Will Markle bring in the sparkle to remould royals for the future?
It’s the question on all our lips as the big wedding day nears – even here in Ireland, where our fascination with the monarchy still rages
On July 29, 1981, I was in Dublin for the day. It was a Wednesday and I was getting married three days later. My father and I had driven from the North to collect my fiancé from the Liverpool/Dublin ferry. We were moving to Dublin and he had to visit the office of the firm he was joining when we returned from our honeymoon. Asked to come in on the Wednesday to sign some documents there, we also had to tidy up some other loose ends that day in relation to a flat that we were renting in Monkstown.
We arrived at the office in Lower Hatch Street and in he went. It was ages before he reemerged on to the street and I was worried that there had been some kind of hiccup with the job. But no, when he came out through the door, he was laughing to himself. Why had it taken so long? Because he had arrived at a crucial point in the wedding ceremony of Charles and Diana and every single person in the accountancy office was huddled around a small television in one of the back rooms. And while the royal couple took their vows, my man (who was English, as it happens) had to wait.
And now, almost 40 years later, that Irish fascination with the British royals shows no sign of waning. On May 19, at 12 noon, hundreds of thousands of Irish people will be glued to their televisions to watch the royal nuptials. For despite the well-rehearsed ‘800 years of oppression’, despite our pride in being citizens rather than subjects, despite our firmly held notion of separateness from our neighbours, when it comes to the British royals, there is on ongoing obsession with them in this country.
I’ve never quite decided if it exists because we see them as another species, so far removed from our everyday reality – all that pomp and pageantry, diamonds and tiaras – or if we watch them in the hope that they will ‘slip’, that they will reveal what lies beneath, and that we will then see that under that veneer, they are not so different from us after all. That that duality will show itself and that we will be either heartened or appalled by it.
Like discovering, as we did back in 2003 when an undercover reporter worked as a footman in Buckingham Palace, that the Queen pours out her Cornflakes every morning from a Tupperware container, and that Prince Andrew has a penchant for stuffed toys.
There’s a scene in the awardwinning series The Crown where a still-young Queen Elizabeth is talking to her uncle, then the Duke of Windsor, but who was briefly King Edward VIII until his abdication in December 1936.
‘We are half-people,’ he tells his niece, ‘ripped from the pages of some bizarre mythology; two sides engaged in some civil war that never ends, and which blights our every trans- action as brother, husband, wife or mother.’
Duty versus family. That’s what the Duke of Windsor in The Crown was trying to convey to the young Elizabeth. That clash between tradition and modernity. We’ve seen it so often, after all – with Edward and Mrs Simpson; Princess Margaret and her lost love, Peter Townsend; Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson and, of course, Charles and Diana.
And now, here it is again, with Prince Harry and the American actress Meghan Markle. It’s the fairytale princess thing alright – like Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco – but there’s much more to it than that. Because already, in the run-in to the marriage, royal tradition is once again being challenged.
For starters, when Meghan Markle walks down the aisle of St George’s Chapel in Windsor next month, will she be on the arm of her father, Thomas, or her mother, Doria? Tradition would dictate that it will be her father who will do the honours, but there has been speculation that Prince Harry’s bride wants her mother to accompany her and, let’s face it, with the grandson of Queen Elizabeth marrying a Tinsel- town actress, of mixed blood, and herself a divorcée, well, all bets may well be off when it comes to following tradition.
She’ll never toe the line, say some commentators. She’s far too much her ‘own woman’. She’s like Diana, say others – that’s what Harry sees in her. That’s why she’ll clash with the royal establishment.
And, yes, there’s a hint of Diana about Meghan, alright, but don’t forget Diana started royal life already an aristocrat and certainly displaying none of the sparkiness of Meghan during her own engagement and the early days of her marriage. When we think of Diana back then, it is the slightly bowed head and the shy look that first spring to mind.
Diana, nonetheless, did help to reshape the monarchy to some extent – but that happened largely through her death, rather than because of how she lived her life. Her
openness, her sense of fun, her public displays of love for her children were anathema to the other royals.
It obviously had a positive effect on her sons and how they now view the modern-day monarchy, but at the time Diana was regarded, inside the fold, as a loose cannon, not as a liberator.
Only in death did her power seep into the royal domain and start to shift the axis a little.
The worst week of the Queen’s reign was undoubtedly after Diana’s death in Paris, when no flag flew at half-mast on Buckingham Palace and the Elizabeth and her entourage remained ensconced in Scotland. She completely misread the mood of the British people – and they were, for once, prepared to punish their usually blameless Queen for it. Only by returning to London, addressing the nation about Diana, and doing a royal walkabout amid the floral tributes to her former daughter-inlaw did Queen Elizabeth manage to pull things back from the brink.
