The abrupt separation of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex from the United Kingdom and its monarchy.
It was raining in London on the evening of March 5th, and so only a small crowd had gathered outside Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London, to watch the Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrive for an awards ceremony hosted by the Endeavour Fund, a charity that supports wounded ex-servicemen and women. As press photographers waited for the couple to dart from Land Rover to lobby, they had little hope of a great shot: rain complicates flash photography, and the Duke and Duchess might be obscured by an umbrella. Luckily, Samir Hussein, who has frequently photographed the Royal Family, had an inspiration: flashes of cameras in the crowd could create a dramatic backlighting effect, as in a studio shot, and other flashes might illuminate the faces of the Sussexes, Prince Harry and the former Meghan Markle. Hussein snapped a picture the split second that the couple, their arms linked under a single umbrella, turned toward each other and smiled. The image became instantly iconic. The pair gazed into each other’s eyes with the insular complicity of newlyweds, unscathed by the rain falling around them like glittering confetti.
Although the photograph suggested nuptial bliss, it marked the conclusion of a whirlwind divorce—the abrupt separation of the Duke and Duchess from the United Kingdom and its monarchy. The event was the couple’s first public appearance in the U.K. since announcing, in January, via Instagram, that they were relinquishing their roles as “ ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family” and would henceforth be spending much of their time in North America, where they hoped to “carve out a progressive new role within this institution.” In the days after the Endeavour Fund event, the couple—who, amid alarm over the spread of the coronavirus, had left their nine-month-old son, Archie, in Canada, where they had been living—carried out their final engagements before formally stepping down from their official duties, at the end of March. The Duke and Duchess will no longer use the honorific H.R.H., which stands for His—or Her—Royal Highness, though they will retain the titles. In February, in Edinburgh, the person introducing the Prince at a conference on sustainable travel asked him how he preferred to be addressed. “Just call me Harry,” he said. The couple will also stop receiving income from the Sovereign Grant, the pot of public money allocated to the Queen and to family members who represent her in official roles. (The Sovereign Grant currently amounts to about a hundred million dollars.)
The Sussexes have declared that they plan to work, with the goal of becoming financially independent, though for now, at least, they will continue to receive funding, reportedly amounting to several million dollars, from the Duchy of Cornwall, the property of Harry’s father, Prince Charles. An indication of the kind of revenue streams they may explore came in February, when Harry travelled to Miami and gave a speech at an investment summit sponsored by JPMorgan; he spoke of the lingering trauma of his very public childhood and bereavement. And last year he signed up to produce, with Oprah Winfrey, a documentary series for television, on mental-health issues; Winfrey was a guest at the Sussexes’ wedding, which took place in May, 2018, in Windsor. Markle, the former star of the TV series “Suits,” may resume her Hollywood career; at the end of March, the Sussexes relocated to Los Angeles. (President Donald Trump greeted their arrival by tweeting that the U.S. will not pay for their security.)
According to royal experts, the only approximate modern precursor to Megxit—the term that was inevitably coined for the Sussexes’ departure—was the abdication crisis of 1936. Then, King Edward VIII stepped down from the throne in order to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, of Baltimore, Maryland; he became the Duke of Windsor and retreated into a long exile of decadent mooching, in France and elsewhere. Constitutionally speaking, there is no real parallel. A king’s abdication reorders the unfolding of history: without Edward’s withdrawal, the current queen, who is now in the sixty-ninth year of her reign, might never have ascended the throne. Harry’s retirement from the family business does not affect the succession. It has, however, inspired a collective reckoning, for which the British public has been especially primed by three seasons of “The Crown,” in which the soul-crushing nature of the institution has been amply depicted. How bad must being an H.R.H. be in order to make someone want to quit?
In the three months since the Sussexes announced their intention to step down—reportedly, before consulting the Queen, Prince Charles, or Prince William—the British people, or at least their representatives in the media, have been reeling like a spouse blindsided by a partner’s sudden announcement of irreconcilable differences. The question of who, or what, was to blame for the rupture has yet to be conclusively answered. Were Harry and Meghan millennial weaklings retreating into self-care and self-pity, unwilling to withstand the scrutiny of their public life in exchange for the material luxury of their private one? Were they pampered hypocrites, lecturing others about climate change while cheerfully leaping aboard private jets belonging to celebrity friends? Were they just bored, or burned out? Were they fatally undermined by the royal establishment? Were they too ambitious for their second-fiddle roles? Or were they, despite all their privilege, victims—he the target of relentless attention since birth, and she the object of barely concealed racism?
