American Princess

by Leslie Carroll

  During the next two years, although William tried to shield his brother from the revelations of their parents’ infidelities, Harry grew up faster than any child, even one who lives in a metaphorical fishbowl, should have to do. To their immense credit, the princes never turned against either of their parents. They were raised not only with a keen sense of duty, but to suppress their emotions and carry on.

  Harry was only nine in July 1994, when his father was interviewed for ITV by Jonathan Dimbleby for the documentary Charles: The Private Man, The Public Role. For the first time, the Prince of Wales openly confessed to his adulterous affair with Camilla, insisting that he had really endeavored to be faithful to his marriage vows with Diana, “until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.”

  Harry was stunned. During a previous debate about the future of the monarchy, when the name of his father’s mistress was raised, the prince had innocently asked, “Who’s Camilla?” and was promptly ushered upstairs. Now the puzzle pieces were falling into place.

  The day after the interview aired, media pundits questioned Charles’s suitability to succeed his mother on the throne. NOT FIT TO REIGN, screamed the headline of the tabloid Daily Mirror. Shortly thereafter, the biography of Charles titled The Prince of Wales: An Intimate Portrait was published. In the wake of its release Andrew Parker Bowles divorced his wife and married his own longtime girlfriend.

  Then author Anna Pasternak published a tell-all, Princess in Love, in which James Hewitt purported to spill the beans on his affair with Harry’s mother, proving that Diana could not claim the high road over Charles when it came to fidelity. Diana had also been romantically linked to other men, some of them married. There were even humiliating leaks of harassing phone calls she’d made to various paramours.

  Diana was just desperate to be loved. Her parents had rejected her. Her husband had rejected her. Cruelest of all—but to their sons as well—was Charles’s admission in the pages of The Prince of Wales: A Biography that his father had forced him into marrying Diana and that he had never loved her.

  “Whatever love is,” indeed.

  Diana took revenge in November 1995, in an interview that was televised on Charles’s forty-seventh birthday. On the Panorama broadcast with Martin Bashir, she stated that she believed Charles was unworthy of the crown and not suited to be king. The Princess of Wales claimed that her husband was the first to stray, and that Camilla had remained in the picture throughout their marriage. In her soft, aristocratic voice, Diana looked up from uncharacteristically black-rimmed and heavily mascaraed eyes and fired a shot heard round the world. She told Martin Bashir, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”

  It was the first time that Harry, who was watching the broadcast from the living room of one of his Ludgrove history teachers, had heard about his mother’s extramarital relationship with James Hewitt and her battle with bulimia. Before that night, Harry had assumed Hewitt was merely his riding instructor and a mentor: a guy who encouraged his interest in all things military and bought him pint-size camo uniforms when he was younger. Diana had always been appalled by the insidious rumors speculating that Hewitt was actually Harry’s father; and while that was untrue, she did admit Hewitt had been her lover.

  The Queen had seen too much dirty linen about the royal family aired in the media, and Diana’s Panorama interview was the final straw. Toward the end of 1995, the monarch wrote to Charles and Diana individually, insisting they divorce.

  LONG BEFORE THE divorce decree came down, Diana had announced that she was retiring from public life—but ultimately she could never cease her tireless charitable and philanthropic efforts. This, in addition to her boys, were what was dearest to her heart, what made the spotlight worth the dark side of celebrity.

  Harry was only nine years old when Diana brought him and William to Passage, a homeless shelter near London’s Vauxhall Bridge, so they could see that just a few miles from where they dwelled in splendor and comfort at Kensington Palace, others were desperately in need.

  Diana also called attention to other issues that many at the time shunned as too frightening. She hugged AIDS patients. She campaigned to remove land mines from conflict zones, so there would be no more collateral damage to innocent children. Diana had compassion for children everywhere; and Harry too would ultimately embrace his mother’s lessons, developing the same easy relationship with, and love for, kids.

