Postcards from the Edge
Europe’s new generation of queens exhibits beauty, intelligence and modernity – and Miss Markle is part of that trend, says Mary Kenny
Everyone seems to think that Meghan Markle, Prince Harry’s fiancée, is a splendid young woman who will add to the lustre of the Royal Family, and that her slightly unorthodox background – divorced parents, mixed-race, American – will add interest and personality to the gene pool.
I couldn’t agree more. That she is both a beauty and bright – her father sent her to a high-achieving Catholic school – is all to the good. But she also fits very well into a pattern of trends among the royal houses of Europe, which, in recent decades, have been improving their gene pools with marriages to attractive, well-educated, often middle-class, young persons of poise and accomplishment.
A hundred years after Bolshevism terrified the world’s monarchists and prompted the toppling of so many thrones, popular European royalty seems to be thriving. And how good-looking so many of these modern-day royals are.
The Queen of the Netherlands, Máxima, is a sparkling Argentine who, like Princess Diana, devotes herself to charities for the homeless. The Queen of the Belgians, Mathilde, is an elegant and well-educated woman who is qualified in speech therapy. The Queen of Spain, Letizia, is a stunning beauty who was a television journalist. And the Crown Princess of Denmark, Mary, is an Australian from Hobart, whose father, John Donaldson, is an eminent Scottish professor of mathematics living in Deal with his second wife, the novelist Susan Moody.
Princess Mary herself is also a brainy mother of four, who met her prince at a pub in Sydney during a sailing regatta. She is hugely popular in Denmark and speaks the lingo like a native.
These youngish Euro-royals and princesses will get on like a house on fire with Meghan, who is decidedly in the same mould, as, of course, are Kate and William, with their young family.
Finland celebrated its 100th anniversary as an independent country in December. The first major piece of legislation it passed on leaving the Russian Empire was the prohibition of alcohol. Finland’s banning of liquor seemed such a good idea that the United States copied it.
It was also considered to be a great feminist victory: prohibition was a decisive feminist cause and temperance was linked to female suffrage. The (mainly Scandinavian) countries that were quickest to give women the vote were also the keenest on restricting or banning alcohol; and, in America, of the first eleven states that pioneered the vote for women, seven were prohibitionist.
The feminist theory was that men would be more ‘under the control’ of their wives if they weren’t out boozing in saloons with floozies, and this, to some extent, was true. But as everyone knows, the Mafia soon took over the bootlegging and, in Scandinavia, illegal moonshine boomed. Prohibition was eventually declared a failure, but Finland still has the highest alcohol taxes in the EU, and thus Finns often take to cruising across the Baltic to get legless at weekends.
Visiting Dublin today, ‘you could be anywhere in Europe or America’, reflects the art expert Homan Potterton, the retired director of the National Gallery of Ireland. It’s so sophisticated that Dubliners now have glossy hair and whitened teeth, and there’s a high standard of living. But Homan, who grew up on a farm in Ireland, feels it’s almost foreign to what it was.
‘Oh, give me some spit and sawdust and a pint of stout instead of this Chardonnay culture!’ he said, only half in jest.
Homan Potterton, 71, now lives in the Toulouse area of France, among a community of anxious expat Brits who wonder what the future will hold, post-brexit. He has recently published a most entertaining memoir, Who Do I Think I Am?, about his life in art and otherwise. He was involved with Sir Alfred and Lady Beit when their paintings were held to ransom by Bridget Rose Dugdale and the IRA. He was (unsuccessfully) interviewed for a job at the Courtauld by Anthony Blunt, who was ‘a horrible snob’ and was downright disdainful to Homan because he was a farm boy from Ireland (some communist!).
He has an hilarious description of a conversation he witnessed between Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and a Trinity College Dublin professor who had an odd speech mannerism – the academic had to speak each sentence twice. Homan found her ‘not nearly as fabulous and glamorous in the flesh as she was in photographs’. And he thought her rather too old for bare shoulders at dinner. The poor dear was only 48 at the time, which, by our oldie standards, is practically a spring chicken!