Although Garter’s actions were on behalf of the Queen, and it is she who ultimately prevented Meghan and Harry from using the word royal in their branding, Her Majesty nevertheless had been intent on doing her utmost to paper over as many cracks as she could, despite always putting the good of the Crown before all personal considerations, as she has done time and again during her long reign.
In the past, there had been occasions when Elizabeth II’s personal choices were stark, such as when she accepted the advice of Sir Winston Churchill to retain the surname of Windsor for the dynasty in preference to Mountbatten, and in so doing created an issue between herself and Prince Philip which took the remainder of the decade to resolve. Or when she remained resolutely neutral during Princess Margaret’s marriage crisis over Group Captain Peter Townsend, which caused problems between her and her sister. Harry should have appreciated that his grandmother was no pushover, but possibly neither he nor Meghan understood the limitations to which they were subjected where exploiting their royal identity was concerned.
Despite being no cinch when the family trespasses on hallowed royal turf, the Queen nevertheless has been an extremely indulgent mother and grandmother. It is likely that this is what allowed Harry to believe that his and Meghan’s extraordinary demands would succeed. She has been the antithesis of the controlling parent and grandparent. Her critics would say that she has been too understanding. Had she been less so, she would have had less to understand.
Of all the royals present at that meeting in January 2020 when she, Charles, William and Harry were deciding how best to proceed, the Queen was the most inclined to take a lenient view, aiming for the couple to achieve as many of their objectives as would be realistically possible without damaging the monarchy - even if that meant recalibrating customs.
Her attitude was reflected in the statement she issued at the end of the meeting:
“Today my family had very constructive discussions on the future of my grandson and his family.
“My family and I are entirely supportive of Harry and Meghan’s desire to create a new life as a young family. Although we would have preferred them to remain full-time working members of the Royal Family, we respect and understand their wish to live a more independent life as a family while remaining a valued part of my family.
“Harry and Meghan have made clear that they do not want to be reliant on public funds in their new lives.
“It has therefore been agreed that there will be a period of transition in which the Sussexes will spend time in Canada and the UK.
“These are complex matters for my family to resolve, and there is some more work to be done, but I have asked for final decisions to be reached in the coming days.”
Understandably, the press examined the statement from all angles, including a few that have never existed. In reality, Meghan and Harry were sailing into uncharted waters. There was talk of them ‘abdicating’, and they were linked to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
There were indeed parallels between Harry and Meghan Sussex and David and Wallis Windsor. Both Meghan and Wallis were American and both were divorcees. Harry and his great-great-great uncle did indeed throw over their royal positions for the love of a woman. Both of them were compulsively and obsessively in love with the women who became their wives. Both were co-dependent upon their love objects, as indeed were David’s brother and Harry’s great-grandfather King George VI upon Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, later Queen Elizabeth, then the Queen Mother. This extreme co-dependency was a feature of several of the Hanoverian royals over the centuries, including their common ancestor King George III and his son the 1st Duke of Sussex, who was Queen Victoria’s Uncle Augustus. He had two unsuitable, indeed invalid, wives, the first being Lady Augusta Murray, the mother of his two children, and the second, Lady Cecilia Buggin. Ever the romantic, Queen Victoria took pity on her uncle and his invalid second wife once she became queen, and since it was not possible to revoke the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 and make Aunt Cecilia Duchess of Sussex, she instead made her the Duchess of Inverness in her own right. This was truly astonishing, and showed to what extent Victoria was both a romantic and flexible, an attitude some courtiers believe Queen Elizabeth II inherited from her great-great-grandmother.
