The US won’t accept HRH President Meghan
This column has worried before that the Duchess of Sussex is riding for a fall in the way she wields her title in America. Apparently, she has taken to offering her opinions to media outlets there, using that name.
It is true that many Americans are interested in British royalty, often exaggeratedly so, but this does not mean that they actually want a monarchy or aristocracy back. They have flourished without either for nearly 250 years. Right from the start, the Founding Fathers gave a great deal of thought to this. The United States Constitution declares that: “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.”
That is not, in itself, a problem for Meghan since not even she is suggesting that Americans should ennoble her. But the relevant passage of the Constitution continues as follows: “… no person holding any office of profit or trust under them [the states] shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept any present, emolument, office or title of any kind whatever, from any king, prince or foreign state”.
This surely clashes with the Duchess of Sussex’s possible political ambitions. She could not become the president of the United States, or even a humble congresswoman, if she held her current title. Worse still, from the point of view of US law, she is Her Royal Highness – a standing declaration that she owes allegiance to a foreign state and a king (or queen). She is likely to keep this title unless she and Harry divorce. Her husband, of course, is His Royal Highness, so I do not see how he could be the First Gentleman if his wife were to enter the White House: he, too, would be “accepting an office of profit or trust” (the office of the First Lady is federally funded).
We are all familiar with the expression “Hollywood royalty”, but I do not believe the United States of America could have a genuinely royal president, any more than the Archbishop of Canterbury could become pope. If she does seek the nomination, I hope Meghan will drop the HRH and the name of my home county, which have never suited her, and run as plain Markle.
It is highly unusual for former
bosses of the National Trust to break ranks, however privately critical they may be of current trends, so I am interested by a recent intervention, not previously picked up in the press, by the NT’S former chairman, Sir William Proby.
Sir William was speaking at the annual general meeting of the Historic Houses Association (HHA), the trade union, you might say, for great country houses open to the public which are owner-occupied. Being private, they are not charities, and so receive far fewer tax advantages and grants. Sir William is the HHA’S patron.
Normally emollient, Sir William was outspoken about the National Trust. He quoted Henry James: “‘Of all the great things that the English have invented ... the most perfect, the most characteristic is the well appointed, well administered, well filled country house.’ It is a sobering thought that we here account for so much of the privately owned part of this great heritage,” Sir William added.
HHA responsibility for that heritage had grown greater, he said, “since that great institution, the National Trust, which did so much to save our great houses in the period before and after the war to the benefit and enjoyment of millions of our fellow countrymen and women seems to have turned its back on this part of the national heritage, apparently wishing to portray their houses as monuments to slavery, exploitation and inequality.”
These are strong words, not lightly used. They imply that the trust, in part at least, is not fulfilling its charitable purposes: it is disowning what it owns, although it knows it cannot, by law, sell the houses off. Sir William’s argument implies that the people who run the trust no longer love this most famous aspect of its patrimony. The trust’s position is almost as if the Royal Horticultural Society were to attack flowers, or the RSPB were to announce that birds are a real nuisance.
Sir William deserves to be listened to. The National Trust is currently in the (secretive) process of appointing its new chairman. Whoever it chooses, it must be someone who truly cares about the great houses it once did so much to rescue. If you don’t love one bit of our heritage, you probably don’t much care for the rest of it – gardens, landscapes, wild places, farms, coastline – either.
For some time, a cottage along a
farm track where I like to walk has displayed the following board, painted in crude red letters beside its fence, “SLOW! BLOODY PISSED OFF ASKING NICELY”.
Passing the place on foot last week, we noticed standing beside the placard one of those Remembrance Day silhouettes of a Tommy which have become very popular in recent years. It was surrounded by a tiny field of poppies.
My immediate reaction was to react prissily against this juxtaposition. Wasn’t it rather insulting to our war dead to commemorate them next to such an unceremonious message?
On further reflection, however, I realised my objection was ridiculous. The original hand-painted notice was perfectly in the tradition of the private soldier from these islands which runs back to Shakespeare’s Henry V and beyond – blunt, humorous, disrespectful.