A curtsy takes about a second. The hands stay still, the head inclines, one foot slides behind the other and the knees bend — and in that second, a piece of Etiquette older than the modern monarchy itself is performed in front of the world’s cameras. When Catherine, Princess of Wales, curtsied to Sultan Haitham bin Tarik at the start of his state visit to Windsor Castle on Oct. 20, she was doing something her predecessors have done, in evolving forms, for centuries: acknowledging rank before the Sovereign‘s guest, and marking a greeting as a formal act of state rather than a casual hello. That such a gesture can still lead the news tells you something important about how the British monarchy works — and why it guards these small rituals so carefully.
From “Courtesy” to Curtsy: A Short History
The word itself gives the game away. “Curtsy” is a worn-down form of “courtesy,” and the gesture began as the female counterpart to the bow — the physical sign, in the courts of medieval and early modern Europe, by which a person of lower rank acknowledged a person of higher one. In the great courts of France and England, these movements were once elaborate, graded and endlessly debated: how deep, how long, to whom, and in what order were questions of genuine political consequence. Over the centuries the practice thinned out. Bows and curtsies vanished from ordinary life in the twentieth century, surviving mainly in a few protected habitats — the ballet studio, the stage, and the royal household. Within the Royal Family, the custom persists in a narrowed form: members of the family bow or curtsy to the sovereign, and formal honours are paid to visiting heads of state on great occasions. The House of Windsor keeps the gesture alive not from nostalgia, but because it remains useful: a wordless, instantly understood signal of respect that photographs beautifully and offends no one.
The Machinery Around the Moment
The curtsy was only the smallest moving part in a day of magnificent machinery. Before it came the arrivals: Prince William greeting the Sultan at his London residence and riding with him to Windsor. Then the welcome itself, staged in the open air before the Datchet Road dais, with the royal party assembled and the bands playing. Then the Carriage Procession — the sovereign and his guest in the Irish State Coach, the Prince and Princess of Wales following in the Australian State Coach, hooves and wheels carrying the party up to the castle while gun salutes sounded from Home Park and, an hour’s journey away in the capital, from the Tower of London. Every element of that sequence is inherited. The coaches, the salutes counted out in guns, the order of carriages — all of it was settled generations ago and is reproduced, visit after visit, with jeweller’s precision. The point of the repetition is the message: this relationship matters enough to be honoured with the full, unshortened ceremony.
(The Royal Navy / Wikimedia Commons (OGL 3))The Night Ahead: A Banquet in St George’s Hall
The day’s ceremonial second act came after dark, with the State Banquet in St George’s Hall — white tie, tiaras, a table running the length of one of the grandest rooms in the castle, and speeches in which sovereign and guest publicly affirm the friendship between their countries. Banquets are easy to mock as expensive theatre, and the theatre is undeniable. But they are also where the visit does its quieter work: ministers meet counterparts, business figures are seated with intent, and the guest of honour is left in no doubt about the value placed on the relationship. The curtsy at noon and the banquet at night are the same instrument played at different volumes — respect, made visible.
(UK Government / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0))What It All Adds Up To
On Wednesday, Oct. 21, the Sultan departs Windsor, and the visit shifts register: a journey to London and a meeting with the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, where the conversation turns from ceremony to policy. That handover — palace to government, pageantry to politics — is the constitutional design of a state visit in a single movement. The monarchy opens the door with history and hospitality; elected politicians then walk through it. Seen in that light, the Princess’s curtsy was not a quaint survival at all. It was the first sentence of a carefully written diplomatic text, delivered in a language of gesture that Britain has been refining for centuries and shows no sign of abandoning.
(Number 10 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0))Customs survive when they still do a job. The curtsy survives because it compresses, into one second of movement, everything a state visit exists to say: you are honoured, you are welcome, and this relationship is worth our most formal effort. At Windsor on Tuesday, in green silk and perfect composure, the Princess of Wales said it flawlessly — and, just as instructively, knew exactly when not to say it again.
From the Courts of Europe to Windsor
The curtsy’s ancestors stood in the great courts of early modern Europe, where the depth of a bow or curtsy was measured like a statement of accounts — deeper for a sovereign, shallower for a lesser rank, the whole hierarchy of a continent legible in knees and spines. Britain kept the custom longer than most, refining it through the Victorian and Edwardian eras even as the handshake conquered ordinary life. What survived into the present is not the full court ritual but its concentrated essence: a handful of gestures, performed on a handful of days each year, each one carrying the accumulated weight of all the centuries behind it.
The Gesture in the Media Age
What has changed is not the gesture but the audience. A curtsy performed for a court of dozens is now performed for a feed of millions, replayed, slowed down and debated within the hour. That could have killed the custom — ritual rarely survives irony — but the Windsor welcome suggested the opposite. Stripped of compulsion and performed with evident ease, the curtsy read not as submission but as craft: the visible signature of an institution that still bothers to do things properly. In a century that communicates in shorthand, there is something almost defiant about a monarchy still fluent in its oldest language.