There the similarities between the Sussexes and the Windsors end. Meghan wanted to marry Harry from the word go, and ensured that she did by being the living embodiment of everything he had ever wanted in a woman. Wallis never wanted to marry David and did all she could to discourage him from marrying her. Meghan is from of a petit bourgeois background while Wallis was from an upper class Southern family. Wallis valued the royal way of life to such an extent that she never wanted to marry the King but to remain his mistress so she could remain a part of the royal system. Meghan’s disregard for the royal system was evident not only in her conduct while she was living in England, but in the manner of her departure. Meghan is essentially a lone wolf with social skills, while Wallis was genuinely a people person. In her own way, Wallis was a romantic, although one with a wide and frankly acknowledged streak of pragmatism. Her uncle Sol Warfield was one of the richest men in America and she was his sole heiress until she threatened to divorce her first husband, a wife-beating alcoholic named Win Spencer. Uncle Sol warned her that he would cut her out of his will and leave his money to a home for fallen women if she became the first Warfield to divorce. She divorced, he left his $2.5m estate as threatened. Although Wallis loved beauty and had style, her actions show that when push came to shove, she chose the heart over the bank. Her behaviour, once David abdicated, also showed that she was indeed the ‘good and honest woman’ Chips Channon labelled her in his famous diaries. Notwithstanding her genuine horror of finding herself living out her worst nightmare as the Duchess of Windsor, she put a brave face on it, was a loyal and devoted spouse to the man she never wanted to marry, created a truly regal lifestyle for them in France and the United States, maintained a dignified silence publicly about the reality of her life, and used to laughingly remark privately how taxing it was to be one half of one of history’s greatest romances.
Many of the comparisons between Harry and the Duke of Windsor are fanciful, born of ignorance or miscomprehension. While it is true that both men were prone to depression and had mental health issues, the Duke of Windsor was the archetypal royal. There was never any doubt that you were in the presence of a former king when you were around him. By the time I met him he might have been a doddering old bore, but he was always regal, immaculately turned out, and lived according to royal etiquette. There was nothing bovverish or oikish about him, which is certainly not true of Harry. The former king would no more have played strip poker in Vegas than have sex in the middle of the Mall. He used to sit on the edge of a room and people would be brought over to him, one by one, to talk with him until he indicated that he had had enough and was ready for someone else. There is nothing regal about Harry. This, of course, has been one of his charms. There certainly has never been anything stylish about him. He always looks as if he’s just crept out of bed or is about to head into it.
I knew the Duke and Duchess of Windsor slightly when I was a young girl in New York and they were coming to the end of their lives. She was a game old bird while he was rather pathetic, with an air of sadness, indeed defeat, about him. Nevertheless, he was very dignified. I knew a very great deal about them through family connections. My great family friend John Pringle, founder of the iconic Round Hill Hotel, where Harry and Meghan stayed when Tom Inskip had his wedding reception there, had been the Duke’s ADC during the war and was full of stories about the Windsors. My stepmother-in-law, Margaret Duchess of Argyll, was a longstanding friend of theirs. My sister-in-law Lady Jean Campbell, whose grandfather Lord Beaverbrook had been one of the Duke’s strongest supporters when he was king and wanted to marry Wallis, gained a wealth of information about them from her grandfather. Had Edward VIII followed the Beaver’s advice, he would have remained on his throne and Wallis would have become either Duchess
of Lancaster or Queen of England. However, he was so terrified of losing her that he preferred to give up his throne rather than be separated, then ironically had to endure a separation of six months to validate her divorce.
The single greatest difference between the Sussexes and the Windsors was that Wallis never wanted to marry David while Meghan wanted to marry Harry from the outset. Wallis never wanted to be anything but maîtresse-en-titre while Meghan wanted to become a royal princess and duchess. Wallis loved her husband and wanted to remain Mrs Ernest Simpson while being the King’s mistress. Rather than losing a fortune to marry a man for love, the way Wallis did, Meghan has ensured the acquisition of wealth through a series of dextrous manoeuvres, some commercial, others personal, but all with her businesswoman’s eye firmly fixed on the baseline. Wallis’ idea of hell was the life she ended up with, saddled in perennial exile with a man-child (whom she and Ernest used to call Peter Pan), condemned for a lifetime to have him worship at her altar. Meghan, on the other hand, has encouraged Harry to embark upon a life of semi-exile and seems very comfortable with the pedestal he has put her upon.
