The thing about royal weddings is that there aren’t that many of them. Practically anyone who marries into the House of Windsor represents a first in one sense or another. Philip Mountbatten was the first Greek prince (and the bride’s third cousin). Diana Spencer was the first to drop the word “obey” from her vows. Sarah Ferguson was a redhead. Sophie Rhys-Jones was a commoner with a serious career. Kate Middleton was a commoner without one. Camilla Parker Bowles, now a grandmother, was without precedent in having referred to herself, in a love letter, as “your devoted old bag.” It’s not so surprising, then, that Prince Harry is marrying Meghan Markle—a divorced biracial American actress, as she is forever being referred to in articles and books, written, for the most part, by married white British journalists.
Reading these accounts, it becomes clear that Markle stands out in plenty of other ways. She could also be described as “daughter of a lighting director who reportedly won seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the lottery and later went bankrupt,” or “among the youngest members of the National Organization for Women, which she joined after seeing a sexist commercial for dish soap at the age of eleven.” Maybe it’s because she grew up in Hollywood, but her life, even before she met Harry, had a dramatic quality. The father of one of her best friends was shot, while working at his auto-body shop, by a Vietnam veteran who had just murdered his own family. There cannot be many future duchesses who have been touched so closely by random gun violence, that most typical of American freak occurrences. Markle is certainly the only Sandringham guest to have once worked at a fro-yo shop called Humphrey Yogart.
Until now, the most glamorous wedding with which Markle had been associated was that of Robin Thicke and Paula Patton, for which she did the calligraphy, in 2005. At the time, she was also working as a restaurant hostess and teaching gift wrapping at a stationery store. She appeared in the Tori Amos video “1000 Oceans,” and unlatched briefcases on “Deal or No Deal.” Her acting career developed slowly: passenger on a plane, FedEx girl. There was yoga, blogging, wine, car trouble, a starter marriage. In 2011, she finally landed a leading role, on the legal drama “Suits.” Around the same time, she launched a life-style site called the Tig. (It’s a shame that she recently had to shut it down, because she’s a good writer.) By last November, when she wrapped her final episode of “Suits,” she had been supporting herself for the better part of two decades, amassing an estimated five million dollars. Her hustle distinguishes her from Princess Margaret, who used to pass the time cleaning her seashell collection, or Camilla, whom one relative apparently called “the laziest woman to have been born in England in the 20th century.” Markle will be the first gig-economy aristocrat.
There are already nonwhite European royals, including Princess Angela of Liechtenstein, who worked in fashion in New York before meeting her husband, Prince Maximilian. It is possible that some of the Windsors, whose high-colonial racism appears as regularly as the Queen’s midday gin-and-Dubonnet, are privately aghast at the prospect of a woman of color joining their ranks. But Markle’s arrival has not created the sort of crisis that arose in 1936, after Edward VIII fell in love with the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson—“a pretty kettle of fish,” the Queen Mother said—or, in 1953, when Princess Margaret wished to wed the divorced R.A.F. group captain Peter Townsend. (The taboo against divorce was finally retired when Prince Charles married Camilla.)
In certain respects, Markle is already a member of the global élite. Her self-made trajectory has taken her everywhere from the United Nations, where she delivered a speech about gender equality, to the royal box at Wimbledon, to which she was first invited not as a royal consort but as a guest of the fashion brand Ralph Lauren. In March of 2017, Markle and Harry attended a friend’s wedding in Jamaica. “While Harry flew to the island in premium economy, his girlfriend borrowed a pal’s private jet,” a British tabloid reported. Wealth has replaced race, class, or marital status as the metric of suitability for a royal partner. The exceptionable thing, it seems, would be to be poor.
Markle attended Catholic school and graduated from Northwestern University. She has drunk rosé on a bachelorette weekend in Greece, toured New Zealand by camper van, and visited Afghanistan with the U.S.O. While shooting “Suits,” she spent several years living in Canada. She is more worldly than some of her future in-laws, including the Duchess of Cambridge, who, upon her marriage, had never been to the United States. (George V, when asked to make an official trip to Holland, replied, “Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and all the other Dams—damned if I’ll do it!”)
A royal marriage is an acquisition, not a merger. In Markle, the Royal Family has found someone who can refresh their corporate culture even while being subsumed by it. Marrying into a family whose identity demands the effacement of your own is a tricky venture in the most straightforward of circumstances. Several of Harry’s previous girlfriends, in fact, were explicitly uninterested in the prospect, however much they may have adored Harry. Markle will immigrate to England and become a British subject. She was recently baptized into the Church of England. When other women realized what a royal life would entail, they took off; Markle took on a new country, a new nationality, and a new religion. Her most distinctive attribute may be that she sees becoming Harry’s wife as an opportunity.
