Wealth & Money Quote by Anthony Holden

“Fairy tale” is doing double duty here: it flatters the pageantry while quietly indicting the public for buying the story. By pinning the phrase to “the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury,” Holden doesn’t just quote a man of the cloth; he invokes the official narrator of national mythology, the institution authorized to turn a wedding into a sacrament of British identity. It’s a neat bit of journalistic ventriloquism: let the Archbishop supply the sugar, then let the numbers supply the aftertaste.

Holden’s key move is the pile-up of nouns: “impress, investment of goodwill, affection and indeed money.” “Investment” is the tell. It reframes emotion as capital, suggesting the crowd wasn’t merely celebrating but purchasing a stake in the monarchy’s continuing relevance. The “indeed” before “money” lands like a cough in a cathedral: a reminder that sentimentality has a receipt. He’s sketching a feedback loop where public affection bankrolls the institution, and the institution returns the favor with spectacle calibrated to feel intimate.

The line “It was a huge success at the time” carries the sting. “At the time” implies a later reckoning, the way tabloid-era romances often curdle into scandal, divorce, or political disenchantment. Holden isn’t denying the real warmth people felt; he’s diagnosing its vulnerability to narrative manipulation. The subtext is that monarchies don’t just endure through tradition; they endure through well-timed hits of collective fantasy, sold as history, audited as profit.