‘We will carry out our duties at the right time.’ These are the words of a person who takes duty seriously, and he is not talking about the voluntary, reciprocal duties of a soldier: he means the role, never chosen, possibly loathed, of a prince of the bl
“I s there any one of the royal family who wants to be king or queen?” Prince Harry mused to himself. “I don’t think so, but we will carry out our duties at the right time.” This formidable quote appears in a pretty good feature on the prince, published Wednesday by Newsweek magazine. The once- grand publication, greatly diminished in ambition and resources, seems to have made clever use of its lingering prestige: it succeeded in following Harry around in his universe of philanthropy for the better part of a year, and was able to create an intriguing new portrait of the world’s most eligible bachelor. ( Although his abandonment of that particular title seems imminent.)
It is sometimes said that the strongest argument against monarchy is not that it elevates or enriches royal personages unjustly — the world is plenty full of inherited wealth and inequality of opportunity — but that it is too cruel to royalty to be morally acceptable. Royal status is said to trap a handful of more or less random people in an intolerable, torture-like way. It limits their destiny, handing them a package of onerous rules and duties at birth.
Limits, of course, are another thing the world is just chock full of. We all get stuck with a face, a family, a genome and a brain on our zeroth birthday, so maybe Harry should suck it up. But in the Newsweek piece you can witness him struggling with the requirements of the family firm.
In his military life, author Angela Levin observes, Harry saw some combat and had the experience of being treated as ( and accepted as) a commoner, more or less. But his career was ultimately restricted by his value as a target, which meant he posed a danger to his own comrades. He could never have become, say, a colonel by the traditional route.
His charity work with other exsoldiers is a way of continuing to resemble or act as an ordinary person, but he still sighs about the difficulty of buying his own groceries. This is obviously sincere. It’s Harry, the ginger cut- up, the cheeky changeling, so it doesn’t make you despise him. He has so much natural charisma that it seems certain he really would succeed in life if he were not the son of the Prince of Wales.
But he’ll never know. And what you notice on a second reading of his “no one wants to be king” quote is that he has truly taken the iron into his soul. “We will carry out our duties at the right time.” These are the words of a person who takes duty seriously, and he is not talking about the voluntary, reciprocal duties of a soldier: he means the role, never chosen, possibly loathed, of a prince of the blood royal. To a reader of our day, it is as though Harry has had a brief stroke in mid- conversation and briefly imagined himself in the 12th century.
What makes this strange is that Harry is now only fifth in line to the throne, and will, God willing, die much further from it. One can hardly imagine it while he is still so young and glamorous, yet it is all but inevitable: Harry’s nearcertain destiny is to become a dithering, half- forgotten older cadet royal, a figure like the Dukes of Kent and Gloucester. Like them, he is bound to drift ever further from the throne, and ever further from the public eye. Unlike those in the direct monarchical line, Harry will, as he ages, gain more freedom to spend money and carry on as he likes.
So there is not really much call for him to talk soberly of “carrying out our duties.” The “duties” of side-road royalty amount to things like appearing at the openings of aquariums and handing out trophies for unpopular sports, and even these are pretty easy to shirk. The elder Harry will be perfectly capable of having a trashy third wife or spending the whole year in St. Tropez without causing any alarm. Older citizens of the Commonwealth have seen an actual King become a dubious sponger/ clotheshorse living out his days in France.
Harry does not yet seem to have acquired the habit of envisioning his probable future. Perhaps he thinks people want reassurance about his sense of duty because his mother took so poorly to the idea. Perhaps he is tacitly speaking for his less- free brother, or implicitly castigating idiots who think his father will somehow be evaded in the succession without outliving the Queen. Maybe he is just sensible and educated enough to remember that the history of Britain ( and England) can be written almost entirely in the lives of “future kings” who weren’t: Edward the Black Prince, Henry VIII’s brother Arthur, James the Old Pretender, Frederick of Wales and Albert Victor.