Royal romances are not fairy tales. As several recent biographies show, they don’t always, or even very often, have happy endings. They are less about passion than about risk—low-libido, high-stakes transactions, in which the ratio of investment and return, give and take, has to achieve near-perfect balance in order that the protagonists may proceed much beyond the first kiss.
After Princess Margaret gave up on marrying Townsend, she became the proudest sybarite of the family, skewering its values by living them to their logical ends. She is the confounding antiheroine of Craig Brown’s “Ninety-nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret.” Brown, who is best known for his satirical diary entries in the magazine Private Eye, dispenses with the conventions of royal biography to create a slightly Dada portrait of the Queen’s younger sister, in chapters that flit between interviews, lists, letters, headlines, journals, and made-up dreams and vignettes. Brown perfectly channels Margaret’s sour, campy voice. His deployment of her sullen quotations (“I have now great pleasure in declaring this hut open”) can make you laugh aloud.
Margaret was also drawn toward cutting dialogue. Her husband-by-default, the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, had a habit of leaving notes on her desk and in her glove box, including one entitled “Twenty Four Reasons Why I Hate You.” It’s the hideous put-downs from him (“You look like a Jewish manicurist”) and from her society entourage (describing Margaret’s complexion as “a dirty negligee pink satin”) that make the book so weirdly sad. “Born in an age of deference, the Princess was to die in an age of egalitarianism,” Brown writes. “Attempting to straddle the two, wanting to be treated as both equal and superior, and vacillating, from one moment to the next, between the easy-going and the hoity-toity, her behaviour often led to tears before bedtime.”
Margaret is a breeze compared with the pomp-obsessed, overreaching protagonist of Tom Bower’s “Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles.” Bower, an investigative journalist, has probed the weaknesses of a number of mighty figures in the British establishment. He says that he is writing as “a committed monarchist” who, after speaking to more than a hundred and twenty royal intimates—many of whom seem to be former employees—shares “their trepidation over whether Charles can become a unifying monarch.” This may be the harshest portrayal of Charles ever written. I was searching the book’s index for something else when I came across “CHARLES, PRINCE OF WALES”:
character: refusal to accept blame, xii, 7, 11, 25, 43, 270, 335; self-doubt, xii, 11, 16, 90, 153-4; disloyalty, xiii-xiv, 4-5, 13, 14, 26-7, 51, 96-7, 162, 210, 310, 335, 337; victims of, xiii-xiv; 50-1, 93-4, 96-7, 210, 264, 310-11; dislike of criticism/dissenting views, xiv, 9, 11, 46, 52, 55, 74-5, 92; scapegoats, 7, 14, 18, 129, 162; self-pity, 7-8, 12-14, 16, 36, 38, 41, 43, 67-8, 243, 257; intolerance/bad temper, 9, 11, 13, 14, 29, 49, 52, 125, 335; sense of superiority, 11, 43, 57, 58, 76; grudges, 13, 14, 49, 335; selfishness, 14, 27, 62, 177, 210, 230, 319, 322; resentment of Diana, 18-19, 62; derogatory comments about Diana, 24, 42, 61; on himself, 44-5, 67-8; discourteousness, 52, 88, 126, 138, 314-15, 322
Bower portrays Charles as a persnickety rank-puller, who, apparently, once had his own bedroom furniture sent to a friend’s house in advance of a weekend stay. (Of claims that he brings his own toilet seat, Charles has said, “Don’t believe all that crap.”) He seems to spend much of his time using his royal position to get people to pay for things he doesn’t want to be seen indulging in, because of his royal position. He and Camilla hit people up for plane rides and weeks on yachts, birthday parties and bathroom tiles, despite the fact that Charles enjoys an annual personal income of around twenty million pounds. (Brown suggests that Margaret, for her part, embarrassed the aristocrat Colin Tennant into giving her a villa on Mustique, where she cultivated a dissolute crowd, including an ex-con who had once “pleaded guilty to employing a section of pavement as an offensive weapon.”) Bower reports that Charles tried to swap one of his watercolors for a work by Lucian Freud. “I don’t want one of your rotten paintings,” Freud replied.