Admittedly, these have not been Britain’s most pressing concerns in recent months. Storms and floods battered the nation for much of the winter, and the instability and anxiety caused by the coronavirus have loomed much larger than the royal drama, especially in the weeks since the Sussexes’ visit, during which Britain has entered lockdown, with hospitals on a war footing. Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, is among the tens of thousands who have tested positive for covid-19, though his case turned out to be a mild one. On April 5th, the Queen, for only the fifth time in her reign, delivered a special address to the nation. Speaking from Windsor Castle, where she has been in self-isolation, she called on Britons to remain “united and resolute,” and reassured her subjects that “we will meet again.” That same evening, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, was admitted to the hospital with persistent symptoms of covid-19; he went on to spend three nights in intensive care but was, according to Downing Street, in the “early phase of his recovery” by week’s end.
Dickie Arbiter, a former press secretary at Buckingham Palace, and now a familiar royal commentator, told me, of Harry and Meghan’s departure, “It is sad for the Queen—at ninety-three, the last thing she wants to see is her family disappear into the sunset—and it is also a letdown for the British people. But the British people are stoic, and they get on with it. And, if that’s what Harry and Meghan want, good luck to them.” Yet, even as much larger crises emerged, the ongoing story of Harry and Meghan was compelling to observe, in part because the constitutional insignificance of their actions is counterbalanced by the symbolic weight of those actions.
They were saying, in effect, that life on a pedestal is not a life worth living—especially when being regularly knocked off that pedestal, sometimes for the slightest sign of human fallibility, is an essential part of the job. Harry’s appealing request for informality in Edinburgh was instantly hailed as proof of his amiable nature; when he then made the less populist gesture of travelling first class, with an entourage, for the train journey back to London, the press reproached him for being snooty. The Duke and Duchess are hardly the first in the Royal Family to wonder whether the benefits of their place at the top of British society outweigh the scouring scrutiny that comes with it. Yet it is rare, and captivating, when someone actually acts on such feelings.
The royal dukedom of Sussex, which the Queen granted her grandson only hours before his wedding, is one of the titles that the monarch has bestowed on members of her family, to mark a special occasion or a new phase of life. Prince William, Harry’s older brother, and his wife, the former Catherine Middleton, were named the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at the time of their wedding, in 2011. And last year, when the Queen’s youngest son, Edward, the Earl of Wessex, turned fifty-five, his mother gave him an additional title: the Earl of Forfar, named for a Lowland town north of the Scottish port of Dundee. The title is for the Earl’s use while in Scotland—the honorific equivalent of a sturdy, plaid-lined mackintosh.
If Markle, who grew up middle class in duke-free Los Angeles, Googled the Sussex title before her wedding ceremony, she likely gleaned some insight into the peculiar constraints of the institution she was marrying into. Prince Harry is only the second Duke of Sussex: the title had been extinct for a hundred and seventy-five years before the Palace polished it up for reuse. The first Duke of Sussex was Prince Augustus Frederick, a son of King George III; and, like his great-great-great-great-great-great-nephew Harry, he had a wandering youth, a fiery desire to live as he wished, and an inclination to balk at the strictures of monarchy.
Augustus was born in 1773, a few years before his father lost control of the American colonies. Portraits reveal a good-looking young man with, like Harry, strawberry-blond hair and a ruddy complexion. Augustus had a sensitive brow, voluptuous lips, and a tendency to gain weight—later ceremonial portraits depict him as plump, dressed in tight white britches and velvet robes.
Markle, who spoke her mind politically before joining the Royal Family, which frowns upon such things, might have found much to like about Prince Augustus. He was liberal-minded, and in the later years of his life he supported electoral reform and extending the franchise beyond the gentry. Before meeting Harry, Markle was a United Nations advocate for women, and campaigned for gender equality. Augustus was a royal patron of several charities, including the Jews’ Hospital, in London’s East End. He claimed that his philanthropic work had made him more aware than other aristocrats of the lives of ordinary British people. “I have every respect for the nobility of the country,” he once said, in the House of Lords. “But . . . education ennobles more than anything else.”
