a first glimpse of the dress as you were, caught up in the moment as you were. "This is, as every wedding day should be, a day of hope," said the Bishop of London in his address, and as William and Kate exchanged vows, a significant portion of our fractured, fractious planet, for those moments at least, shared an idea and a dream.

It helped that, despite its pomp, the wedding offered much that we could relate to. Ignore for a moment the celebrity guests, the soaring architecture and the swelling melodies that only world-class musicians can produce. Nuptials in developed nations almost always represent an accommodation between tradition and society as it really is — as this one did. The bride and groom had lived together for just over four years before marching up the aisle. Kate is 29 years old. (William is her junior by five months.) This mirrors a wider trend that has seen British women delay tying the knot until 30. When Charles married Diana, the average age of British brides was 23.1. Diana was only 20.

That union ended in divorce, just like some 50% of all British marriages. When Prince Charles later chose to wed his mistress, also a divorcée, he pursued a path that just 68 years before forced Edward VIII to abdicate. In 2005 there was barely a murmur of complaint as Charles and Camilla, in common with two-thirds of British brides and grooms, exchanged vows in a civil ceremony. Camilla's children by her first husband were in the pews for William and Kate's wedding. Few marriages these days are free from tangled family constellations, and the royal one is no exception.

Merging two families is rarely easy. And which families are free from embarrassing relatives? But this happy couple faced far more significant dilemmas in planning their nuptials than whether to invite Kate's tattooed uncle Gary Goldsmith (yes) or William's scandal-prone aunt Sarah, Duchess of York (no). They were keenly aware that every decision they made would form a virtual mosaic tile. At a distance, those tiles — the seductive details of lace and tulle, blossoms and hats, music and crowds and pageantry — resolve into a single, big picture. Stand back from the lush spectacle, and the image is of not just young marrieds but young marrieds whose future is intimately entwined with that of the country over which they may reasonably expect to reign. This was not simply a wedding but the clearest indication yet of how the House of Windsor is positioning itself for the post-Elizabethan age.

To Have and to Hold On
As the groom's spry grandmother entered the abbey, clad hat to toe in her favorite yellow, she appeared, as always, distant yet utterly familiar, a stern matriarch capable of sudden, transformative smiles. For more than 59 years the Queen has been a reassuringly fixed point of reference in a country that has seemed increasingly unsure of its identity. Britons have come to question many of the structures and institutions that once defined Britishness, including a class system that helped citizens know their place and hindered those who sought to challenge the social order. Britain's constitutional monarchy has not escaped contention, but Elizabeth II provides a bulwark against republican sentiment. The popularity of her children has flowed and ebbed, and critics routinely cast doubt on the value of monarchy. But apart from the briefest of moments — in 1966, when she hesitated to visit the Welsh town of Aberfan after a landslide of coal waste buried a school, and again, more than 30 years later, when she stayed silently at her home in Scotland for the first six days after the death of Princess Diana — the Queen has sailed on unscathed and, a rarity in this skeptical age, near universally respected.

She is, however, 85, and the royal family is preparing for the succession that must inevitably come. There is an implicit understanding among palace officials that all events showcasing the Windsors form part of that preparation, from big occasions like William's wedding to the smaller-scale routines of ribbon cutting and receptions. "Our job is to think ahead and spot the potholes and drive round them and to plan for the long term," says a palace aide.

For William and Kate, granted the titles Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as their wedding day dawned, those potholes included the risk that too opulent festivities would stoke resentments and open divisions in a time of belt-tightening austerity. In the Oscar-garlanded film The King's Speech, George VI plays a key role in stiffening the sinews of his subjects as they face a national crisis. It's a template his successors would dearly love to emulate. (The movie, confided one palace official, was the best piece of public relations the royals could have hoped for.) But that would entail convincing the public that the Windsors provide bang for the taxpayer bucks spent on their upkeep, calculated at 62 pence ($1.03) per subject per year. In return for that support, the royals perform ceremonial duties and, so the wisdom goes, boost tourism and national pride. Critics of the monarchy counter that the cost of the institution is insupportably high, entrenching traditions that favor the country's elite.

In planning the wedding, the couple and their advisers took great care to emphasize the human scale and dimension of the event. The palace let it be known that the bride's family would help foot the bill and pointed out that many of the costs ordinarily associated with flashy matrimonials — the posh cars and coaches, the glitzy reception venue, the catering and waitstaff — were already amortized as part of routine expenditures for the royal household. Yet there was a balance that needed to be struck. Strip the spectacle of grandeur and the royal nuptials might easily have mutated into the sort of celebrity affair that in Britain fills newspapers one day and forms the wrapping for fish and chips the next. "Members of the royal family are not politicians. They're not pop stars with a new album. They're here for the long term," says the aide.