While the Queen treats her birthright as an honor, her eldest son appears to feel perpetually hard done by it. “Nobody knows what utter hell it is to be Prince of Wales,” Bower quotes Charles as saying. It’s not that Charles thinks himself unworthy of the job. “This is all to do with learning culture in schools,” Charles wrote to an aide, after a woman on his staff inquired about paths to promotion. He blamed “a child-centered system which admits no failure and tells people they can all be pop stars, high court judges, brilliant TV personalities or even infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the effort or having natural abilities.” Charles must be relieved that the positions of Head of the Armed Forces and Defender of the Faith are currently filled, by his mother. Presumably, he thinks he has been featured on postage stamps on the basis of his skills.
Theoretically apolitical, Charles has sought to influence governments in ways that are both laughable and worrisome. According to Bower, he once had a private secretary call Downing Street to insure that Prime Minister Tony Blair adhere to royal etiquette by signing letters to him “Your obedient servant.” He is constantly haranguing ministers about urban planning, alternative medicine, climate change, the overfishing of the Patagonian toothfish. (A cache of letters known as the “black spider” memos, because of Charles’s handwriting, became public through the Freedom of Information Act, from which members of the Royal Family are normally exempt.)
Over the years, he has managed to divert significant public money to his pet initiatives. Bower writes, for example, that the Department of Health, under pressure from Charles, agreed to give many millions of pounds to the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. In a speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects, he famously denounced a proposed addition to the National Gallery as “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.” He ended up getting the project killed; likewise, a three-billion-pound modernist plan to redevelop the Chelsea Barracks. (He attached his own preferred design to a letter he sent to a Qatari sheikh whose family had agreed to fund the scheme.) Charles is understandably passionate about his causes. Every time he makes the case for “the ‘old fashioned’—I would call them timeless—virtues of squares, mansion blocks, and terraces,” he is making the case for himself.
Charles’s entitlement makes more sense in light of the humiliating treatment he received from his parents. It must be a mindfuck to have been raised to believe you were destined to lead a nation, and then to be fifty and have your mom and dad skip your birthday rather than be seen in the company of your girlfriend. The Queen looks fairly petty, subjecting Camilla, as she attempts to gain acceptance into the family, to a series of ever more recondite snubs. Camilla, who doesn’t like “hot countries,” according to Bower, also has her moments, but she is a winningly frowsy inamorata. Charles seems to feel that the injuries he has incurred while pursuing their relationship are grave enough that the monarchy will always owe him one.
In April, as anticipation of Harry and Meghan’s wedding ramped up, a psychiatrist issued warnings in the press that a fascination with the Royal Family could lead to mental-health problems. For a lot of us, though, going deep into the weeds of seigneurial law (technically, the Queen owns all porpoises, whales, sturgeon, and dolphins that pass within three miles of Britain’s shores); precedence (Kate must curtsy to Beatrice and Eugenie if she encounters them alone, but they must curtsy to her if she’s with William); and etiquette (little-boy royals wear shorts, not pants) is a highly relaxing leisure activity, whose value is in direct correlation with its vapidity. It is a form of what the Queen would be unlikely to call self-care. If the sentence “Quite frankly, I think he will be cream crackered and want a good night’s kip”—this was a private secretary, excusing Prince Harry from a night out—isn’t reading pleasure, then I don’t know what is. What lover of language, or of people, would not want to know that the favorite expression of Cressida Bonas, one of Harry’s old flames, is “cringe de la cringe”?
The master of the lives-of-the-royals genre is Andrew Morton, who in 1992 published “Diana: Her True Story,” an era-defining “biography” basically dictated to him by its subject. (Diana had a friend smuggle tapes, detailing her mistreatment at the hands of her husband and his family, out of Kensington Palace on a bicycle.) “Diana” is the kind of book you read lying down, preferably in a bathing suit. I recently found two copies—one paperback, one hardcover—in a vacation-rental house. Morton, who is now married to an American, spends part of the year in California, where he has pivoted to unauthorized lives of movie stars. Improbably, he has found himself, in exile, perfectly positioned to deliver another exhaustive contribution to the royals literature. “To Carolyn and all our friends in Pasadena,” reads the dedication of “Meghan: A Hollywood Princess.”
Morton was a tabloid journalist in Britain, and “Meghan” is a labor of shoe leather, or tire rubber, or whatever one goes through a lot of when reporting the bejesus out of a book in and around the San Fernando Valley. It constitutes the fullest account there is of Meghan’s pre-Harry years, and even of her family’s pre-Meghan ones, which offer an eerily emblematic capsule course on American history, from the Georgia cotton plantation where her maternal ancestors were enslaved to the Self-Realization Fellowship Temple on Sunset Boulevard where, in 1979, her parents married, after meeting on the set of “General Hospital.” Meghan was born two years later. Her mother, Doria Ragland, worked as a makeup artist and later became a social worker. Her father, Tom Markle, had two teen-age children from a previous marriage—a daughter who was getting into witchcraft and a son with a water bed and a go-kart.