In terms of education, Markle outstrips her husband, having graduated from Northwestern University before becoming a television actress. Harry achieved undistinguished exam results at Eton, Britain’s most élite private school, and instead of attending college he joined the Army for ten years, where he rose to the rank of captain. Prince Augustus was, by contrast, a nerd; he attended the University of Göttingen, in Germany, and eventually amassed a large library of valuable books and manuscripts at his apartments, in Kensington Palace. He owned a collection of sixteenth-century Hebrew Bibles, and studied them with a tutor.
As the ninth child and sixth son of George III, Augustus, like Harry, was never in much danger of succeeding to the throne, and felt burdened by the limitations of being a mere prince. Granted, these were cushy limitations: Augustus grew up attended by servants in royal residences. (When the Prince was a young man, his mother, Queen Charlotte, acquired Frogmore House, where, more than two centuries later, Harry and Meghan held their post-wedding party, with Idris Elba serving as d.j.) When Augustus was in his teens, he expressed interest in joining the Royal Navy or the Church of England, but his father never gave him permission to pursue either path—or any other profession. According to his biographer, Mollie Gillen, Augustus spent his youth travelling around Europe, falling prey to “the uncertainty and boredom” of a life with “no goal to aim for.”
Augustus wasn’t even free to marry without his father’s approval, thanks to the Royal Marriages Act, passed by Parliament in 1772, which stipulated that members of the Royal Family needed the monarch’s consent before they could wed—a legislative response to the fact that some of George III’s brothers had married women who were considered unsuitable to be queen, because they were widowed, illegitimate, or both. (The stipulation persists, in a modified form: in order for Harry to remain in the line of succession, he was legally obliged to seek the Queen’s approval for his marriage, though Markle’s status as a divorcée was no longer a deal-breaker.) Augustus felt the law’s force when, at the age of twenty, he secretly married Lady Augusta Murray, a noblewoman ten years his senior, in a ceremony held in Rome.
Apparently, Augustus expected his father to grant approval retroactively. He told Augusta, “We shall live very snug, very quietly, en ton bourgeois; and surely this is the noblest title we can possess.” The King, however, was incensed, and thwarted the marriage, at times foiling the couple’s efforts even to live in the same country. Augustus appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Britain’s senior cleric, asking for his help in securing permission to live abroad with Augusta, with the understanding that any children born to the couple would not be considered royal. The Archbishop said no, reminding Augustus that, “wherever you go, or wherever you reside, you can never divest yourself of the character of a British Prince.”
It’s not yet clear how thoroughly Harry and Meghan wish to divest themselves of royalty. Despite Harry’s request for first-name informality, he hasn’t given up his title of prince, or asked to step out of the line of succession. And though the couple have agreed to pay back the public money—reportedly, about three million dollars—that was spent on renovating Frogmore Cottage, the Windsor Park residence that the Queen bestowed on them, they have shown no sign that they will give up her other wedding gift: the royal dukedom of Sussex. In January, they launched a glossy Sussex Royal Web site, intended to serve as “a source of factual information regarding the workstreams of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.” Their Sussex Royal Instagram account has 11.3 million followers—four million more than that of the Royal Family. At the end of March, the couple indicated that they would suspend their social-media accounts and their Web site, pending a redesign that will omit the word “Royal.” But their brand seems robust enough to survive. Earlier this month, they revealed an intention to launch a charitable entity, Archewell, whose name was derived from arche, the ancient Greek for “source”; the word was also the inspiration for their son’s name.
Harry and Meghan’s exit has drawn attention once again to the question of what, exactly, the extended Royal Family is for. Prince Charles has expressed a desire to streamline the institution if, as expected, he becomes king; more junior family members would be shuffled off the public stage. He may have been thinking of the predicament of Prince Andrew, his younger brother, who recently stepped back from royal duties after a disastrous interview with the BBC about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender. Prince Andrew, like Prince Harry, had a distinguished military career, but he was less admired in his subsequent role as a business envoy for Britain. He had a predilection for expenses-paid travel that earned him the tabloid sobriquet Airmiles Andy.