It’s about emotion. The royals don’t do public emotion. And certainly not when duty calls.
Princess Margaret, after all, was persuaded to give up the divorced Peter Townsend, a decision from which she never truly recovered, her biographers have argued, citing it as the thing that blighted her life.
And just look at how the monarchy found itself in disarray when, contrary to all that it stands for, emotion did win out over duty. That was in 1936 when Edward VIII said that he could no longer continue on as king without Wallis Simpson, the woman he loved, by his side. And he actually said it, out loud and publicly – the ‘l’ word.
That, of course, was the last time an American divorcée even attempted to get behind the royal velvet rope. And was rejected out of hand.
Meghan Markle, also an American divorcée (and with an established acting career to boot!), has, on the other hand, been welcomed with open arms. She is a vibrant, beautiful young woman, but let’s not pretend that she is entirely ploughing her own furrow within the royal household. So will she really leave her own identity behind?
Well, she has already given up her career, she has acquiesced by ditching her popular blog, and she also agreed to be baptised into the Church of England in preparation for her marriage to Harry.
She joins a complicated family having come from one herself. Perhaps that is what has helped to cement her love affair with Harry. With her own parents divorced from when she was only six, she also has a poor relationship with her father’s other offspring, none of whom will be in attendance at Windsor in five weeks’ time.
And while her family experience certainly doesn’t mirror that of her fiancé – for, as Tolstoy said, ‘every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ – nonetheless, their complex back stories must surely act as a bond between them.
So will she enter the royal goldfish bowl, or, as some have wondered, will the monarchy be changed by the arrival of Rachel Zane, Meghan’s feisty character from the hit series Suits?
Undoubtedly Meghan comes with a whiff of danger. So did Diana, some would argue. But she didn’t really. It evolved because of circumstances. Rather, Diana created that persona for herself as her marriage disintegrated, and she was, of course, as we all now know, a very unhappy, manipulative and complex young woman. Her greatest gift to the monarchy was to show her sons that it doesn’t have to remain static, that things can change, that you can show emotion, that you can do things differently in the modern world.
And it seems to have worked for William and Harry, both in how they conduct themselves generally, and in their public pronouncements about their mother, about mental health issues and about the importance of opening up about such matters.
When William chose a ‘commoner’ to be his wife back in 2011, it seemed like a new way forward for the monarchy. Kate Middleton was beautiful, with a pleasant and friendly disposition and they seemed to be the epitome of what a young, royal marriage should be. She was stylish and modern and like a breath of fresh air.
But there was never any whiff of danger about this nice, middleclass girl from Berkshire. You knew, from day one, that when it came to royal matters, Kate would toe the line.
And look at her now. Still beautiful in that oh-so-perfect way, but dressed so safely, so conservatively, so way beyond her 36 years.
Compare and contrast that ‘look’ and demeanour with that of Diana who died, hard as it still is to believe, at the very same age. Where’s the future queen’s style, where’s the personality, where’s the chutzpah?
Meghan Markle isn’t short of chutzpah. Nor indeed was ‘Feel-ip’, as Queen Elizabeth calls him, when she married her handsome prince back in 1947.
But despite all sorts of rumours over the years, and his famous politically incorrect gaffes, and although he struggled in the early years of his marriage to play second fiddle to his wife, Philip Mountbatten was defined by his royal blood; more royal, if truth be told, than Elizabeth herself. And so, despite himself, he has played the game, because he was an insider and always recognised that it was a game that must be played according to the rules.
Prince Harry, however, isn’t so taken with rules. He tends to do things his way. He’s grown, indeed, from a cheeky chappie into an independent, playful, and caring young man.
It’s easier, of course, when you are not the firstborn. William, as the older sibling and the man who will be king, has always carried the greater burden. Harry, essentially, is off the hook, much more able to live the kind of life he wants to live, the kind of life that his mother showed him he could have.
There’s nothing royal about Meghan, and while, despite everything, she won’t actually transform the institution that is the British monarchy, she’ll certainly give it a nudge here and there, and will leave her mark. And perhaps contribute to reshaping it for the 22nd century.
And what better way for her to start than to break with royal tradition and insist that is her mother who walks her down the aisle of St George’s Chapel when she marries into the royal ‘firm’ in a few weeks’ time.
Diana, the mother-in-law she never knew, the woman who stood in the very same chapel with baby Harry in her arms on the day of his Christening, would certainly approve.