Contrary to popular belief, Wallis did everything in her power to keep Edward VIII on the throne, but he was so ‘insanely in love with her’, as his cousin Prince Christopher of Greece put it, that he recklessly threw away his crown rather than run the risk of being separated from her. Knowing the sacrifices he had made out of love for her, Wallis spent the rest of David’s life responding to a love she really didn’t feel, though, with the passage of time, she did develop a deep affection for him. Wallis also had sufficient humility to appreciate that her way was not the only or necessarily the best way. She was no egomaniac. She recognised that the royal world was a richer, more ancient, layered and textured one than she was used to in America. She did not believe that she had much to teach an older and more established society than hers. She appreciated that they had much to teach her, and set about learning. Margaret Argyll used to recount how Wallis went from being a relatively unsophisticated newcomer in the early 1930s to one of the world’s most sophisticated women by the end of the decade. She became the world’s leading hostess, her dinner parties a byword for taste, style, and elegance. No one entertained like the Duchess of Windsor.
For all their differences, Meghan and Wallis have one or two defining features in common. Wallis was and Meghan is an obvious, upfront woman on the make. Wallis did and Meghan does exult in luxury. Materialism and an awareness of quality have mattered to them more than they matter to most women. Wallis was honourable enough to pay the price for her position. She understood that her prince had given up a lot for her. If Meghan truly believes her comment that her ‘love for Harry has made possible’ his stepping back from the royal way of life, she has not only failed to appreciate the tremendous sacrifices he has made for her, but she hasn’t even listened to what he has said. Harry stated in front of hundreds of people at the Chelsea Ivy how ‘saddened’ he was to give up his links with the military and indeed his country, family and friends. Can she truly believe that she has liberated him from bonds which were not shackles but valuable moorings to a past life which, for all its imperfections, was a glorious one? Can she genuinely accept that there was no sacrifice in substituting a splendid position laden with possibilities for doing good, with one full of uncertainty?
Meghan’s flattened affect where the sacrifices of others are concerned is one of the many concerns the royals have for Harry’s future with her. They understand his predicament even though they do not like or approve of it. They appreciate that they are powerless to intervene, that this is one river which must flow into the ocean, and any attempts to divert it might result in an unfortunate outcome. For that reason, William has tried to mend fences insofar as it is possible for him to do so, though I am told that there is now so much water under the bridge that it is unlikely that the brothers will ever again be close the way they used to be. Charles, I understand, is utterly perplexed as to what he can do to help, having moved mountains for Meghan, only to have them come crashing down on him. It was he who managed to get for Meghan, a divorcee like him, what he could not achieve for himself; namely a church wedding conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury at St. George’s Chapel.
A royal told me that the Queen has been more relaxed than anyone else, ‘possibly because she realises that if things work out for Harry and Meghan, they will have broken new ground where other junior royals can follow, and if things don’t (work out), it won’t be the end of the world. The monarchy has survived far greater threats.’
Already, it is evident that the British public have accepted that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are detached. They have bidden them farewell, sometimes with regret, sometimes with relief, sometimes with impatience, but with no perceptible difference to anyone’s life. As such, they’re now in a different category from the rest of the family. ‘In my view,’ the royal said, ‘they’ve already been downgraded in the [British] public’s eyes from royals to celebrities.’
