How Meghan Markle will reinvent the royal family and the United Kingdom
>> Millions of Brits, charmed by Meghan Markle’s glamour and easy-going manner, are celebrating the divorced, mixed-raced American actress’ marriage to Prince Harry for making the royal family seem more relevant and modern and less stuffy.
Recent surveys by YouGov, an online research firm, and others show that about half of the United Kingdom’s 66 million people were indifferent to the royal wedding at Windsor Castle yesterday. Still, nearly two-thirds believe the Los Angeles native, 36, who achieved fame in the legal drama Suits, will be a breath of fresh air for the world’s most closely watched monarchy.
“There’s no denying that Markle is an amazing addition to the royal family,” said Ar’nie Krogh, a London relationship coach who specialises in interracial marriages.
“Compared to other royal families around Europe, the UK’s is still pretty conservative and stuck in the past. But we’re in the age of computers and the internet now and it’s time to do things differently,” Ms Krogh said. “Markle speaks to younger generations because of her background and career and charity work. However, she also manages to represent the old-fashioned princess ideal. She’s elegant. She has beautiful hair and skin.”
The British monarchy has been breaking through barriers since at least 1936, when King Edward VIII abdicated the throne so he could marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American socialite. In 1960, Princess Margaret — Queen Elizabeth II’s sister — married Antony Armstrong-Jones, a photographer. Although Armstrong-Jones went to the elite Eton boarding school, he was considered the first “commoner” to marry a king’s daughter in more than four centuries.
In 2005, when Elizabeth’s eldest child, Charles, Prince of Wales, married his longtime mistress Camila Parker Bowles it was the second marriage for both of them and it reflected the removal of another royal obstacle: that members of the monarchy should not marry divorcees. Charles, 69, is first in line to the throne.
The 2011 marriage of Charles’ son, Prince William to Catherine Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge, was another first: an ordinary courtship that started in a college dorm at St Andrews University.
“Support for Harry and Meghan is enormous,” said Hamish Shephard, the founder of Bridebook, one of the UK’s most popular wedding planning apps. “This is partly due to her celebrity. She’s much more relatable. She feels like a more familiar figure than other royals who are very dissociated from society. But she’s not a wallflower. She’s got her feminist and social agendas and I think a lot of people are really behind her for that.”
Other royal watchers and enthusiasts did not think Markle’s unorthodox background for royalty poses a problem for tradition-bound Britain.
Still, when Markle marries her prince and becomes a duchess she will set a new precedent: She will bring racial diversity to the British royal family. Doria Ragland, her mother, is black. Her father, Thomas Markle, is white. (Some historians believe that Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, was of African descent.)
In the UK, blacks make up 3% of the population compared to 13% in the United States, according to census data. About 2.2% of the UK population is mixed-race.
Trevor Phillips, a former UK politician who has chaired several racial equality groups and whose own daughters are mixed-race, cautions against reading too much into the meaning of Markle’s skin colour for the UK’s black community.
“The most significant thing [for black people] is how unremarkable her race is,” he said.
“Twenty-five years ago there’s no doubt that it would have been a massive drama, possibly even a crisis. Today, most white British people are completely undisturbed by her race. I suspect that more people in Britain are far more interested in the fact that she is an actress in a series that they have not seen than they are in her race.”
Baroness Floella Benjamin, an actress and member of the House of Lords who emigrated to the UK from Trinidad in 1960 as a 10-year-old, said that the UK is “moving forward” despite a torrent of racist abuse that Markle received on social media after her engagement was announced.
“There will always be people who have prejudices of one kind or another — The most important thing about Harry and Meghan is that they truly love each other,” she said.
Mr Philips added that around the time William was born (1982), he was working as a television producer and he pitched an idea for a sitcom about a prince who marries a black girl from London.
“It didn’t fly. Everyone thought: ‘Come on. That’s taking things a bit far, isn’t it?’” he said.