Even 20 years ago this wedding would have been inconceivable. The genius of our royalty is that it reflects the people
FOR anyone who loves our country, enjoys a spectacle or just likes a good wedding, today promises to be a great occasion. All royal weddings come with a generous sprinkling of stardust, but the union of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is something extraordinary.
Even two or three decades ago, the prospect of the Queen’s grandson, the son and brother of future kings, marrying a divorced American actress, born to a black mother, would have seemed inconceivable.
Not even the most ambitious screenwriter in Ms Markle’s native Los Angeles would have come up with such a scenario. But times have changed, and for the better.
And after all the red-top tabloid headlines, all the traumas of his early life, all the girlfriends, the parties and the scandals, Prince Harry — seasoned in service to his country — has found happiness at last. Good for him. He deserves it. This being the Royal Family, of course, things are never straightforward. To Buckingham Palace, the events of the last week must have felt like an unfolding nightmare.
Even by the soap opera standards to which the House of Windsor often descends, the chaotic shambles of Meghan’s semi-estranged father Thomas — who planned to walk her down the aisle, apparently staged pictures for a paparazzo, seemingly suffered a heart attack, decided to cry off, changed his mind and then cried off again so Prince Charles is now doing the honours — marks a tragi-comic low point.
Still, even the smoothest wedding build-up is rarely free from moments of panic, and there can be few married couples in Britain unfamiliar with the phenomenon of embarrassing in-laws.
In any case, the monarchy has long had a melodramatic dimension, in which calamitous weddings have played a particularly eye-catching part. And when compared with past royal nuptials, the excesses of the House of Markle look almost mundane. Although we typically like to think of royal weddings as fairytale occasions, the truth is that many were like something from an unusually horrific nightmare.
Think, for example, of the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves in 1540: the king an obese monstrosity with a stinking ulcer on his leg, his German bride a ‘Flanders mare’ who seemed completely out of her depth.
Not surprisingly, it was never consummated: rather ungallantly, Henry claimed he had been put off by the ‘hanging of her breasts and looseness of her flesh’.
The real soap opera stars, though, were the Hanoverians, who specialised in laughably catastrophic weddings. The marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales, in 1736 is a case in point. once again the bride was German. At just 16, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha did not speak a word of English and was patently terrified.
As she shuffled down the aisle at St James’s Palace she was violently sick, not merely over her own dress, but over her new mother-in-law, Queen Caroline.
The most spectacularly disastrous royal wedding of all, though, was that of the future George IV to Caroline of Brunswick in 1795.
They first met only three days before the wedding, when George was so disgusted with his bride’s appearance that he immediately called for brandy.
At the wedding itself, again at St James’s Palace, George arrived drunk, fell over on the steps of the altar and refused to recite his vows until his father, George III, ordered him to comply.
Somehow George managed to consummate the marriage that evening, though he told friends afterwards that ‘it required no small [effort] to conquer my aversion and overcome the disgust of her person’.
For her part, Caroline was equally horrified, and claimed that he ‘passed the greatest part of his bridal night under the grate, where he fell, and where I left him’.
This set the tone for what was to follow, climaxing with the chaotic scenes at George’s coronation in 1821, when the doors of Westminster Abbey were literally slammed in his estranged wife’s face. To cap it all, Caroline was taken ill that night and died three weeks later.
There is, I suppose, a valuable lesson here in the dangers of choosing an unsuitable royal partner — not that the Royal Family should need such a lesson after the PR disaster that was the marriage of Harry’s parents.
Still, on today of all days, any nagging anxieties are best forgotten.
THERE is no doubt, after all, that the union of Harry and Meghan is a genuine love match, which is not something that can be said for most of their royal predecessors.
You would, I think, have to be peculiarly mean-spirited — or a senior member of Jeremy Corbyn’s cult — to deny that the happy pair make an attractive couple, and that there is a palpable spark between them.
Perhaps this explains why the wedding has struck such a chord, not just here, but around the world. As publishers, music producers and film moguls will tell you, romance never goes out of fashion. There is also, of course, the novelty factor.
We are accustomed to seeing members of the Royal Family at the altar with specimens of the English upper classes. Even the Duchess of Cambridge — despite the jokes about ‘doors to manual’, a reference to her mother’s past career as an air stewardess — went to the impeccably blue chip Marlborough College and University of St Andrews. But Meghan is different. No casting director could have dared to supply the Palace with such a refreshingly original cast member, an American actress with a mixed-race heritage and more than a dash of star quality.
In the murkier corners of the Left, whose inmates usually foam with rage at the very mention of the monarchy, Meghan’s racial identity has provoked all sorts of strange effusions.