  On August 28, 1996, a little more than two weeks before Harry’s twelfth birthday, the divorce decree, called a decree nisi in England, was stamped. Diana would receive a settlement of £17 million. Harry’s parents being legally divorced was a rarity in the royal family at the time—although it would become an all-too-common event among the offspring of Elizabeth II, with three of her four children ultimately ending their first marriages. Princess Margaret’s marriage to photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones had also ended in divorce. But well into the twentieth century, divorced persons were considered such societal pariahs that they were not even welcome at court or permitted in the royal box at Ascot. Diana was also being formally stripped of her title as a Royal Highness. Harry and William’s mother would henceforth be styled simply as Diana, Princess of Wales. Retaining her royal title was important in terms of Diana’s social status and ability to raise funds for the comprehensive charity work and philanthropy that had become her raison d’être. Upset by the indignity, Prince William assured his mum that he would restore her HRH when he became king.

  Sadly, he would never be able to fulfill his promise.

  Hollywood Royalty

  On July 29, 1981, a heavily pregnant Doria Loyce Ragland and her husband, Thomas Markle, were among the estimated global audience of 750 million people who were glued to their television sets to watch the royal wedding of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer.

  How could Doria and Thomas ever have imagined that the second son born to the couple they were witnessing tie the knot would someday get down on one knee and offer a diamond ring to the daughter in Doria’s belly? Americans have better odds of winning the lottery.

  Six days after Diana became Princess of Wales, on August 4, 1981, Rachel Meghan Markle was born in Los Angeles, California. She inherited her wavy brown hair, freckles, and seductive dark eyes from her African American mother and the quirky kink at the tip of her nose from her Caucasian father.

  Meghan’s parents had a true Hollywood marriage, however; “meeting cute,” as the expression goes. In the late 1970s, Thomas Markle, a divorced father of two, was a lighting director for the popular ABC soap opera General Hospital at the Columbia/Sunset Gower Studios when he fell for Doria Ragland, who was temping as an assistant makeup artist. “I think he was drawn to her sweet eyes and her Afro, plus their shared love of antiques,” Meghan would later write in an essay for Elle UK magazine about growing up biracial. Thomas, then thirty-five, and Doria, twenty-three, married on December 23, 1979, at the New Agey Self-Realization Fellowship Temple on Sunset Boulevard. The six-foot-three-inch groom, wearing a tweed blazer and ginger-hued shirt, towered over his five-foot-two-inch bride. Doria looked like a schoolgirl in a modest white pleated skirt and short-sleeved blouse, with a coronet of baby’s breath in her hair. Their only child was born less than two years later.

  From the start, Meghan was adored in equal measure by both her parents. Doria’s nickname for her has always been Flower. According to his son from his first marriage, Thomas Jr., who moved back in with his father and stepmother when he was fourteen, Thomas Markle had been a workaholic—until Meghan was born. “Dad’s work took priority over everything, but she became his whole world. I remember when she came home from the hospital he had decorated the bathroom with little angels and fairies. He would keep holding her up to the mirror so she could see herself in his arms. The look on his face was priceless.”

  From the time she was a baby, it seemed pretty clear that Meghan was a “daddy’s girl.”

  Her half brother said, “
Dad would take so many pictures of Meggie that she must have been the most photographed baby in the San Fernando Valley. He must have about fifty thousand pictures of her stashed away somewhere. Meggie was a little princess long before she met Harry. She was her daddy’s princess.”

  The family lived in a neighborhood that Meghan described as “leafy and affordable.” On paper, a great place to raise their daughter. What the area wasn’t, was diverse. “There was my mom, caramel in complexion, with her light-skinned baby in tow, being asked where my mother was, since they assumed she was my nanny.”

  Meghan acknowledges that she was too young at the time to comprehend how difficult it must have been for her parents to endure such institutional prejudice—“what the world was like for them”—but they made it a safe and happy place for her.

  When Meghan was about seven years old, she coveted a particular boxed set of Barbie dolls for Christmas. The Heart Family consisted of a mommy, a daddy, and two kids. The perfect nuclear family, according to Mattel. But the sets were sold only in white families or black families. Meghan recalls not particularly caring at the time which set she received—just that she wanted one of them. In her immediate family, skin color had never been politicized. One day, her mother picked her up from her grandmother’s house, and “there were the three of us, a family tree in an ombre of mocha next to the caramel complexion of my mom and light-skinned, freckled me. I remember having the sense of belonging, having nothing to do with the color of my skin.”