No anecdote is too minor to include. We learn that Tom once went to a restaurant with an imaginary parrot on his shoulder (“It was hilarious,” his first wife recalls), and that Meghan was born at 4:46 A.M. We learn the names of both the bird and the obstetrician. Morton’s accretion-of-random-detail approach gives a vivid sense of how life chez Markle differed from a royal upbringing:
Not only did Tom spend every waking minute with his daughter, in his own quirky fashion he tried to impose a little discipline on the somewhat laissez-faire household in order to protect his little “Flower.” Though he had always said to his son that if he and his friends wanted to smoke weed they should do so only in the house, this instruction changed on the arrival of the baby. On one occasion Tom Junior and his friends were smoking a spliff in the sitting room while Meghan was in the nursery crying. His father announced loudly that he was going upstairs to change her diaper. Shortly afterward he appeared in the sitting room carrying a full diaper. He joined the boys on the sofa, took a spoon out of his pocket and started eating the contents of the diaper. Grossed out, the boys fled the house. Only later did he reveal that he had earlier spooned chocolate pudding into a fresh diaper. It was his way of stopping the boys from smoking weed when Meghan was around.
As California gothic, this tops Joan Didion. It may also help explain why Tom Markle, Jr., recently published a handwritten letter in In Touch Weekly, calling his half sister a “jaded, shallow, conceited woman” and urging Prince Harry to back out of “the biggest mistake in Royal Wedding History.”
Tom, Jr.,’s childhood couldn’t have been as grotesque as the one his future brother-in-law suffered. For Harry, the family drama began in utero. Charles wanted a girl; Diana reportedly knew she was having a boy and didn’t tell him. William and Harry were both sent to boarding school at the age of eight. When Charles and Diana decided to separate, their mother broke the news in their headmaster’s study; when she died in Paris in the summer of 1997, they had not seen her in a month. Even after losing her, the princes weren’t able to trust their close relatives. Several years later, Charles’s brother Edward showed up at St. Andrews, where William was a first-year student, planning to pay the Prince’s friends to appear in a documentary.
Harry sympathizers will appreciate “Harry: Life, Loss, and Love,” by Katie Nicholl, who began her royal-journalism career, rather abruptly, in 2003. “I was a young show business reporter covering a party at the Kensington Roof Gardens in London when Harry, who was hosting his own soiree in the VIP room, invited me to join him,” she recalls. Over the years, she has turned out decorous chronicles of the monarchy’s younger generation. Her books tend to include revelations that are just interesting enough to qualify as scoops, without jeopardizing her network of well-placed sources. In order to reach the part in “Harry” where Harry and Meghan go on an early date at Soho House, one must endure an awful lot about his military career and charity work. “Harry’s search to find a wife and a meaningful role in his life has been long and at times arduous; a battle on many fronts. Yet it is only when we understand this battle that we can truly understand Prince Harry,” Nicholl writes, in a passage that could also characterize the experience of reading her book.
According to Nicholl, Harry has grown “from a sometimes wayward royal into an impressive young man.” In the years leading up to his relationship with Meghan, he lacked direction, a problem that Nicholl attributes to unresolved anger over his mother’s death. Even when Nicholl is attempting to make Harry sound forlorn, he comes off as slightly debauched. Nicholl writes, of an island vacation that Harry took with the family of a girlfriend, “In the evening the family would get together for ‘jolling’—drinking games on the beach, when they would knock back ‘volcanoes’—vodka shots with chili sauce. It was the sort of family holiday Harry had never experienced, and he was happier than he had been in a long time.” You feel for Harry, a little, but you’re not sure whether he’s craving love, or vodka.
Harry is a magnet for trouble that he never seems to have made, like the time when, at the age of twenty, he went to a birthday party dressed as a member of Rommel’s German Afrika Korps. The theme of the party, “native and colonial,” was awful enough, even without the swastika, but Nicholl isn’t one to question the upper classes. She mostly blames Harry’s protection officers. In 2009, a video emerged in which Harry could be seen calling one fellow-soldier a “raghead” and another “my little Paki friend.” Nicholl writes, “What should have been an exciting new chapter in the prince’s career was overshadowed by a race row, and once again, Harry was in the middle of it.” Well, yes.
