[Verginius Rufus]

The American obsession with British royalty and nobility is nothing new.

I once was looking at a microfilm of a small-town Virginia newspaper, the Lynchburg Press, from the early 1820s. A lot of space was devoted to the latest news about the British royal family.

Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn has two con men pretending to be the Duke of Bridgewater and the Dauphin (King Louis XVII of France). Apparently that was inspired partly by a relative's attempt to prove their claim to an inheritance from an English noble family.

[LouAvul]

I first recognized our inane obsession with those inbred mongrels when diana married charles. It (seemed like it) was on the tube as long as when kennedy got shot.

And post wedding day blues, everybody discovered they were just as degenerate as commoners.