A distinguished British historian told me, “In the old days, before the First World War, what you did with the secondary royals was marry them off into other royal families, and that gave them something to do. In the days of the Empire, you could send them off to go and be governor-general, or to have a full-time military job. These days, being royal, but not being either the heir to the throne or the monarch—it’s very hard to carve out a job.” At the same time, the historian added, “it’s quite difficult ceasing to be royal.” The Queen’s daughter, Anne, the Princess Royal, first found purpose in equestrian pursuits—she represented Britain in the 1976 Olympics; she has since become a stalwart representative of the Crown, and is involved with more than three hundred charities and other organizations. Prince Edward went into the entertainment industry; among his ventures was a television spectacle in which he, Prince Andrew, and Princess Anne dressed up in knightly regalia and participated in a mock chivalric tournament. Edward’s production company closed down in 2009, and since then he, too, has become a full-time representative of his mother.
A life of cutting ribbons at hospital openings and chatting with dignitaries is not everyone’s idea of fulfillment. Nor is the job as easy as it looks, as Markle discovered during one of her first official engagements, at a garden party in Dublin; she endured a brief scandal after it emerged on Twitter that she’d told an attendee she approved of Ireland’s recent decision to legalize abortion. Before Harry met Meghan, he had been in a couple of long-term relationships, but had expressed doubt about finding someone who was willing to be his partner. “You ain’t ever going to find someone who’s going to jump into the position that it would hold—simple as that,” he said, glumly, in a 2013 televised interview conducted from his military posting in Afghanistan, after he had been photographed larking about, naked, in Las Vegas with female companions who had been willing to jump into other positions. In a televised interview that he and Markle gave in 2017, upon their engagement, Harry expressed gratitude for having found not just a wife but “another team player.” He added, with a nervous laugh, “The fact that I know she’ll be really, unbelievably good at the job part of it as well is, obviously, a huge relief to me.” In a public appearance soon afterward, during which they met a group of Welsh schoolchildren, the pleasure Harry took in his new partner was evident. “Everyone give Meghan a group hug!” he told the kids, who mobbed her.
As the Duke and Duchess of Sussex carried out their final round of engagements in the U.K., even the most obdurate anti-monarchist had to concede that something was being lost with their departure. When Markle visited a secondary school in East London, she warmly greeted a sixteen-year-old student named Aker Okoye in front of an assembly hall filled with his peers. Okoye’s cheeky response—“She really is beautiful, innit?”—aptly summed up the Duchess’s charisma and her gift for connecting, as did her wagging finger of amusement. Markle’s initial projects as a working royal indicated that she planned to use her renown as a fashion and life-style tastemaker to draw attention to worthy causes. She quietly volunteered at the Hubb Community Kitchen, founded by survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, then contributed a foreword to a cookbook benefitting the group. In 2019, in collaboration with several British retailers, she helped create a line of clothes for Smart Works, an organization that helps unemployed women dress for job interviews. When she announced the project, she spoke of wanting to provide clothes that couldn’t be mistaken for last season’s rejects—like the forty lilac-colored blazers she had found in the Smart Works warehouse. At a launch event, Markle said, to approving laughter, “Now, don’t get me wrong—it’s a great blazer, and I’m sure, for someone, it’s exactly what she wants to be wearing.” She was really good at the job part of it.
It was also hard not to appreciate how deftly the couple bid Britain goodbye. Two nights after the Endeavour Fund Awards, Harry and Meghan appeared at the Royal Albert Hall, for the Mountbatten Festival of Music. Harry reminded Britons of his military service by wearing a scarlet mess jacket bedecked with medals, including one from his service as a helicopter gunner. Markle’s choice of dress—a crimson floor-length gown with cape shoulders, by the London-based atelier Safiyaa—perfectly matched Harry’s uniform. Walt Disney himself could not have dreamed them up. (Indeed, Markle recently recorded the voice-over for a Disney documentary about elephant migration in the Kalahari, which is now available for streaming.)
The Royal Albert Hall event was likely the last time that Harry would be seen in that particular uniform, which indicated his position as the Captain General of the Royal Marines—a role inherited from his grandfather, Prince Philip. Harry is scheduled to step down from this position, and from all other official appointments, by the end of a yearlong transition period instituted by the Palace. At that point, the mystery of royalty will be displaced by the more mundane sheen of celebrity.
Not long ago, I met with Camilla Tominey, an editor at the Daily Telegraph, the conservative broadsheet. Tominey has covered the Royal Family, at various publications, for more than fifteen years; in 2016, she broke the story that Prince Harry was dating an American TV actress. On the morning we met, in the lobby of Portcullis House, an office building that serves the Houses of Parliament, Tominey was sleekly put-together—she was about to appear on TV, to comment on her other beat, Westminster—and she spoke with fluid assurance on the Sussex drama.
