THE PICTURE OF A MAJESTIC REVOLUTION
It’s an image of equality that once would have been unthinkable. Here, STEPHEN GLOVER celebrates the royals’ glorious ability to adapt – but warns the ferociously private parents: tread carefully on tradition
AT THE heart of Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard there is a dictum delivered by the hero, a Sicilian prince, that may sound paradoxical: ‘Everything must change so that everything can stay the same.’
It is a maxim that might be applied to our own Royal Family, which with the birth of Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor has undergone a change that will define it for the next half century and beyond.
The main agents of transformation are of course the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who choreographed Archie’s birth almost entirely according to their own preferences, and with scant regard to royal protocol.
Some will see this change as a breath of fresh air; others as a dangerous and self- centred subversion of longestablished and hallowed ways of doing things. I find myself thinking that both judgments are true.
But the change has not just been orchestrated by the forward-looking young couple. The Queen, too, has embraced it for reasons which appear to be similar to those of Lampedusa’s hero.
She knows that, if the Royal Family is to survive and prosper in the 21st century, it must adapt. Fate has offered it a chance to do so in the shape of Archie, the son of an American whose mother is black. He is seventh in line to the throne, but much higher up the pecking order in terms of his importance to ‘the Firm’.
Three days ago, Harry and Meghan posted a picture on their Instagram account (swiftly followed by its official release by Buckingham Palace), which they use to shape and burnish their profile for their 7.5million followers and the wider world. Unlike previous members of the Royal Family, they hope to control their own image rather than entrust it to the vagaries of the media.
This photo, which has already appeared on thousands of websites around the globe, catches a deeply symbolic moment. Meghan, the adoring mother, cradles Archie in her arms. Very little can be seen of him because, as during his Press photocall, his tiny head is enveloped in a white cashmere hat.
On Meghan’s right stands her mother, Doria Ragland. It is a scene of multi-racial and multigenerational harmony. The Queen, wearing a blue cardigan and looking a little as though she has wandered in out of the Fifties, smiles at Archie with an openness and warmth which will have moved all but the flintiest of hearts.
NEXT,in the background stand Harry, the loving and even awed father, and a beaming Prince Philip. Once the victim of supercilious racist aspersions as ‘ Phil the Greek’, and himself having once been guilty of racially stereotyping the Chinese as ‘slitty- eyed’, the 97-year- old Duke is an integral part of this refashioned Royal Family.
None of this racial amity will have seemed remotely strange to the Queen, as she has devoted herself to the Commonwealth during her reign, and made many friends in Africa and elsewhere, not least the great Nelson Mandela.
She was in Kenya with Prince Philip in February 1952 when she was told that her father, George VI, had died.
The new Elizabethan age began in Africa, and it is slowly drawing to a close with the Queen’s grandson married to a woman of partly African-American descent.
How far she and this country
have travelled since that distant day! In 1952, in the death throes of the British Empire, it would have been unimaginable for a member of the Royal Family to have married a black or mixedrace person. Black people in Africa, or indeed this country, were too often expected to be servants or, if educated, lawyers or docile politicians.
There had been uproar a few years earlier when Seretse Khama, the English-educated member of the royal family in what later became Botswana, married Ruth Williams, a middle-class English woman. The Labour government of the time even tried to stop this inter- racial marriage. It nonetheless went ahead, and Khama eventually became the president of his country.
It’s only a picture, you may say — and that is true, but it is one that tells a crucial story about enormous change in our country.
Many families in Britain could offer themselves as exemplars of racial concord but not, until now, the Royal Family.
A visitor from Mars presented with this photo might observe the unstuffiness of these people — their normality and ease with one another. Here is a version of the Royal Family attuned to modern Britain.
These are values which Harry and Meghan (the latter I suspect being the prime mover in this endeavour) wish to project in their own way, perhaps not fully aware of the magnitude of the historic changes they have ushered in. Archie is unwittingly a standard-bearer of something new.
His parents plainly yearn to escape what they regard as the stultifying bonds of tradition. Their plan was for the baby to be born in their home, Frogmore Cottage in Windsor, rather than at some swanky clinic near Harley Street, attended to by Sir Humphrey This, or Sir Lancelot That.
As it happened, Meghan ended up in what is believed to be a private London hospital, though this has not yet been confirmed. Nor have the identities of the doctors present at the birth been revealed, or thanks publicly proffered, as is normally the case with royal births.
