Word: royale
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...story worthy of the thousand and one Arabian nights, and the British press played it with grisly gusto. ROYAL FAMILY KILL PRINCESS WHO ELOPED was the headline in the Observer, which spurred competing papers into ferreting out the lurid details. According to first reports, the tragic story involved a Saudi Arabian princess called Misha who married a commoner, thereby incurring the wrath of her princely grandfather; she was shot and her husband beheaded. Leading the Fleet Street pack was the Daily Express, which published some blurry pictures that purported to show the beheading of Misha's lover, taken...
...which sliced off a man's head in a howling market place the Arabs have put themselves back a thousand and one years in the eyes of the startled, revolted world." Later, the Express located a German-born woman in London who had been a governess to the Saudi royal family. The newspaper ran her narrative under the rubric "the real story by the woman who knew the secrets in the heart of the tragic princess...
...stories continued, the British Foreign Office issued a statement saying, "We share the regret already widely expressed that such a tragedy should have occurred." This in turn outraged the Saudi Arabian government, which launched a formal protest. British Foreign Secretary David Owen apologized to the Saudi royal family for the Foreign Office statement. That caused Labor M.P. Martin Flannery to introduce a motion in the House of Commons damning Owen's apology as "groveling, humiliating and shameful." The Daily Mail accused Owen of truckling to Saudi oil interests: "So down on your knees, Dr. Owen, before they cut off supplies...
...into the mores of the oil-rich desert kingdom, the Saudis confirmed that the executions had taken place, apparently last July. In their protest to the Foreign Office, the Saudis insisted the pair had not been married at all. Indeed, they stressed that marriage of a member of the royal family to a commoner is no crime in Saudi Arabia. The princess and her lover had been executed after a "sentence by an Islamic court for adultery?and for an adulterous act the law is death." According to the Saudi protest the British press stories had "distorted reality and constituted...
Although princely pieces still command princely sums, the days when royal emissaries vied for a queen's collection of Leonardos in hushed auction rooms are gone. Today's collectors are apt to be middle-class?and many buy on the installment plan. Few of them can afford to furnish a room completely in one period, so they buy an Amish quilt or a mellowed English highboy to soften the lines of their contemporary apartments...