“When Meghan arrived here, she was really well received,” Tominey told me. There was happiness and relief that Harry had found such an impressive woman. As one of Princess Diana’s sons, he had always been dear to the British public, but he was known as a Jack-the-lad, with a penchant for boorish revelry. “Too much Army, and not enough prince,” as Harry himself put it, in his post-Vegas interview. Tominey went on, “When we wrote the story initially, it was kind of couched in ‘How did he score this amazing girl?’ She was this extremely glamorous woman who had a lot to say for herself, and had an interesting past as a campaigner for women’s rights. She was a woman who meant business, and it looked like she would be an instant asset to the Royal Family.”
Markle was an instant asset for reporters, too. Harry might have been expected to choose a well-born young lady whose life had been only gauzily chronicled in Tatler. Markle had an apparently bottomless online footprint. There were the many interviews she had given as a successful actress, and the revealing photographs she’d posed for as just an aspiring one. In 2014, she had even created her own Web site, the Tig, which was named for her favorite wine, a Tuscan red called Tignanello. Markle had characterized the site as “a hub for the discerning palate—those with a hunger for food, travel, fashion & beauty.” On the Web site, which was taken down after the couple’s relationship became known, she and other contributors dispensed food and travel tips: one post touted the Fat Radish, “a delightful and delicious British (yes, British!) restaurant” on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where Markle appreciated the peekytoe-crab gratin and the “happy, bright vibe.” She had also written more substantial essays, including one in Elle about her biracial identity; she described how her mother, who is African-American, had been mistaken for her nanny when she was a baby, and how a teacher once told her to check the box for “Caucasian” on a mandatory census form, saying, “Because that’s how you look, Meghan.” Markle wrote that she didn’t check any box, noting, “I couldn’t bring myself to do that, to picture the pit-in-her-belly sadness my mother would feel if she were to find out.” Markle also had conveniently indiscreet relatives, including a half sister, Samantha, who could speak no right of her (on Twitter, Samantha called Meghan “duchass”), and a father who had declared bankruptcy in 2016, before moving to Mexico, and seemed easily swayed by the opening of a checkbook. The warmth of the press’s welcome was, in part, excitement over a good story.
But, Tominey explained, Markle soon had critics inside the Palace who were less enamored of the very qualities that made her irresistible to the press: her showbiz lustre, self-confidence, and feminist habits of assertion. Reports emerged that, in the run-up to the wedding, she was being imperious. The Daily Mail gave an account of a “dictatorial” Markle seeking to spritz musty St. George’s Chapel with air fresheners before the ceremony (a charge rebutted by friends of the bride). Tominey said, “I’ve put it down to a clash of cultures, in the sense that she had come from the celebrity world, which is very fast-paced and quite demanding. The royal world is very different—it’s much slower-paced, and hugely hierarchical. In the royal world, it’s ‘What should we do next?’ ‘Well, what did we do last time?’ ” Markle may not have comprehended how many unwritten traditions governed the institution she was joining. Tominey explained, “It’s a bit like ‘Downton Abbey’—there’s a hierarchy of staff who have been at Buckingham Palace for years and years, to serve Queen and country. And, therefore, for Harry and Meghan to be making demands, there was a bit of below-stairs chatter, particularly with the Duchess, that was ‘Well, hang on a minute, who do you think you are?’ ”
Royal reporters soon had their own reasons for being antagonistic. There was considerable irritation at Harry and Meghan’s efforts to circumvent traditional practices of covering the Royal Family. Especially egregious, from some journalists’ point of view, was the obfuscation over the birth of Archie, in the spring of 2019. The Palace issued a statement that the Duchess of Sussex had gone into labor “in the early hours of this morning” on the afternoon of May 6th; in fact, the birth had taken place hours before the statement was released. It could be argued that it is an outrageous invasion of an expectant mother’s privacy for the progress of her child’s birth to be chronicled as global news. Nevertheless, the press corps concluded that Harry and Meghan were trying to render them irrelevant.
Richard Kay, a longtime royal commentator at the Daily Mail, told me, “There has always been a compact between the press and the royals that has worked—they need us, and we need them.” In the eighties and nineties, Kay covered Princess Diana, whose modus operandi was very different: she called broadcasters and newspaper editors or invited them to lunch, in the hope that, if they knew her, they would report more favorably on her. Prince Harry is about as likely to start inviting editors to lunch as he is to embark upon a Ph.D. in astrophysics.