The very name ‘Archie’ — he will not be christened ‘Archibald’ — is apparently intended to convey a lack of pomposity. It may even suggest a certain raciness. There is a P. G. Wodehouse character called Archie Moffam, who has some of Bertie Wooster’s amiable but unsteady qualities, and is a bit of a card.
Although Archie would be entitled to use the courtesy title of Earl of Dumbarton, Harry and Meghan want him to be known as homespun Master Mountbatten-Windsor. However, this apparent act of humility may only be temporary, and he will assume a title when Prince Charles becomes king.
Few people, I think, would cavil at these attempts by Harry and Meghan to sidestep some of the cumbersome paraphernalia of royal life, though I personally would like the doctors to have been publicly thanked, as is the custom. Still, I can see it is hardly a big deal.
In many ways, the fresh approach of the young couple, and their desire to forge their own path, are welcome. The trouble is that there seem to be more motives at play than just a desire simply to do things their own way and avoid the circus that usually attends royal births.
During the past week we have had glimpses of other agendas. In Harry’s case, his deep wariness of the Press has surfaced again. Meghan seemingly shares some of that — though as a former actress
in an American TV drama she knows how to cheerfully use the media when it suits her — but her preferences appear to be more shaped by a desire to be appreciated in her home country.
There is no denying that over the past few days there have been some bizarre aspects to the stagemanaging of events. In some cases it would seem that there has been deliberate subterfuge.
For example, having been informed by Harry or his officials, Buckingham Palace released a statement at 1.49pm on Monday to the effect that Meghan was in labour. In fact, she had already given birth eight hours earlier.
Perhaps the misinformation does not matter very much, though it is bound to be annoying for journalists, who are used to fairly straight dealing with royal spin doctors. The point is it is always advisable to tell the truth. The refusal to admit where the birth had taken place was very odd.
It seems Harry was determined to withhold all but the bare essentials. Of course he and Meghan are entitled to their privacy, but as members of the Royal Family, whose leading lights are funded by the taxpayer, they have an inescapable public role — and the duties that come with it.
When Archie was eventually presented to the world’s media in a rather orchestrated encounter, he was so swaddled in clothes, with most of his head covered in a bonnet, that he might almost have been a stage prop. It was as though his parents wanted to share as little of him as possible with the world.
While Harry might be accused of being a bit curmudgeonly, Meghan risked the charge of favouritism by inviting her close friend Gayle King — who happens to also be the presenter of a morning show for the U.S. CBS network — to spend some time with her.
The suspicion may grow that Meghan who, as a former actress, loves the camera, is anxious to cultivate her image, and bathe in widespread adulation, in the land of her birth.
As for Harry, his attitude towards the media is understandable, founded as it is in his belief that his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, was pursued by the Press and hounded to her death by feral paparazzi.
In truth, she had many personal dealings with journalists, and her death was chiefly caused by her speeding, inebriated chauffeur.
But Harry, whose opinion of the Press was not enhanced during his younger days of sowing wild oats, and as a result sometimes appearing on newspaper front pages in an undignified way, can’t, or won’t, see the whole picture.
Onlya couple of months ago, he lumped the mainstream media together with social media, and accused them jointly of ‘distorting the truth and trying to manipulate the power of positive thinking’.
It goes without saying that the Press is far from perfect. But despite apparently believing that they can interact satisfactorily with people via their Instagram account, Harry and Meghan need the mainstream media in order to communicate with the general public.
In the end, the media can look after themselves. However, if people should get the idea that they are being fed self-serving halftruths — as appears to have happened this past week — that will not be good for the brave new Royal Family they are helping to build.
let me return to that photo, and the impression it creates of a modern monarchy in tune with 21st-century Britain. It is, as I say, as though Harry and Meghan are harbingers of a force much bigger than themselves. When we remember past monarchs and their reigns, we often think of portraits which caught the mood of the age. Holbein’s famous picture ( a copy, I fear) of a bejewelled and truculent Henry VIII; Van Dyck’s portraits of a vainglorious Charles I; myriad paintings of Queen Victoria, from attractive young woman to stout Empress of India.
Is it too much to suppose that a future age might look back to our own, and see in this photo — with the Queen on happy and equal terms with a black yoga teacher who lives in los Angeles — the completion of a revolution she helped to start 67 years ago, which has now been brought to fruition by Harry, Meghan and Archie?