  That Christmas morning, under the tree was a box wrapped in holiday paper flecked with glitter. Meghan unwrapped her gift to discover a black mommy, a white daddy, and a child of each skin color. Her father had customized the Heart Family for her.

  Thomas Markle had grown up in a small blue-collar town in Pennsylvania. In the late eighteenth century his ancestor Johann Markel picked up stakes in his hometown of Offenburg, which was located directly across the Rhine from Strasbourg in the German region of Baden-Württemberg. Johann emigrated to America, settling in Pennsylvania, home to countless German immigrants of the day—hence the term Pennsylvania Dutch, given to those who spoke their native language, Deutsch, or German, after their arrival in that part of America.

  Johann’s double-great-grandson Isaac—Thomas Markle’s great-grandfather—was a laborer in a lumber mill there. It was a hard life. Isaac’s ancestors died of pneumonia and cirrhosis of the liver. Meghan’s paternal grandfather Gordon, a veteran of World War II, worked on the railroads. The alteration in the spelling of their surname from Markel to Markle was purportedly due to an error made by a census taker.

  Doris, Meghan’s grandmother and the family matriarch, worked at the local five-and-dime. The Markles were God-fearing and upwardly mobile. After leaving school, Thomas had a job at the local bowling alley as a pinsetter, but that was never how he envisioned spending the rest of his life. His ambition was to be a stage technician. At the age of twenty, he moved to Chicago, where he worked on local theater and television productions, keeping his color blindness a secret from his bosses—one he transcended, eventually becoming an award-winning Hollywood lighting designer.

  Thomas was only twenty when he met a pretty redhead named Roslyn Loveless. She was already pregnant with Samantha, the first of their two children, when they married. Samantha’s brother, Thomas Jr., was born two years later. Embracing the free and easy hippie lifestyle of the 1960s, the first Markle family lived in the Chicago suburb of Hyde Park, tootling around in a battered blue VW van. But according to a family friend, Thomas hadn’t really been ready to settle down with a wife and kids. Within eight years the marriage was over. Roslyn moved to New Mexico with their children while Thomas headed for that iconic Hollywood sign. In the Los Angeles sunshine, he partied as hard as he worked.

  Cut to 1979, when Doria Ragland stepped into his life. Superimpose a heart around their close-up.

  Fade and dissolve to Great Britain during the Middle Ages. Madrigal music underscores our journey into the past.

  Whenever anyone marries into the British royal family, especially if the bride is a commoner from a nonaristocratic family, genealogists have a field day. For example, just prior to their wedding, Catherine Middleton and Prince William were discovered to be fourteenth cousins once removed through his mother and fifteenth cousins through his father. Their common ancestors go all the way back to the Plantagenets and the reign of Edward III, who ruled for fifty years, from 1327 to 1377.

  Kate and the beloved late Queen Mother share an ancestor as well. Australian art historian Michael Reed, who discovered the link when researching the provenance of a famous antique cabinet in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, said that it made sense for Kate to wear the Queen Mother’s scroll tiara when she married Prince William. “Both women share a great deal: Durham ancestry, the vast Gibside Estate, and the same famous cabinet.” Reed’s research revealed that the Blakiston Baronets and the Baronets of Conyers of Horden, Kate’s ancestors, were the wealthiest landowners in Northern England. They married into the Bowes-Lyon family so that they could share each other’s vast coal estates at Gibside. Kate’s direct ancestor, Sir Thomas Blakiston Conyers, also attended the funeral of his Gibside cousin Mary Bowes, Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne. Mary was the Queen Mother’s triple-great-grandmother, who at the time of her death in 1800 was thought to be the wealthiest woman in England.

