The Life of Royal Baby, Foretold!

We're not fortune tellers, but we do have a wealth of material about royal people, both real and otherwise, from which to make some informed guesses. So come, let us take a look at the possible life of Baby England.

We're all rejoicing — yes, even those of us in America will one day be ruled by the New British Empire — in the news today that our future queen, Kate Middleton, is with child. She's said to be less than twelve weeks along, so this whole thing is still pretty new, but that doesn't mean we can't start focusing on the future. Not on how big Kate is going to get or what they will name the kid — royals don't have many options in that department, from what we understand — but even further than that. Childhood, teenage years, courtship and marriage. All that exciting stuff. Obviously we're not fortune tellers, but we do have a wealth of material about royal people, both real and otherwise, from which to make some informed guesses. So come, let us take a look at the possible life of Baby England.

If It's a Girl...

Fearing the relentless attention of paparazzi and other media, Kate will move with her daughter to San Francisco in the hopes of raising her as a normal girl, untroubled by the stresses of royal life. All will be perfectly lovely and anonymous until she's about 16, when Charles and Camilla come for an unexpected visit and tell their granddaughter that she is a princess of the United Kingdom! The young lady is thrown for quite a loop — dorky her? A princess?? — but eventually is eager to assume her royal duties. She takes her nerdy friend with her, gives her mother a hug (who, I guess, could now move back, too?), and it's off to Genov— I mean England.

But before she can get there, there's some kind of overthrow and her family is scattered across the globe, the young princess forced to wander in a wasteland with a warlike people, waiting to exact her revenge. It is only when three eggs — given to her by, uh, Angela Merkel, let's say — hatch and baby dragons come flying out that her odds of reclaiming her crown begin to improve. Still, she has to wander this barren and burned over land, known to locals as "Greece," mustering forces, somehow empowering her cause and herself in the process.

After a bloody, fiery dragon war, peace and stability are finally restored to the United Kingdom, meaning it's time for the princess to find a husband! But will she choose the safe guy her parents want her to marry, some boring member of the Swedish royal family perhaps, or will she choose the roguish other suitor, who is maybe kind of a jerk but they have totally better chemistry? There will be much hemming and hawing about this, but of course eventually she will pick the bad boy, who turns out to be not so bad after all, thus freeing up the Swedish prince to go live a content bachelor's life with his strapping footman Lars. It's happily ever after for all in Britain, even doddering old Charles and Camilla, who, inspired by their granddaughter's show of independence, finally follow their hearts' desire and go bungee jumping.

Once the princess has become a queen, she will of course have to have some sort of exciting affair with a dashing nobleman with a forked beard of some kind. It will be torrid and passionate and ultimately doomed and set against the backdrop of a naval battle with a large Spanish armada (Spain, unlike Greece, did eventually figure itself out), and it will all be very picturesque. Either that or the queen and her king will live a very happy married life until their own daughter becomes a headstrong teenager who wants to shirk off the duties of royalty in order to make it as a pop singer in America, in which cause Kate and Wills's daughter, all grown up now, will be very strict in the beginning but then more understanding by the end, maybe only after she's been turned into a bear for a while.

When she's much older, she will have some sort of dynastic power struggle with her husband and three sons — one young and petulant, another smart but conniving, the oldest noble and gay — over the Christmas holiday.

If It's a Boy...

After spending some time on some asteroids as a young boy, the little prince is given the finest education in Europe. But all he'll really dream of is the glistening promise of America. Largely because it means he can be a normal guy like he sees in movies instead of being forced into doing all these stuffy prince chores. So once he's done at Eton or whatever Swiss boarding school he's shipped off to, it's time to go to a big university right in the middle of the U.S. Of course there he will meet a nice, smart farm girl and even though he's a bit cocky and rude, they'll fall in love. There will be a lawnmower race involved, so be prepared for that big news story in about twenty or so years. All will seem well, except the trouble is, he won't have told her that he's a prince until she finds out in a bad way and things go south. Don't worry, though. Once our prince returns to England she'll track him down and they'll romantically reunite. But only after he tells her that she can pursue her dreams, too, rather than just becoming a duty-bound royal bride.

It's also possible that the prince will leave the U.K. not simply because he was eager to see a new place, but because his uncle, wicked Harry, has done something terrible and blamed it all on his nephew. So maybe the prince moving to the U.S. was a banishment, which means when he returns to England there will have to be some kind big battle/reckoning thing with Harry that, sigh, might have to end with Harry getting eaten by hyenas — or, I dunno, soccer hooligans. But the prince's victory will ensure that goodness and light is brought back to the kingdom, and eventually he will present his own son to his subjects and everything will start all over again.

Of course, because of his birth order, this first son will probably have to deal with threats from hunchbacked brothers and the like, or maybe his wife will take up with a knight or something (Sir Niall Horan II?), but it's also possibly that he'll be a genial prince turned kindly king who never overtaxes his people forcing them into banditry, doesn't marry a wicked witch by accident, and doesn't get hoodwinked by his sorcerer vizier into handing over his daughter and trying to kill the local street boy she loves. Sure, our future prince might have to create a huge religious schism to marry the girl of his dreams, but that never ends that badly, does it? He should watch out for wild boars, though. Those things can prove disastrous.