Self-styled republicans hate the Royal Family, but they also claim to love ‘diversity’, which has left them in something of a fix.
I have to confess to rather enjoying the spectacle of the Guardian newspaper’s madder columnists banging out some absolute drivel about how ‘the very concept of the Royal Family is the antithesis of diversity’, and how Harry is about to get a ‘crash course’ in the ‘complex world of race and identity’.
I bet Meghan didn’t mention that on their first date. To the vast majority of sane, normal people, however, the remarkable thing about Ms Markle’s background is how unremarkable it is.
ALTHOUGH we live in an age of risible hysteria about race and ‘diversity’, especially in the upper echelons of the BBC and in our major universities, most normal people see nothing sensational in the thought of the Queen’s grandson marrying a brown-skinned American. Most of us prefer to judge Ms Markle by her personality, not by her skin pigmentation.
Ironically, the monarchy is much more in tune with the instincts of the nation than its chattering-class critics. After all, one in ten British couples now involve people with different ethnicities, while an estimated 833,000 British children are currently being raised by mixedrace couples.
In this respect, one family — the Windsors — is the symbol of a bigger story. And that is precisely as it should be.
The nation itself, after all, is nothing if it is not an extended family. And the appeal of the Royal Family, when you forget the palaces and pageantry, derives partly from the fact that when we look at them, we see ourselves.
Few people embody that more than Harry himself. There cannot be many families who are unfamiliar with the younger son who struggled to find his niche, the party animal who found a serious side or the playboy who grew up.
Indeed, one reason that Harry has such wide public appeal is that he is an immediately recognisable figure. Like a modern version of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal — the wayward prince who grew in stature to become Henry V, victor of Agincourt — he has evolved from the days of Nazi fancy-dress party costumes and Las Vegas stripping sessions to serving in Afghanistan and promoting the Invictus Games for injured military veterans.
Harry’s is an impressive and inspirational story, not least since he lost his mother in such traumatic circumstances and had to grow up in the glare of the international spotlight.
Indeed, I suspect that Harry’s spectacular public approval ratings — one poll recently found that 81 per cent of us have a positive view of him and only 11 per cent have a negative view — reflect the fact that many people still see him as the shell-shocked little boy walking behind his mother’s coffin.
No politician could dream of matching such figures. And that, of course, points to another story. In an era when so many other great institutions, from Parliament to the BBC, seem tarnished and beleaguered, the Firm’s sheer
resilience, its tenacious grip on our national imagination, remains enormously impressive.
Twenty years ago, after the death of Diana, there was a brief burst of apocalyptic talk about the end of the monarchy. But no one is talking about that now. Indeed, when our national destiny seems so uncertain and our public figures inspire such little enthusiasm, the monarchy stands out as the one unchanging fixture, a bulwark of tradition, a beacon of stability in an age of dizzying change.
At a time when the world’s most famous republican office is occupied by Donald Trump, the hereditary principle of monarchy looks in pretty robust health to me. After all, the Swedes, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Dutch and the Belgians all have monarchies, and they rank among the safest, richest, most developed and contented societies on earth. Even France’s President Emmanuel Macron — a would-be Napoleon if ever there was one — once remarked that his countrymen are ‘eternally nostalgic’ for their lost kings. ‘The French elect their president to be a monarch,’ he said. ‘Then they want to cut his head off.’
In Britain, thankfully, we gave up beheading our kings in 1649. And although other monarchies, from Germany to Russia, have fallen by the wayside, ours remains the supreme symbol of Britishness both at home and abroad.
Cynics sometimes like to present us as forelock-tugging lackeys, brainwashed into subservience.
But this is nonsense. We know perfectly well that the Royal Family are all too human, with faults and foibles we can all immediately recognise.
BUT the monarchy is the symbol of something bigger, the nation itself — which is why so many metropolitan liberals, the selfstyled ‘citizens of nowhere’ who think themselves above the timehonoured loyalties of place and nation, are intellectually incapable of understanding its appeal.
Its magic does not lie in the flags and carriages, although they are part of it.
The real magic lies in the blend of the national and the individual, the patriotic and the personal, the past and the present.
Of course, the hard-Left can never understand this.
Their minds twisted by extremism, their hearts coarsened by envy, they see only privilege where the rest of us see patriotism.
Well, let the naysayers stew in their joyless misery. The rest of us, in our tens of millions, would raise a glass to an institution that has served Britain splendidly for centuries, and to two people who deserve a happy future together.
For although this is a great national occasion, we should not forget that at its heart are two young people who are not so different, deep down, from thousands of others getting married this summer.
So let’s hope today’s happy scenes banish the memories of the last week. And, if you’ll forgive the lèsemajesté, let’s hope the wedding night goes better than it did for Henry VIII.