  According to genealogist Gary Boyd Roberts, a researcher at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, Meghan and Harry are seventeenth cousins, thanks again to the prolific Edward III, who had nine children. According to Roberts, one of Edward’s myriad descendants was an ancestor of Meghan’s father, Reverend William Skipper, who arrived in New England in 1639—a mere nineteen years after the Mayflower disgorged its passengers in Plymouth.

  Their other common ancestors can be traced back to the fifteenth century: Sir Philip Wentworth, a knight and courtier who was the great-grandfather of Jane Seymour, third queen of Henry VIII; Mary Clifford, daughter of John Clifford, the 7th Baron de Clifford; and Elizabeth Bowes and her husband, Richard Bowes, son of Sir Ralph Bowes of Streatlam Castle and High Sheriff of County Durham, born in 1480—ancestors of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (née Bowes-Lyon).

  Although it’s a bit of a stretch, it’s possible that Meghan Markle’s roots, like Kate Middleton’s, might also be traced to Britain’s coal mines. Meghan’s double-great paternal grandmother Martha Sykes, who was born in a coal-mining region of Yorkshire, emigrated to America with her parents Thomas and Mary in 1869, during the reign of Queen Victoria. Their names are found in the 1870 census from the Mahanoy Township in Schuylkill County, a mining area of Pennsylvania, when Martha was just three years old. The family, which would eventually swell to five children, would have dwelled in a rough-hewn lumber shack with no indoor plumbing. Open sewers outside would have been magnets for disease. Thomas Sykes, who toiled as a collier, unfortunately did not achieve the better life he’d dreamt of when he left his homeland. Just eight years after his arrival on American soil, he died at the age of forty-three, leaving Mary a widow with five children.

  Martha Sykes survived her Dickensian childhood to marry into the Markle family. Her great-grandson Thomas is Meghan’s father, who grew up poor in Pennsylvania.

  Back on British soil, further digging into the roots of Meghan’s family tree reveals a slightly unpleasant hiccup, as the British might say. But it occurred ten generations ago, when Meghan’s ancestor Lord Hussey, 1st Baron Hussey of Sleaford, orchestrated a rather ill-advised plot to overthrow Prince Harry’s ancestor, King Henry VIII. As every schoolchild knows, Henry was fond of beheading people who crossed him. Such was the fate of Lord Hussey, whose lands, as well as his head, became forfeit to the crown.

  Hussey met a bad end, but his great-great-grandchild, yet another adventurous seafarer in Meghan’s genealogy, Captain Christopher Hussey, sailed from England in the 1650s and became one of the founding fathers of the island of
Nantucket. Another descendant of Lord Hussey—and an ancestor of Meghan’s—is Mary Hussey Smith, who became a major landowner in nineteenth-century New Hampshire.

  It’s also possible that Meghan may not be the first of her family to enter the hallowed halls of Windsor Castle, although she will certainly be the first to do so as a duchess rather than as a domestic. Family lore via a second cousin of Meghan’s father, former U.S. Air Force colonel Ken Barbi, holds that Markle’s triple-great-grandmother Mary Bird worked at the palaces. A search of royal household staff records did locate an M. Bird who was employed at Windsor Castle in 1856.

  Whether she had an ancestor who polished the royal silver or not, what is undeniable, however, is that Meghan Markle will be the first person to marry into the British royal family who is a descendant of slaves.

  During the same years Mary Bird may or may not have been working for Queen Victoria, and while other Markle ancestors were living in prosperity in New England, the other side of Meghan’s family were forced to live as someone’s property in rural Georgia.

  A run-down railway town almost due south of Atlanta, Jonesboro has some unusual claims to fame. The site of a Civil War battle, it was also where the author of Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, spent a good deal of her childhood.

  Richard Ragland was born into slavery near Jonesboro in 1830. That part of Georgia, Clayton County, was on the edge of the frontier. Revolutionary War veterans were encouraged to become pioneers by entering lotteries where they could win land. But it was rough, inhospitable territory, recently seized by white men from Native Americans—nothing of the moonlight and magnolias of Mitchell’s revisionist fantasy. For those who had the misfortune to live there, Jonesboro was a hardscrabble existence; even the local landowners were looked down on by Georgia’s coastal cotton barons.