Unlikely as it now sounds, there was a time, not so long ago, when the future of the British monarchy seemed in genuine doubt. After Friday's national jamboree, however, the furore surrounding Diana's funeral in 1997, when the House of Windsor suddenly found itself on the receiving end of unprecedented public anger, seems like ancient history.
Once again the "Firm", as the royal family calls itself, has shown an uncanny ability to capture the public imagination and make itself the focus for patriotic celebration in a way that no other institution can match. For years, republicans have been earnestly predicting that the British would soon tire of the flags, the carriages, the pomp and the pageantry. But here we are in 2011, 10 years after Stanley Kubrick had us travelling to the depths of space, waving our little union jacks. Nothing changes, or so it seems.
On the surface, the wedding of Prince William and Princess Catherine, as we must get used to calling her, looked little different from royal weddings past: the Queen and Prince Philip in 1947, say, or Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips in 1973, or Charles and Diana in 1981. For one thing, it was uncannily well timed, coming only weeks before the coalition's cuts really begin to bite. The Firm has a curious knack of arranging marriages during desperate economic times: the Queen's marriage, after all, came during the depths of Clement Attlee's postwar austerity, while Charles and Diana got hitched only weeks after the Brixton riots, at the very moment when Margaret Thatcher's monetarist medicine had sent the Tories down to third place in the polls. For timing, though, Anne and Mark take the biscuit. Their big bash on 14 November 1973 came the day after Edward Heath had announced a state of emergency to deal with the unprecedented energy crisis that culminated in the three-day week.
On the wilder shores of the internet you can find plenty of people who think all this is some kind of palace conspiracy. Sometimes, though, a coincidence is just a coincidence.
Yet behind the bunting, there was something different about Friday's occasion. For one thing, the social and moral context has changed utterly. Even in 1981, it would have been unimaginable to have a Labour leader with two children and a long-term partner, but no wedding ring. Only last month, however, official figures showed that the marriage rate in England and Wales had fallen to its lowest level since 1862. People are not only marrying much older – the Queen was 21 when she tied the knot, whereas Kate Middleton is 29, which would once have been old enough to qualify her for a place on the shelf – but many are not marrying at all. In the 1930s, when the Queen was growing up, only 6% of 40-year-old women were unmarried. Today that figure is closer to 30%. One of the great ironies of the royal wedding, therefore, was that millions of the people glued to their screens have consciously decided not to get married themselves.
The other striking thing is the almost total absence of anti-monarchical sentiment. There have certainly been some "anti" articles in liberal newspapers, but their authors could probably hold a republican conference in a telephone box. In any case, serious opposition to the monarchy seems to have lost any of the edge it once had. Go back to 1981, and you find Ken Livingstone, then head of the Greater London council (GLC), ostentatiously spending the day meeting families of Irish republican prisoners at County Hall, before releasing a thousand black balloons. You even find a gaggle of ambitious young Labour politicians, among them Peter Mandelson, Harriet Harman and Alistair Darling, taking a cross-channel ferry to France to escape what they called the "royalist orgy". That's the same Harriet Harman, incidentally, who offered her "warmest congratulations" to the happy couple on behalf of the Labour party.
The polls tell the wider story. In August 1997, at the height of the post-Diana hysteria, only 48% of Britons thought the country would be worse off without the monarchy. Today, that figure is 63%. Two out of three of us believe the monarchy is "relevant" to life in Britain today, although I have to confess I have never really understood what that means. Six out of 10 of us think the monarchy improves our image around the world. And despite the presence of David Beckham and Elton John, more than half of us believe the wedding celebrated "British values", compared with only 32% who thought it was about glamour and celebrity. Probably no other institution, with the possible exception of the BBC, could match approval ratings like those. Certainly no political party comes close.
And perhaps that offers a clue to the monarchy's extraordinary revival. We are living, after all, in a ferociously anti-political age. In an age when Gillian Duffy is held up as a fount of common sense, respect for politicians has reached an all-time low. None of the party leaders comes close to representing public opinion: only 47% of us approve of David Cameron, with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg lagging behind on 32% and 28%. Thanks to the expenses scandal, popular wisdom casts the Palace of Westminster as a trough and its inhabitants as venal, grasping pigs. That Sally Bercow has become one of Westminster's most famous women probably says it all.
By contrast, the monarchy is virtually the only national institution that still commands widespread and instinctive respect. Its detachment from the hurly-burly of parliamentary politics has only added to its lustre. Republicans may well retort that it represents the cornerstone of a conservative political order, but it is palpably clear that most people simply do not believe them. Rightly or wrongly, the Queen is seen as a genuinely nonpolitical, patriotic figure, the incarnation of a vanished patriotic consensus. In an age when so many young men and women have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, her grandsons' military service, which might once have been contentious, represents a priceless political asset. Even Prince Harry's raucous partying has helped to humanise the institution: in an odd way, pictures of him staggering out of Boujis show that he is not so different from thousands of other young men – only a lot richer.
And yet as far as the monarchy is concerned, the question of relevance is basically beside the point. Back in 1959, the Tory journalist Peregrine Worsthorne predicted that the dissolution of the British empire would have seismic consequences for the domestic class system. In the long run, he predicted, everything about the traditional hierarchy would start to look "foolish and tacky when related to a second-class power on the decline". At the very least, people would start to question the point of "maintaining a Queen-Empress without an empire to rule over".
But as Friday's pageantry reminded us, Worsthorne's prediction, though apparently sensible, was completely wrong. In fact, it is precisely the dissolution of British power, the decline of deference and the tottering of the old imperial order that explain the institution's resilience. Everything else has changed; the monarchy, by and large, has stayed the same. In an age of globalisation, it is virtually the only institution that remains defiantly, unashamedly British. Shorn of its imperial connotations, it has become the supreme focus for domestic patriotism. Proposals for "Britishness days" have come and gone, but only royal events have people hanging out the bunting, as my Oxfordshire neighbours did. Other countries have national days. We have royal weddings.
No doubt republicans are telling themselves that, soon enough, a new generation will come to maturity who care nothing for the baubles of monarchy and cannot wait to vote for President Miliband. Their predecessors said the same thing in 1981. They were even saying something like it when Queen Victoria was on the throne.
The truth is that the British monarchy is one of the most resilient institutions in the world. Its hold on the popular imagination, as Friday proved, shows no sign of slackening. And if you really cannot stand Prince William and his blushing bride, then I have bad news for you. They are going to be with us for the next 50 years. You had better get used to them.
Dominic Sandbrook is a historian whose most recent book is State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974 (Allen Lane)