The memory of Diana colors any discussion of Prince Harry. A few years ago, he began speaking in public about how thoroughly he had suppressed his grief following the loss of his mother, who died when he was twelve, in a car crash in Paris, while being chased by paparazzi. In 2017, Harry gave an interview to Bryony Gordon, the host of “Mad World,” a podcast on mental-health issues, in which he admitted that he had been “very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions,” and that he had sought professional help. Last fall, while the Sussexes were in Africa, on a foreign tour on behalf of the Queen, Harry and Meghan spoke with the journalist Tom Bradby. “Every single time I see a flash, it takes me straight back,” Harry said. Markle revealed that she had been encouraging Harry—or Aitch, as she calls him—to reconsider his impulse to press dutifully on. “It’s not enough to just survive something, right?” she said. “Like, that’s not the point of life. You’ve got to thrive.”
Judging by Harry’s recent remarks, it appears that, in the years since his mother’s death, Markle was the only person close to him who persuaded him to exchange a stiff upper lip for a trembling lower one. In a documentary that aired in July, 2017, twenty years after Diana’s death, Harry made the startling admission that, after her funeral, he’d cried “maybe only once.” A person’s motivations for falling in love are often mysterious, but it seems evident that Markle not only showed Harry the compassion he’d been deprived of when Diana died; she also gave him an opportunity to serve as the protector he hadn’t been able to be for his mother. Before the Africa trip was over, the news broke that Markle was suing the Mail on Sunday for publishing portions of a letter she’d written to her father. According to Markle, the extracts—which quoted her telling her father that his “actions have broken my heart into a million pieces”—were misleading, and constituted both a breach of copyright and a violation of privacy. (The newspaper is contesting the lawsuit.) In a forceful statement, the Duke complained that Markle was being subjected to ceaseless criticism, and expressed a fear of “history repeating itself.” He wrote, “I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.”
Harry shares a temperamental kinship with Diana, Tominey told me: he seems genuinely enthused by charitable work, and has a rapport with children. “He is one of the most impressive royals I’ve seen in action,” she said. “I remember being in a hospital with him, in Barbados, with profoundly disabled children, and he was so good with these kids. I just said to myself, ‘He’s the real deal. He’s got the touch—his mother’s touch.’ ” In 2014, not long before leaving the military, Harry helped create the Invictus Games, a sports competition for wounded ex-servicemen and women. In their royal roles, the Sussexes were expected to follow Diana’s emotive, empathetic model, providing a counterpoint to Prince William and his wife, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, whose public persona has been closer to that of the Queen: irreproachable and inscrutable. The Duchess of Cambridge, after experiencing considerable vilification in the early years of their relationship—she was called Waity Katie, on account of the decade it took the couple to get to the altar—is now widely cherished, but she remains something of a blank screen. The novelist Hilary Mantel, in a subtle essay about royalty and femininity, called her “gloss-varnished.”
Tominey noted that Harry’s restlessness with his prescribed destiny predated his marriage. In 2007, he publicly expressed a wish to move to Lesotho, where he had founded Sentebale, a charity for children with H.I.V. Tominey said, “This idea that ‘I don’t like that part of me is owned by the public’—we can all sympathize with that,” adding, “I wouldn’t want to be part of the Royal Family for all the tea in China.”
The thorniest aspect of Megxit has been the debate over whether criticism of the Duchess was motivated by racism. Reporters who cover the royals are indignant at the suggestion, and like to note that Harry himself used to be accused of racial insensitivity. (In 2005, he notoriously wore a Nazi outfit to a “native and colonial”-themed party.) Tominey said, “This narrative of ‘the press and the public have been attacking us,’ and ‘there’s a racial undertone,’ and Prince Harry talking about ‘unconscious bias’—people are scratching their heads and saying, ‘Well, last time I checked, nobody I know ever dressed up as a Nazi for a fancy-dress party.’ ”
Dickie Arbiter, the royal commentator, told me, “For goodness’ sake, the Queen is head of the Commonwealth, and the majority of the Commonwealth is other races—African, Asian, you name it.” The fact that some of the Queen’s best subjects are black is perhaps not the strongest defense of the royal institution, which is notably lacking in diversity. Princess Michael of Kent, who is married to one of the Queen’s cousins, retired a favorite “blackamoor” brooch, featuring a gilded image of an African man, only after being publicly criticized for wearing it to the Christmas banquet at which Prince Harry first introduced his fiancée to his wider family. Whatever Princess Michael’s views on race may be, the fact that nobody at the Palace had told her to bin the brooch years earlier suggests a culture of obliviousness.
