Regarding Arwa Mahdawi’s column about her daughter falling under the spell of the “princess industrial complex” (My four-year-old has invited King Charles over for ice-cream. Can someone please make it happen?, 16 July), if only the lives of media princesses resembled what actual princesses of the past, and some current, endured, perhaps the obsession would fade. Most princesses of the ancien regime didn’t have great lives. Most could expect:
1) An arranged dynastic marriage in her early teens to someone possibly twice her age whom she had never met (eg Isabel de Valois, 1545-68, third wife of Philip II of Spain).