What complicates any attempt at pothole avoidance is that Britons have never been clear or consistent in their expectations of their royal family, and that confusion has deepened in recent decades. "Ninety days out of 100, the British attitude to the monarchy is like our attitude to the sky: we know it exists, and we don't really think about it that much," says Peter Morgan, the screenwriter whose 2006 movie The Queen provided a fictionalized explanation for its heroine's failure to lead the national mourning for her former daughter-in-law. When something comes along that makes Britons focus on the monarchy — Diana's death, William's wedding — "we can't make up our minds what we want of the royals," Morgan says. "Whether we want to pay them, whether they should pay for themselves. Whether we want to reform them, empower them, fade them out. We never resolve our conflicting attitudes or come to any conclusion, least of all the one that's staring us all in the face — namely, that we're really quite happy with the way that it is."

Polls suggest Morgan is right. With Elizabeth at the helm, support for the monarchy has barely wavered from the 70% mark even during times of apparent difficulty. (Interestingly, private polling for Buckingham Palace found that the prospect of William and Kate's wedding did little to boost support either.) In the post-Diana years, the palace public relations machinery has become more sophisticated; the Queen and her family benefit from a battery of experts who understand that a loyal courtier doesn't offer flattery but cold truth. Their involvement doesn't prevent stumbles, as nearly every royal has found out. Good advice is useful but cannot substitute for good judgment.

The Queen's enduring popularity owes a great deal to her good judgment and instinctive reticence. She granted TV cameras behind-the-scenes access for a 1969 documentary, persuaded that she needed to be humanized in the eyes of her subjects. Viewers saw scenes from Windsor family life: the Duke of Edinburgh grilling sausages, the Queen sympathizing with Richard Nixon. ("World problems are so complex, aren't they now?") But although the documentary broke ratings records, the monarch regretted her participation, and the film was withdrawn from circulation.

Hindsight suggests her natural inclinations are sound. It is not remoteness but familiarity — or more accurately the confessional culture that Diana embraced and her former husband submitted to when giving interviews about his private life — that more reliably breeds contempt for public figures. And it's especially dangerous for the constitutional monarchy, which, unlike common or garden celebrity, depends on the idea that not all people are born equal. If the royals are no different from the masses, why bend the knee? "In the early 1970s the Vatican thought it would be a good idea for the Catholic Church to become more accessible, for the Mass to be in English, to connect, but people don't want that at all," says Morgan. "They want mystery and power and unknowability. In the end, the Windsors' tragedy is they are more like us than we want them to be." His words echo an observation about royalty by the 19th century essayist Walter Bagehot: "Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic."

Marrying Up

When billions of people have lined the streets or switched on TVs or computers to watch you plight your troth, any attempt to keep out the daylight may seem hopelessly optimistic. William grew up in full view, a reluctant reality-TV star. His wife, a comparative newcomer to public life, has drawn plaudits for her composure under the fire of flashbulbs. Yet there are examples aplenty of beauties who have managed the transition from unknown to icon. The real challenge for Kate is without precedent: to strengthen, not dilute, the Windsor brand by metamorphosing from commoner to royal. Her success will depend in part on whether Britons are prepared to accept that such a transformation is possible. And the extent to which they do will in turn give Kate — and the rest of us — fresh insight into how a once hidebound nation is adapting to an age of ceaseless revolutions.

Step into the strange, analog world of the Windsors as she has and you might be forgiven for imagining these revolutions are media constructs. There's little sign of modernity in the cluttered corridors, ticking clocks and transistor radios of Buckingham Palace or the smaller complex of Clarence House and St. James's Palace that, in a domestic arrangement that would stretch credulity in a TV sitcom, is the London home of Charles, Camilla, Harry and, for now, the newlyweds.

Yet the royals have made adjustments to the modern world — if not always the right ones or at sufficient speed. In 2006, sitting in Buckingham Palace, Prince Andrew, the Queen's second son, insisted to Time that the monarchy understood the need to adapt. "I think this organization is very good at change management," he said. "We live it, we work it all the time. Change is an almost continuous process," so much so "that it's almost imperceptible."

The controversies that have engulfed Andrew in the past year highlighted his difficulties with the process. His decision to maintain a friendship with disgraced U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein was all his own, displaying an unreconstructed hauteur toward the idea that royals, like other public figures, are accountable to the public. His much criticized contacts with Saif Gaddafi, by contrast, were at the behest of the government, in the prince's role as trade envoy, a job created to give him a function and purpose that he signally lacked. Just being royal is no longer enough to win the support of the British populace.