Not all the scorn levelled at Markle has been racist; some of it has been merely anti-American. When Allison Pearson, the Telegraph columnist, derisively took note of the Duchess’s “newly-whitened smile,” she was partaking in a long-standing British tradition of equating American dental hygiene with American cultural inferiority. Yet some of the coverage of Markle has unequivocally been racist, with the gutter tone set early by a Daily Mail headline, in November, 2016, announcing that “harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta compton.” The accompanying article claimed that the Los Angeles neighborhood where Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, lived was “plagued by crime and riddled with street gangs.” A double standard was clearly in effect for Markle: in 2011, nobody at the Palace seems to have complained when Kate Middleton scented Westminster Abbey with orange-blossom candles. Even positive commentary about the Sussex marriage, or celebrations of Markle’s charms, was often racially inflected. The coverage of the couple’s relationship exposed the fact that, among some gatekeepers of British culture, it still comes as a surprise to learn that characterizing a woman of color as “exotic” does not amount to a compliment.
Gary Younge, a sociology professor at Manchester University and a former columnist for the Guardian, said, “Meghan does seem to be an inadequate vessel for the rage that has been rained on her.” Moreover, he went on, pundits who claimed that the marriage of Harry and Meghan proved how far Britain had come were too self-congratulatory. “Mixed-race relationships are neither new nor rare in Britain, and so it shows how far behind the Royal Family is, if anything,” Younge said.
Much like President Barack Obama, Markle is a singular figure who was misguidedly heralded as a representative symbol of progress. “On a very basic level, she doesn’t come from our nation’s dysfunction,” Younge noted. In the U.K., the legacy of the nation’s colonial history is omnipresent, and there is a less well-established black middle class than exists in America. Younge said, “Most black Britons of Meghan’s age—their grandparents or parents would have been bus drivers or nurses or train drivers. They would have had working-class jobs, and the Royal Family never marries anybody with a working-class background.”
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex made their final appearance as active members of the Royal Family on the afternoon of March 9th, at the sixty-second annual Commonwealth Service. The celebration, held at Westminster Abbey, is attended by various members of the Royal Family, and marks the Queen’s role as head of the Commonwealth, an association of fifty-four nations, most of which are former British colonies. In 2018, Harry was appointed president of the charitable Queen’s Commonwealth Trust; last year, Markle was named its vice-president. When the couple became engaged, they spoke with enthusiasm about the idea of spending the better part of their time working on behalf of the Commonwealth. So far, they have indicated that they will maintain their positions with the charity.
That morning, royal fans started gathering along Broad Sanctuary, the road that wends past Westminster Abbey toward Parliament Square. In the square, the flags of the Commonwealth countries fluttered against a low, silvered sky. Claire Aston, a Londoner in her seventies, had been there since early morning. Aston, a former dental nurse in the Women’s Royal Air Force, sat on a raised concrete wall, using her copy of the Daily Telegraph as insulation from the cold granite. Aston was an old hand: in 2011, she spent three nights sleeping on a yoga mat, in order to have a front-row view, when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were married. “I saw everything,” she told me. “I saw Pippa Middleton’s lovely bum.” For Harry and Meghan’s wedding, in Windsor, she spent only one night outside. “That was the last time I saw Harry,” she said, as if talking about a grandson who was too busy to visit.
A group of smartly dressed teen-agers made their way to the entrance to the Abbey. They represented the youth group of a South London church affiliated with the Eternal Sacred Order of Cherubim and Seraphim, a Nigerian denomination. Sarah Arute, a church leader, told me that she was excited when Markle joined the Royal Family: “I felt that there was hope for the future—that the Royal Family was opening up a space for the less in society, so that we have a voice.” She was happy to see Markle that day, regardless of the personal choices she and Harry had made. “They are still royals, even if they are not here,” Arute said. “Did you see how she looked since she has been away? Radiant.”
