HARRY’S AND MEGHAN’S exclusion from the ranks of the “Senior Royals” says much about the British aristocracy’s survival instincts. For centuries it has been re-vitalising and re-capitalising itself by astute marriages. For “ordinary” aristocratic families, this generally involved allowing the families of the merely rich to rise into the ranks of the nobility. In the case of the ruling dynasties, however, it was considered wisest to mingle royal blood only with royal blood. Only a handful of English kings married English-born women – and these alliances all-too-often ended badly. Think Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn!
The British people have good reason to thank the British aristocracy for their shrewdness in the marriage market. Had Randolph Churchill not recovered his family’s fortunes by marrying the American heiress, Jennie Jerome, there would have been no Winston Churchill to give the British Empire its “finest hour”. At the royal level, however, attempts to revitalise the reigning dynasty with an infusion of American blood have proved singularly problematic.
Back in the 1930s, Britain’s ruling class wasn’t outraged by Wallis Simpson’s scandalous liaison with Edward, Prince of Wales, on account of its “immorality”. What outraged them was its alarming open-endedness. That married women conducted affairs with princes and kings was hardly news to the British aristocracy. Recalling Edward Windsor’s long list of married paramours, one wit is said to have quipped: “No greater love hath a man than this – that he laid down his wife for his king!” No, adultery, practically an upper-class sport, wasn’t the problem. The problem was that an American woman, already on her second husband, could so obviously be contemplating making the Heir Apparent her third.
And, of course, Wallis Simpson was no Jennie Jerome. The latter hailed from one of the wealthiest and most powerful families of America’s “Gilded Age” (1870-1910) These titans of business and finance boasted larger fortunes and grander homes than most European aristocrats. Leonard Jerome, Jennie’s father, was known as “The King of Wall Street”. His offspring needed no instruction in the power that flowed from great wealth and how important it was to protect it. Wallis Simpson, however, had “risen without trace” and hungered much too obviously for the wealth and power she’d never quite managed to snare.
And then there were Simpson’s ideas. If anything, these were even more frightening than her ambitions. To condemn her as a fascist smacks of anachronistic self-righteousness. Half the British aristocracy were sympathetic to fascism in the 1920s and 30s. Its younger members relished fascism’s violent impatience with the dreary traditions of their parents’ generation, and many endorsed its rejection of the squalid compromises forced upon the West’s “best men” by party politics. Racism had yet to acquire the power to shock decent citizens, and intellectuals of both the left and the right embraced the “science” of eugenics with enthusiasm. That Simpson’s radical political ideas might also be Edward’s was a proposition that sent shivers up and down the spines of England’s elderly rulers – lords and commoners alike.
A more resolute Edward, and certainly a genuinely fascistic Edward, would not have accepted so meekly the demands of his scandalised family, and Downing Street, that he either relinquish Mrs Simpson – or the Crown. If he had appealed to the angry victims of the Great Depression over the heads of the politicians, by placing himself at the head of a “Royal Party”, then, who knows, Edward may well have ended up ruling as well as reigning. After all, he would, almost certainly, have been able to count on the support of Oswald Mosely and Winston Churchill!
That Edward was neither a resolute man nor a resolute fascist, meant that his 1936 abdication has come down to us as a love story rather than a political thriller. But, if the affair of Edward and Mrs Simpson contains at least some of the elements of a royal tragedy; is it fair to brand Harry and Meghan’s story as a right royal farce?
That it’s a story about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, not the Prince and Princess of Wales – let alone the King-Emperor – does, of course, make a difference. There are, however, some common narrative threads linking 1936 with 2020.
That Meghan, an African-American, might also be said to have risen without trace (at least until the British tabloids started digging) certainly rings a historical bell or two. There is also, in Meghan, something of Wallis Simpson’s all-too-obvious hunger for recognition and influence. And that leads directly to the most important similarity between these two American women: both represented ideas that contradicted sharply the Royal Family’s perception of its role in British society.
Which is not to suggest that Meghan is a fascist – not for a moment. In fact, she represents what might best be described as the polar opposite of fascism – multiculturalism and individual self-realisation. In this regard, Meghan and Harry stand in a place very similar to Edward and Mrs Simpson: their vision of the future is one shorn of the many stultifying traditions of the House of Windsor; it is a young vision for a generation moved and motivated by ideas very different from those of the 93-year-old monarch and her 71-year-old son and heir. They clearly favoured a Royal Family that mucks in and helps people directly – in the spirit of Harry’s rehabilitative efforts with war veterans. A monarchy that was all about garden parties and delivering boring speeches to even more boring people wasn’t for them, or, they strongly suspected, for the young people of twenty-first century Britain.
And it is in this respect that Harry’s and Meghan’s story takes on some of the aspects of genuine tragedy. Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, in many respects pre-figured the sort of royal figure her youngest son aspires to be: open, giving, uninhibited and fun-loving, with just a hint of rebelliousness. His grandmother, however, raised in the shadow of Edward VIII’s abdication – and the burden which “that woman” imposed on her beloved father, George VI – has never trusted her own, or anybody else’s, emotions. Duty has shut up so many of the pathways to her heart that she cannot see the huge advantage to the monarchy of allowing Harry and Meghan to clear away some of the barriers currently separating the Crown from the Realm.
Edward and Mrs Simpson, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, were banished to France. The Sussexes have taken themselves off to Canada. In Edward’s case, the Royal Family’s decision was probably the right one; in the case of Harry and Meghan, however, the British aristocracy’s talent for self-preservation is much less obviously on display.