The lack of a job description has also bedeviled Andrew's older brother. Charles has spent his whole life preparing to be King, but, despite the screams of fans that greeted him on the wedding morning, few Britons view the prospect of his reign with enthusiasm. Several polls have suggested that a majority of Brits would like to see him bypassed altogether in a convoluted (and improbable) arrangement that would have the royal scepter handed straight from the Queen to William.

Charles' turbulent personal life dented his standing; it doesn't come naturally to tug the forelock to a man who memorably expressed the desire in a covertly recorded phone call to be his mistress's tampon. And in his earnest efforts to carve out a meaningful role for himself, he has drawn attention to the absence of one. "I find I am often accused of living in the past or of wanting to return to the kind of past that can only be met in the imagination," he complained in a 2002 speech. "I have been branded as a traditionalist, as if tradition was some kind of disease." He aspired, he said, "to level the monstrous artificial barrier erected between tradition and modernity," and he has tried to do so through his sincere campaigning on green issues (where he has been ahead of the curve) and architecture (where he is a dinosaur). None of this has boosted his popularity. The best hopes for the monarchy lie not in its members' ability to reinvent themselves as advocates for worthy causes, like superannuated rock stars, but to renew faith in the Elizabethan tradition.

The greatest hopes for that renewal rest with William and his new bride — not exactly an unpressurized start to a marriage. "I wanted to give her a chance to see in and to back out if she needed to before it all got too much," William explained last November after the couple announced an engagement that many had expected far sooner. The marital history of the Prince's parents hardly inspires confidence, but Diana — though then nine years younger and incalculably more naive than the daughter-in-law she will never know — entered her marriage with one distinct advantage over Kate: she was a blue blood, the daughter of an earl.

The new Duchess of Cambridge may look the part — though she has yet to master the Windsors' regal, stiff-wristed wave — but British news organizations revealed that her antecedents were not only modest but plebeian, including miners and manual laborers. Her brief split from William in 2007 was attributed by those same news organizations to class tensions. They mentioned her mom Carole Middleton's lèse majesté in chewing gum in the presence of the Queen; they openly mocked the family's business, Party Pieces, a mail-order company that retails decorations and other "partywares."

Nor has Kate been spared the snobbery that Britons — or at any rate, broad strains in British journalism — reflexively direct against anyone perceived to have ambitions to move up the social scale. Just two years after she first caught their attention, the tabloids dubbed Prince William's girlfriend "Waity Katie." Her sole ambition, they implied, was to snare the future King. A columnist for the middle-England Daily Mail imagined the wedding thus: "Look at her go, the sheer velocity of that aisle-sprint making the bridal veil plume straight behind her, like the slipstream on a jet. Onwards, towards her Prince, her glittering prize." "In the U.K. we are all deeply obsessed with the issue of class. When the royal wedding was announced, newspaper inches were devoted to Kate's background," says Lee Elliot Major, research director at the Sutton Trust, an organization dedicated to fostering social mobility. "In England, particularly, you walk into a room and a lot of people will be assessing, whether it's consciously or subconsciously, where you are in the social-class rankings. Whether it's your accent, the way you look or the way you behave, there are always little clues."

A Touch of Classlessness
You might be forgiven for supposing that Britain has changed just as imperceptibly as its monarchical superstructure — that the country is still divided in three, with flat-capped laborers looking up to the white collar middle classes, which in turn defer to a louche upper crust of landed gentry, headed by the Windsors. And by some measures, you would be right.

Income mobility — the opportunity to overcome an impoverished start in life — is notably restricted in Britain, as it is in the U.S. A child born into an affluent home in either country may expect to enjoy better opportunities throughout life than his counterpart from a hardscrabble neighborhood. In the U.K., by the age of 3, a poorer child tends to lag his wealthier equivalent in terms of personal development by 12 months. At 18, the rich kid, who, like a mere 7% of Britons, has enjoyed the benefits of a private education, is six times as likely to go to university and 55 times as likely to get into Oxford or Cambridge. Research by the Sutton Trust reveals that although the proportion of privately educated people at the top of British professional life has declined slightly in the past 20 years, more than half the leaders in most professions attended fee-paying schools.

Nor can one overlook the varying degrees of privilege within this picture: certain private schools, among them Eton (which William attended) and Westminster, give their pupils a turbocharged chance of success, as a glance at Britain's posh government indicates. Led by Eton- and Oxford-educated David Cameron and Westminster- and Cambridge-educated Nick Clegg, more than 60% of the 29 Ministers around the Cabinet table were privately educated, and as many as 7 in 10 Ministers are alumni of Oxford or Cambridge. Alert to the charge that, as a beneficiary of the status quo, he has no real desire to change it, Cameron is usually at pains to present himself as a modern and demotic sort of bloke. A photograph from his student days showing him attired in the distinctive tailcoat worn by members of the Bullingdon, the irremediably toffish Oxford dining club, has been suppressed in a piece of news management that spotlights just how sensitive an issue class can be. Downing Street duly briefed the press that the Prime Minister would attend the royal wedding in a business suit. After traditionally minded Brits protested, he donned a morning suit after all.