When the black cars bearing members of the Royal Family approached the Abbey’s entrance, there was a flutter of anticipation and a raising of cell phones. First came the Earl and Countess of Wessex—“Who’s that?” the crowd murmured—and then the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Markle, in a vivid- green dress with a cape and a matching fascinator, gave a little wave in the direction of the crowd. Harry, who had seen his brother married and his mother eulogized in the Abbey, kept his head down, mouth grimly set. They were followed by close family members, in order of rank: the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who smiled, professional and wholesome; and, with the Duchess of Cornwall, the Prince of Wales, who entered the Abbey with the soft-stepping dutifulness of one fated to wait until old age to do the job for which he was born. The Queen, who has never missed a Commonwealth Service in the long duration of her reign, was the last to be brought to the entrance. When the door of her burgundy-colored Bentley was opened and she climbed out, dressed in a pale-blue suit and hat, I gasped. Nothing prepares you for the sight of majesty in the form of a very dignified, very tiny, very old lady.
Television cameras stationed inside the Abbey captured the royal brothers settling awkwardly into their seats as they awaited the Queen. The formerly close bond between Harry and William has reportedly been tested by Harry’s choice of what he called, in the Africa-trip interview, a “different path.” Camilla Tominey wrote a story in which she revealed that the Telegraph’s “expert lip reader” had studied the royal interactions and concluded that Harry had said to Meghan, “He literally said, ‘Hello, Harry,’ and that was it.” It would have required an expert mind reader to discern whether the Prince was referring to Prince William or to Boris Johnson, who was in the receiving line, or to someone else entirely. After the service, there would be more body language to parse, but, rather than wait for the royals to leave the Abbey, I went across London, to pay my respects to the first Duke of Sussex.
Prince Augustus Frederick was offered the title of Duke of Sussex by his father in November, 1801—not as a recognition of his marriage to Lady Augusta but as a reward for giving her up. The couple had been forcibly estranged for almost the entire course of their marriage. “I adore you,” Augustus wrote to Augusta, during one of their separations. “I am sure I never shall be happy till when we meet again.” Things changed in the eighth year of the marriage, when Augusta gave birth to a baby girl, and the Duke came to believe—mistakenly—that he wasn’t the father. “What has been so long wished for is at last come to pass,” he wrote to his brother, the Prince of Wales. “We are to meet no more.”
Augustus gave up Augusta, but he didn’t stop challenging the expectations imposed on a prince. After Augusta’s death in 1830, he married a second time, again in contravention of the Royal Marriages Act. (In for a penny with your father’s face on it, in for a pound.) His second wife was a widow, Lady Cecilia Underwood, with whom he lived in discreet contentment. Cecilia wasn’t permitted to take the title of Duchess of Sussex, but Queen Victoria, who ascended the throne in 1838, showed mercy, as only a queen can, by giving her a different title: Duchess of Inverness. Augustus was the young queen’s favorite uncle: he gave her away at her wedding, to Prince Albert, in 1840. Augustus was popular among the British people, too, and when he died in 1843, crowds lined the streets to pay their respects. The London Times praised him as “a Prince of the blood who had the courage to break a stupid law.”
Augustus’s distaste for royal conventions continued beyond the grave. He was granted his request not to be buried in St. George’s Chapel—where, almost two centuries later, Harry and Meghan began the tumultuous adventure of their married life. Instead, Augustus was interred in a public cemetery, in Kensal Green, in West London. Another of Victoria’s uncles, King Leopold I of Belgium, wrote to the Queen to express his disapproval, arguing, “All Princes must stick to their own caste. . . . I do not like the affectation of the contrary.”
By the time I arrived in Kensal Green, rain had begun to fall. The cemetery, which was virtually deserted, is wedged between a busy road and a pair of derelict gas holders. A potholed dirt path was edged by neglected burial plots and mausolea. No signs indicated the way to the Duke’s grave, but close to the Anglican chapel at the heart of the cemetery I found it: an unshowy granite tomb. Lichen grew on the stone, and the inscription was almost illegible. But on one side of the tomb I could make out “His Royal Highness Augustus Frederick Duke of Sussex,” and on the other the name of the Duchess of Inverness, who had been buried beside him after more than three decades of widowhood.
The place felt forlorn, especially after the pomp and circumstance of the Commonwealth celebration. But simplicity was what the Duke had wanted. He had decided, in his own way, to carve out a progressive new role within the institution of the monarchy. He was, the Illustrated London News approvingly reported, “the first of a royal race who has chosen to lay his bones in one of the cemeteries of the people.” ♦
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