Royal reckoning

Don’t blame Harry & Meghan: change was inevitable at the House of Windsor.

What must it be like for Harry to regard his uncle Andrew?

What terrors must it evoke? Here is a sweatless ghost of royal future, haunting Ebenezer Wales with a grotesque morality play of privilege divorced from decency.

Second sons are nearly as notorious as seventh sons, especially as princes, and Randy Andy has been a case study in the curse of the spare heir at least since 1992, when his toe-suckingly tawdry split from the mother of his daughters made him the star player in the Queen’s annus horribilis, to 2019, when he headlined the sequel and endured the humiliation, deserved as it allegedly is, of a forced Andrexit.

Megxit is different. It is proactive, not reactive. Visionary might be over-stating the new type of private royal life that Prince Harry and Meghan have sought to carve out for themselves and their baby son Archie, but it is at least forward-looking and progressive. It will be, as the Queen put it in her letter of consent for their move to Canada, “a more independent life as a family while remaining a valued part of my family.”

Change is coming to the House of Windsor. The Queen is 93 and cannot live forever. Her death will close a chapter on the best-loved monarch at least since Victoria and the longest-serving ever. Republican and other anti-monarchical impulses in the Commonwealth are likely to surge in a receptive climate. Some princes will become kings, likely two in relatively short succession. Others, probably including Harry, will not.

The Queen’s son Charles, who will take the throne as a senior citizen, is better liked than he once was but is hardly loved, and at least he knows it. He has plans for a slimmed-down future royal family, and although he and the Queen have expressed desire that Harry remain an active part of this new royal core, the emerging wisdom is that Harry and Meghan jumped before they were pushed, or prodded, however gently, with a jewel-encrusted sceptre.

For Harry, whose destiny has always been wrapped in this ancient institution, today’s uncertain moment seems to have been a rare opportunity for self-determination, to set the terms of his own life rather than let the future kings — his father, Charles, and soon enough his brother, William — impose them.

The impulse is understandable on privacy alone. Harry lost his mother, Diana, to a car crash in Paris caused largely by paparazzi harassment, and is now suing media outlets over similar harassment of Meghan. He has complained that she was targeted by malicious propaganda during her pregnancy, and together they have launched legal proceedings against media outlets claiming breach of privacy, infringement of copyright, a campaign of lies, and phone hacking.

But support for their partial withdrawal into private life has not been universal. Criticisms and negativity have mostly involved an assumption of crass motive. People can trade on the family name in private business, for example, as Harry appeared to do last summer when he was caught on a bystander’s camera asking Bob Iger, chairman and CEO of Disney, for a job for Meghan.

“You know she does voiceovers,” Harry said to Iger in the reception line for The Lion King movie opening. “Oh really, ah!” Iger said with all the good manners of a rich American visitor talking to a British prince at a West End black-tie theatrical première. “We’d love to try.”

Both Harry and Meghan will have to contend with the fact that, when you start from a place of royalty, professional success tends to get an asterisk, even for widely admired and seemingly normal, well-adjusted royals like Peter Phillips, Princess Anne’s eldest child, who married a Canadian and generally keeps his head down.

Harry’s stakes are considerably higher, though, and it is the sheer boldness and peril of the whole thing that seems most attractive to those who are inclined to like him.

People can also trade on the family name in public philanthropy. The morning after the Windsors held crisis talks at the Queen’s Norfolk estate at Sandringham, for example, Meghan visited a women’s shelter in Vancouver. Was it a calculated move? Maybe. Does that make it any less worthy? Maybe not.

Harry could truly mess this up, and end up looking like a spoiled recluse who fails to give back as much as he receives from Britain and, now, from Canada.

He and Meghan seem to have decided the risk is worth it, and that they can create a new way of being royal.

Royalty is a spell of magic in the human experience, powerful but delicate, as Walter Bagehot, the great English journalist and early editor of The Economist magazine, wrote in his authoritative book The English Constitution.

He was comparing the British Monarch, which at the time of writing in the mid-1860s was Queen Victoria, with the French Emperor, then Napoleon III.

To the French, he wrote, the Emperor is not head of state, but the state itself. He embodies their virtue of equality, so the greater you make him, “the less, and therefore the more equal, you make all others. He is magnified that others may be dwarfed.”

The Queen, however, stands for the opposite principle. “We have voluntary show enough already in London; we do not wish to have it encouraged and intensified, but quieted and mitigated,” Bagehot wrote. The Royal Court “would do evil if it added a new example to our many examples of showy wealth — if it gave the sanction of its dignity to the race of expenditure.”

That still rings true today, as a modest old lady reigns her final years in a tumbledown palace in a glittering financial capital with an uncertain future at the centre of European commerce.

It rings true in British Columbia, where gossip has swirled over the ownership of the Sussexes’ lavish borrowed vacation property, and in Toronto, where they fell in love, have a network of friends, and seem likely to choose to live.

It is even reverberating down to Los Angeles, in the entertainment world, where executives see the vast potential in this proven successful actress who is now literally a Disney princess, according to reports that Harry’s pitch to Iger resulted in a deal, with her pay going to an elephant charity.

Change is coming to the royalty, and Harry has successfully made his first big play, winning for himself a “geographic balance” that, as he and Meghan put it, “will enable us to raise our son with an appreciation for the royal tradition into which he was born, while also providing our family with the space to focus on the next chapter, including the launch of our new charitable entity.”

That is a razor ridge to walk, however, being royal, charitable, and private all at the same time.

Pulling it off is like casting a spell. It’s a kind of magic.

“Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it,” as Bagehot put it more than a century ago, before the end of empire and the other previous crises that have caused rethinkings of monarchy, such as Edward VIII’S abdication in favour of love with an American.

“Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.”

ABOVE ALL THINGS OUR ROYALTY IS TO BE REVERENCED.