Britannia, like Cameron, is adept at presenting a modern face to the world. But she can still behave like a sclerotic old dame. Might the very fact that Britannia's head of state attains the role by birth, not merit, prove a bar to meritocracy? "There is no evidence, no science around this, but irrespective of the fact that the royal family does not have real power in the sense it did have in previous times, it's a powerful symbol of the hierarchy that still persists in the U.K.," muses Elliot Major. Brought up to spot invisible roadblocks to social mobility, Brits fear ridicule if they seek betterment — and Carole Middleton's mistreatment by the British press suggests those fears are justified. In the U.K., money is seen to buy lifestyle, not class.

But there's something else money can buy: a private education, which can catapult kids, if not their parents, into a higher social bracket. That isn't good news for the majority of British children trapped in a state school system that far too rarely matches the quality of teaching and facilities in the private sector, but it helps explain why it's not so strange after all to see the great-great-granddaughter of a coal miner on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, kissing a prospective King — twice, to the crowd's delight. Kate's parents sent her to Marlborough, a school Elliot Major brackets with Eton and Westminster as "incredibly prestigious." (It's also incredibly expensive, with fees of $47,800 per year.) Kate met her future husband at the university they both attended, St. Andrews, Scotland's most venerable such institution, founded in 1413. If she had pursued a more traditional career path, her degree in art history would have garnished a résumé that at the very least could have been expected to help her secure a junior managerial position or some other type of white collar employment.

Instead she finds herself breathing the thin air at the summit of British social ambitions. A sign of true nobility, at least in fairy tales, is generosity. Cinderella, ensconced in her castle, doesn't shut the gates to mice. And Kate's Cinderella-like impulses are benefiting 26 charities personally selected by her and her new husband to receive donations that might otherwise have been spent by well-wishers on wedding presents destined to further clutter palace corridors.

Lessons to Be Learned
Among the beneficiaries is IntoUniversity, an organization devoted to providing underprivileged children with the motivation and tools to gain higher education so that they too might one day go to the ball. The founders of the charity were startled and delighted to be included on the royal list. "We're working with a whole load of young people who have ambitions and hopes and inspirations," says one of IntoUniversity's founders, Hugh Rayment-Pickard.

On the first day of a weeklong course in North London for 10- and 11-year-old kids, mostly from the local Broadwater Farm primary school and almost all from minority backgrounds, tongues protrude out of corners of mouths, brows are furrowed, and pencils are inexpertly wielded. IntoUniversity staff are introducing their charges to the workings of the media, part of a broader effort to give them ideas about professions they might one day join. At one table, children struggle to design the front page of a newspaper. your highness amazingly astonished at katwills wedding engagement — gasp, reads an early attempt.

Despite the breathless headline, the kids appear largely indifferent to their royal benefactors. The wedding "has nothing to do with us. We're not related to them," says 11-year-old Andre Bucknor. He heard (incorrectly) that tickets to the wedding were on sale to people rich enough to afford them. The misapprehensions of a boy may seem unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Still glowing from the excitement of the wedding and buoyed by the expressions of affection it inspired, the royal couple could easily ignore dissenters at the edge of the picture. But though dissent may be rare, consent — the consent that keeps the royals safe in their palaces — matters too. The Windsors require the consent of that boy and his schoolmates to continue the family business.

As William and Kate embark on married life, they aim to snatch a few more years behind the front lines of royalty. He will continue as a pilot for the Royal Air Force while she plays housewife at their cottage in Wales, emerging for occasional state duties and to quell, if only briefly, the insatiable demand for her image. The two have spoken of their desire to start a family, and the government is already examining the feasibility of changing the laws of royal succession so that any male child they might have does not automatically take precedence over a female.

That would represent a leveling of the barrier between tradition and modernity. It could strengthen the monarchy by bringing it closer to the world the rest of us inhabit or weaken the monarchy by reminding us that it is part of a tradition based on inequalities — an issue that most Britons appear happy to overlook while Queen Elizabeth remains on the throne.

Will her successors figure out how to repeat the trick? Peter Morgan thinks they will. "The history of the British monarchy is a history of two parallel and contradictory impulses, a history of diminishment of constitutional power and in parallel an escalation of skills of survival," he says. "Never underestimate the British monarchy's ability to adapt, reorganize its molecular configuration and survive. They'll be here long, long, long after we've all gone."

• Catherine Mayer / London