Laudator Temporis Acti

Arnold Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus and His World (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 1-2:

It is a misfortune to be born into a position in society from which there is no possibility of escape, however uncongenial this inescapable position may be to the victim's temperament, gifts, and consequent inclinations. This misfortune is a rare one. There are few stations in life that have held everyone that has been born into them as their life-long prisoner. One prisoner in a thousand, or one in a million at least, has succeeded in breaking his way out of even the most cramping and most crushing original confinement. At least one person, out of the many born into this position, will have found his position uncongenial enough, and will have had importunate enough incompatible ambitions, to have nerved him to make the necessary effort of will for breaking out, hard and painful though the act of self-liberation may have been.

Perhaps the only social position from which escape is impossible for those born into it is royalty; for this continues to haunt its victim psychologically even if he has managed to extricate himself from it officially. A royal personage who, so long as he has remained officially royal, has been longing to enjoy the satisfactions and amenities of private life, is apt to find, if and when he has had his way, that he now misses the servitude that was so irksome to him so long as he was officially subject to it. He now discovers, too late, that, unconsciously, he had been wishing to have the best of both worlds; and he has actually got the worst of both as an ironical result of his apparently successful fight to win his freedom. Moreover, the royal personage who is free to divest himself of his royalty officially is relatively fortunate. Even this limited degree of self-liberation can be attained by a royal personage only in a society that has become so orderly, or that has reduced royalty to so insignificant a social role, that, in this society, it has ceased to be dangerous either to wear a crown or to doff one. In most societies, at most times and places, the wearer of a crown has been holding a wolf by the ears.

In the present-day Western World, to be royal has ceased to be dangerous, yet royalty continues to be awkward for inheritors of it who are irked by it.