It is also the bodyguards’ fault when, several years later, the tabloids print photographs of Harry, naked except for a leather necklace, playing strip pool with a group of young women in a Las Vegas hotel suite. Nicholl is so indulgent of Harry’s misbehavior that she seems not to recognize the implications of a “hilarious episode” recounted to her by the late Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, a Windsor family friend:
His friend Melissa Percy lives next door to me, and one night, I think it was after the royal wedding, Harry was over and they were having a party. Our roof terraces link and suddenly I heard a crash. Harry had jumped over the flowerpots and was on my terrace knocking on my patio door. Of course, I was a little surprised to see him and let him in. The next thing I knew he was kissing me, a proper French kiss! He traced a star on my forehead with his finger and said, “Close your eyes, beautiful girl, tickle, tickle, kiss, kiss,” and the next thing he was gone. I was rather taken aback to say the least, but that was typical of Harry—he is a lovable rotter.
You wonder, if Palmer-Tomkinson had lived to see the reckonings of 2018, what she might have made of that kiss.
Markle, whose father is of Dutch and Irish descent and whose mother is African-American, describes herself as biracial. She has been politically outspoken from a young age. “I watch in horror as both sides of a culture I define as my own become victims of spin in the media, perpetuating stereotypes and reminding us that the States has perhaps only placed bandages over the problems that have never healed at the root,” she wrote several years ago. In the fall of 2016, not long after it became known that Markle and Harry were seeing each other, Harry issued a statement condemning the invasion of her privacy. “It was explosive, unprecedented, and highly flammable,” Nicholl writes. (Howlers like this are another attraction of the genre.) It was certainly unusual for the Royal Family, in its sensitivity to political correctness. Acknowledging that Markle was his girlfriend, Harry excoriated the press, criticizing, in particular, “the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments.”
Obviously, this entailed a certain amount of hypocrisy, given Harry’s history and that of his family. For almost a century, Prince Philip has been making “gaffes” that would not be out of place at a U.K.I.P. rally; Princess Michael of Kent recently showed up for the Queen’s Christmas luncheon, which Markle also attended, wearing a blackamoor brooch, supposedly by accident. (“A Cheetah’s Tale,” the Princess’s recently published memoir of big cats in colonial Mozambique, includes such reminisces as “Of course it had been Rosemarie’s idea to borrow him from friends in exchange for one of her houseboys whom she wanted to learn English.”) Nicholl, for once, doesn’t take a particularly charitable view of Harry’s maneuver, suggesting that it made him look hotheaded. But you can see it as a sign of change, a productive channelling of Harry’s rowdy energy. The party prince finally did something cool.
“I wanted to give her a chance to think about it—to think if it was all going to be too awful,” Charles told reporters, of his decision to ask Diana to marry him just as she was leaving for a vacation. In 1981, this sounded like the stammerings of a self-satisfied toff. Today, when his sons voice similar sentiments, they appear sincerely apologetic. There is nothing tackier than being a royal, and the younger ones seem to know this. In the same video in which Harry mocked his “Paki friend,” he made a pretend phone call to the Queen: “Granny, I’ve got to go, send my love to the corgis and Grandpa.” He is aware that his own identity leaves him open to derision, which he tries to forestall with kitsch. “Is there any one of the royal family who wants to be king or queen?” Harry said, in a 2017 interview. “I don’t think so, but we will carry out our duties at the right time.”
On the occasion of Charles and Diana’s nuptials, the royal biographer Hugo Vickers wrote, in a diary entry, “The Royal Wedding is no more romantic than a picnic amid the wasps.” For centuries, royal weddings have been exercises in assortative mating, in which young people are matched, for the good of the line, with partners who are much like themselves. In 1959, because of a complicated procedural saga involving her maiden name, the pregnant Queen was warned that Prince Andrew, deprived of a patronymic, would be born bearing “the Badge of Bastardy.” She ended up allowing her descendants to be known as Mountbatten-Windsor. It’s interesting to think about how Markle would have been received had she fallen for William instead of Harry, the heir instead of the second son. She is nearly thirty-seven. Would the palace mandarins have made analyses of her fertility? Would they have urged the use of certain reproductive technologies, or forbidden others? Can a dynasty perpetuate itself on love instead of blood?
Privilege is not a good look these days, even for an institution based upon it. But the Windsors are evolving slowly. In March, Kensington Palace announced that, in an attempt to make Harry and Meghan’s wedding more inclusive, more than a thousand members of the British public—schoolchildren, charity workers—had been invited to Windsor Castle. While the ceremony goes on in the castle’s chapel, they will stand around outside for more than four hours. They have been told to pack their own lunch. ♦
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