If this is the case, Harry and Meghan’s position is not as enviable as optimistic PRs might think it is. There has been talk that they will be able to earn $100m per annum, maybe even more, that they are a billion dollar brand, that they could become a second Barack and Michelle Obama or even, God forbid, a variation of Tony Blair. This is to ignore some basic facts while misinterpreting how status works at the highest levels of society. Harry has never been the President of the United States, nor has he been a Prime Minister like Blair, who might have deceived Parliament into entering a war which made him popular in the United States and the Middle East, but earned him the hatred of millions of Britons once they saw through his lies. If Tony Blair’s trajectory is anything to go by, Harry and Meghan had better strike while the iron is hot. Tony Blair’s heyday lasted for only a few years. His money-making glory days were wrapped up with his reputed prestige, and once that evaporated he became a busted flush, reviled in so many quarters of society and parts of the world that his utterances are treated with contempt, his presence an embarrassment to such an extent that I know of many people who have declined to meet him (yours truly included), and even more who refuse to be in the same room as him (yours truly again), much less the same photograph. Nor was Tony Blair’s politics the only thing that destroyed his reputation (although they did not help). It was the perception of him as a narcissistic, hypocritical, messianic, virtue-signalling money-grubber that buried his reputation. Hectoring people with one hand while coining it in with the other is not the ideal way to gain or retain respect. Once enough of the public lose respect for a public figure, their earning potential begins to wane. This is something Meghan and Harry would do well to note, for none of us who wish them well wants them to go the way of Blair, whose story really is a cautionary tale.
Even so, Tony Blair did lead a country, and did do so for an extensive period of time. He won three general elections and might well have gone down in history as a great Prime Minister had he not deceived Parliament and the British people into the war with Iraq which no one in Britain but he wanted. Even then, he might well have become an eminent retired statesman had he not shown himself to be the acquisitive hypocrite he is now regarded as being. Nevertheless, Blair was, if only for a short while, respected. In that interval, he was able to capitalise upon his reputation, his former position, and his undoubted experience, to make a fortune.
Harry, on the other hand, has never led a country. He has never been elected to any position. He has no experience as a leader. He was only ever a minor ranking army officer who happened to be the second son of the heir to the British throne. Yes, he had star quality. Yes, he was a revered figure until his marriage. Yes, he had a great position, but he was never going to be number one, much less President of the most powerful nation on earth or Prime Minister of Great Britain. Moreover, he walked away from his position to seek his fortune in the great bazaar of commerce. In doing so, he lost the most prestigious part of his position, his transcendence above
the fray. As Garter put it, you either are or you aren’t.
It remains to be seen, now that Harry and Meghan have stepped back from their royal roles, whether their frank commercial take on life will enhance or demean their earning capacity. Certainly, they were forthright in their announcements and their pitches, as was demonstrated by that famous clip of Harry nobbling Disney CEO Bob Iger at the Lion King premiere. Harry not only abandoned well-bred reticence, but he replaced it with a hustling technique that even Trevor Engelson would find enviable. ‘You do know she does voiceovers?’ Harry unexpectedly asked an astonished Iger, who spluttered, ‘Ah, I didn’t know that,’ before Hustling Harry zeroed in for the kill saying, ‘You seem surprised. She’s really interested.’ A clearly embarrassed Iger then rolled over, saying, ‘We’d love to try. That’s a great idea,’ while his wife, the journalist Willow Bay, looked on with a face like thunder. Harry and Meghan had clearly planned their ambush, because they then turned their attention to the director Jon Favreau, with Harry declaring, ‘Next time anyone needs extra voiceover work, we can make ourselves available,’ while Meghan stated, ‘That’s really why we’re here - it’s the pitch.’
It worked too. Disney signed a deal with Meghan to do voiceover work in return for a donation to the charity, Elephants Without Borders. Whether she received expenses, possibly running into the hundreds of thousands, has not been announced, but she did the work prior to departing for Canada in November 2019. When the programme aired in April 2020 the reviews were mixed, with an unfortunate proportion accusing her of being over-eager to please or being just on the right side of annoying, though a minority found charm in her performance.
Success or failure, when the Royal Family found out that Meghan and Harry had not only used an official engagement to pitch for work, but had successfully concluded negotiations behind their backs, they were furious, accusing the couple of entering into contracts ‘with firms like Disney’ without following procedure. Meghan was unrepentant. She told friends that her ‘work with Disney is far from over. The voiceover is just the beginning and there’s (sic) more collaborations to come. Meghan has no regrets and the sky’s the limit.’
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