National Post (National Edition)
Prince Harry was the Most Valuable Bachelor
Saturday’s royal wedding is the beginning of a marriage, and the ending of an act in the drama of the House of Windsor. The unmarried Prince Harry had been, virtually by definition, the world’s most prized eligible bachelor. The maximum you can score in this category, the only realistic method of earning 100 points out of 100, is to be an unmarried Prince of Wales.
An unmarried King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a hypothetical possibility in the game, but such a personage would not be likely to show up at colonial or continental balls to sow wild oats under a transparent assumed name, as Edward VIII (and other Waleses) sometimes did. A king could never inspire ordinary womenfolk with dreams of a chance meeting as a prince might.
Much of the poignancy of Edward VIII’s situation was that he had been an unmarried and definitely heterosexual Prince of Wales who had also been lucky in drawing from the urn of Windsor genetics. He socialized enthusiastically for most of two decades — and then made a politically explosive mate choice that still defies understanding. Contemporaries, unable to accept the opacity of the human heart, speculated cruelly that Mrs. Simpson had used some sort of deviant sexual witchcraft to win him over.
Our less prepossessing Prince Charles endured a decade of awful scrutiny before settling on a first wife. Every year the papers yielded a new candidate for Princess of Wales, and in 1977 the Daily Express actually announced Charles’s imminent marriage to Princess Marie-Astrid of Luxembourg (who ended up an archduchess: there are fewer of those around than there are queens). Charles is now thought to have been stampeded by his male role models into proposing to Diana Spencer before things became too complicated. He had the chronic problem, partly created for him by his great-uncle Edward, that he could scarcely be in a room with a woman three times without setting off alarms in the press.
British newspapers had delicately ignored Edward VIII’s carrying-on with an American divorcee. But when he succeeded to the throne, his determination to face the new responsibilities with the support of a permanent partner increased, just as his private life became a constitutional matter of paramount urgency — one that the British public had, with a savage European war around the corner, been given no hint. It is possible that the intrusive nature of the modern British press is, in part, a legacy of the underappreciated abdication trauma.
Princes William and Harry experienced bachelorhood without the cruel intensity that accompanies being one step from the throne. William, as the heir apparent to the throne once removed, is the more tempting catch in a purely hierarchical sense. But I suspect most heterosexual women would agree that Harry seems like more fun and that he was fortunate to avoid the bulbous Battenberg pate. And, after all, little girls dream of being princesses rather than queens consort. Unlike the Duchess of Cambridge, Meghan Markle does not have the assurance of being progenitress of a line of kings, but such considerations are far out of fashion.
Overall, Harry may have been the MVB, the Most Valuable Bachelor, since Edward VIII. This is a little funny, since his destiny is to become a collateral royal — a monarch’s uncle or someone who is passing time on the way to it. As a rule, no one is so invisible as a prince or princess hitting middle age. Most readers under the age of 60 would have trouble naming our Queen’s royal aunt and uncles, the children of George V who did not come to the throne. Yet, Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, lived until 1974.
The joke about the Duke of Gloucester was that he was the “unknown soldier,” and this summarizes the fate of the collateral royal. They have always tended to be slightly pathetic, when not ultra-dissipated or downright monstrous. Their social position makes it hard for them to be ordinary apprentices — to be upbraided or tested or contradicted like a normal schmuck — in almost any field. They are steered into philanthropic endeavours for which they are doomed not to receive much credit. Many career options, perhaps most, are off-limits. The Earl of Wessex produced some good documentaries, but if his real dream is to make the lesbian vampire epic to end all lesbian vampire epics, we will probably never know.
Military careers were once fairly open to royal dukes, and one doubts there is any Commonwealth realm where the offspring of the political class can withstand a comparison of service records to that of the Royal Family. (In British military history, there is almost always a Duke of York around.) Harry was obviously serious about his army vocation, but he found that such service, at a moment when the job mostly consists of counterterrorism, is incompatible with any degree of celebrity.
And while military tradition might guarantee that young “Cornet Wales” was treated just as abusively at Sandhurst as his comrades, the social challenges that a royal personage presents for his commanders can only grow more awkward as his career proceeds. So ... what do you do? Retire from the army and invent a quasiOlympics for wounded soldiers, perhaps. No mean way to spend one’s time.
WILLIAM, AS THE HEIR APPARENT TO THE THRONE ONCE REMOVED, IS THE MORE TEMPTING CATCH IN A PURELY HIERARCHICAL SENSE. BUT I SUSPECT MOST HETEROSEXUAL WOMEN WOULD AGREE THAT HARRY SEEMS LIKE MORE FUN. — COLBY COSH