‘Pothead’ matures into cultural revolutionary
THE news of the engagement between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is a glorious ending to a fairytale story – The Prince and the Showgirl come true. But it also marks the latest seismic shift in the development of the British establishment, its traditions adapting to a modern age.
Only a generation ago, this royal match – to a mixed heritage, American divorcee – would have been unthinkable.
When Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, it was considered crucial by the royal court that she be upper-class and virginal. We know how that ended. But Diana’s free, unbiddable spirit, her divorce and her death revolutionised the royal family – and put a rocket-booster under the glacial evolution of the British establishment.
While the dynastic days of the royal family intermarrying are gone, and it it isn’t unprecedented to marry an American – Edward VIII did Wallis Simpson – it is pretty rare. Then again Meghan’s foreign origins are hardly a problem. Harry is returning to a centuries-old tradition of finding a royal bride outside England.
What is unprecedented in British royal circles, however, is Meghan’s mixed heritage background. But as so often happens with society’s taboos, they are kept in place for centuries and then, suddenly, the dam breaks and everything is changed utterly.
As fifth in line to the throne, by law Prince Harry had to ask the Queen’s permission to marry Meghan if he wanted to retain his right of succession. But there is no legal – or earthly – reason the Queen could have said no.
Yesterday, the Archbishop of Canterbury indicated Harry and Meghan will be given special dispensation for a Church of England wedding.
Said Harry’s biographer Penny Junor: “That she is of mixed race might even be a bonus. It would show Harry, a senior member of the royal family, to be a modern man – not a precious, strange creature from another planet, which is how the royals are sometimes seen.”
Again, the royal family is playing catch-up with an increasingly multicultural Britain. Even the upper classes live in a less hermetically sealed world than one might think.
Harry has certainly embraced a modern, cosmopolitan lifestyle, for years ricocheting from one public relations disaster to another at home and abroad. Some of it was teenage behaviour, such as the cannabis smoking episode in Highgrove.
The worst adult embarrassment was being pictured cavorting naked in a Las Vegas hotel room in 2012.
But in recent years Harry, too, has undergone a transformation: from lost boy to bad boy to war zone pilot to doing charity work with war amputees.
And with his race barrier breaking engagement he has been applauded as the British royal family’s greatest revolutionary and indeed, one of its greatest assets. — Daily Telegraph with additional reporting by AFP