After the week they’ve had, it’s too fitting that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are doing this thing in Windsor Castle’s St George’s Chapel, the official spiritual home to the Order of the Garter. The order was founded after the perceived embarrassment and shaming of a woman at court in 1348, through no fault of her own.
Legend has it (probably apocryphally) that Edward III’s dance partner accidentally flashed her garter, to various looks askance, prompting Edward to take the garter upon himself and challenge the mockers with what would become his new order’s motto: “Honi soit qui mal y pense.” Shame on him who thinks badly of this. “Those who laugh at this today,” Edward added, “will tomorrow be proud to wear it.” Note how an embarrassing incident was opportunistically embraced by the crown, promptly knit into its mythology and swiftly used to further its wider ends. Almost immediately, Edward was using the same line to shut down criticism of his dodgy claim to the French throne. Gotta admire the balls on him.
To the matrimosseum, then, where it has been revealed that Prince Charles will walk Meghan Markle up the aisle in the absence of her father, who you might vaguely have heard is recovering from heart surgery in Mexico. We don’t know too much about his 69-year-old understudy, but as all theatre critics will tell you, anyone forced to go on at the last minute is always “a revelation”. Ideally, a star will be born, because the House of Windsor’s going to need one in a few years. Charles will lead Meghan to Prince Harry, who will then turn to the wider TV audience and bellow: “.” Harry’s tone? Same as the bit in Gladiator when a flashing-eyed Rusty Crowe inquires of the Colosseum crowd: “Are you nut entertained? ARE YOU NUT ENTERTAINED? IS THIS NUT WHY YOU ARE HERE?”
And is it? On the eve of a royal wedding whose final week of preparations has been several stripes of toxic, we must once again ask: what do we want out of these people?
“She makes him happy,” one member of the public explained to the BBC. “And that makes me happy.” In the Kensington Palace gift shop, a woman buying a £39 mug with Harry and Meghan’s initials on it told me: “I love how down to earth they are.” A lady who had travelled from Florida confided beneath the whirr of a news helicopter: “I just like weddings.”
In Ma’am Darling, Craig Brown’s exquisitely naughty and hilarious book about Princess Margaret, the author notes that when it comes to the royal family in the modern era, “the trend is toward praising the unexceptional”. The vast sales of royal biographers and watchers suggest they know their audience, and in their hands the banal is treated with a reverence it would be afforded in the case of no other subject. To read these accounts is to drown in fist-gnawingly dull passages about occasions on which the royals drive! their! own! cars!, for instance, changing effortlessly / fluently / unaffectedly up through the gears, while the prose remains very much stuck in first. All of which leads Brown to the central questions of our modern relationship with the monarchy: “If they are so ordinary, why are they so special? And if they are so special, why are they so ordinary?”
This unresolved conflict has been much on display this week, alongside the snobbery and the sycophancy, the cruelty and the casual racism. You can’t move for people explaining that the miserable drama with Meghan’s poor paparazzi-colluding father shows us that “all families are complicated” – like we need telling that, where the Windsors are concerned. Please. They’ve been bringing their own drama since forever. The very fact Harry is marrying an American divorcee sets a low success bar even by the standards of his clan. The last time the experiment was tried, the couple in question ended up in a Bois de Boulogne villa with a couple of mines’ worth of diamonds but only Hitler on speed-dial.
Too soon? Very possibly. Royal nuptials do something funny to people who otherwise know that wedding details are almost comically boring. People who would normally need to be a bottle of lady petrol down before they cared what type of cake their friends are having are positively gripped by news that Meghan’s will be a lemon sponge with elderflower buttercream. Other people declare their furious lack of interest like a mantra that needs repeating just the 900 times a day.
In Windsor, many were treating Royal Wedding Eve like it was an early flight from Stansted, where it’s basically fine to have a pint at any time. “We open at 6am tomorrow,” said the barmaid at The King and Castle, with a thousand-yard stare. Elsewhere on the lanes around the castle there were slightly more claimants to be “official town crier” than there once were to be Anastasia Romanov. Police had taken the possessions of some homeless people for “safe storage”, making way for the royal superfans who wished to sleep on the same streets to get a great viewing spot for Saturday. And if you were a screenwriter trying to come up with a vignette to illustrate a country in heady thrall to a version of its past yet struggling to meet the challenges of its present, you’d probably ditch that one as being too on the nose.
Before we had culture wars, we had John Mortimer’s insistence that the nation could still be divided into cavaliers and roundheads. We now live in an age of endless taxonomy – and anger – where people are forever identifying adversarially. Leavers and remainers, Somewheres and Anywheres, people who adore the royal family and people who can’t stand them. (Confusingly, many of the latter demographic adore the royals at one artistic remove. They worship the Queen as played by Helen Mirren, and can’t get enough of The Crown.)
After the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, which I covered for work, I returned home to find my husband had not seen one nanosecond of the proceedings, choosing instead to watch The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary about Nazi collaboration in Vichy France. I mean … eyeroll. Someone later asked him if he hadn’t even wanted to see Kate’s dress, and he said “her DRESS?”, as though he’d been offered sight of her dental records, or her GCSE essay on weather symbolism in King Lear. This time round he’ll be at the cup final, Saturday’s other gloriously militarised event where a perceived arriviste will meet the game’s version of royalty. And that concludes the court and social engagements for my household.
There was no evidence of protesters in Windsor on Friday, though some are promised for Saturday. Extended opening hours may help. Elsewhere, though, a certain cultivated ennui about Harry and Meghan’s wedding is the badge of someone who would like you to know they have better things to do with their time. Nothing new here. “I have noticed in the press certain references to Princess Margaret wishing to marry someone or other,” Noel Coward sniffed grandly to his diary back in 1955. “I really must try to control this yawning.” Within two weeks, Coward was practically wetting his pants at the news that Margaret was not going to marry the someone-or-other (Group Captain Peter Townsend) after all. “This is a fine slap in the chops for the bloody press which has been persecuting her for so long,” he thundered. “It has all been a silly mismanaged lash-up, and I can’t imagine how the Queen and the Queen Mother and Prince Philip allowed it to get into such tangle …” On and on it goes, quite the opposite of a yawn, right down to his hope “that they had the sense to hop into bed a couple of times at least, but this I doubt.”
He perhaps needn’t have worried on that score. Back to the events of this week, though, where we must once again wonder how tangles are allowed to happen to the royal family. How could Kensington Palace’s courtiers not have predicted many months ago that Meghan Markle’s father was a potential vulnerability who might need assistance in the eye of the media maelstrom in which he would find himself? Instead of farting out press releases about floral arrangements, someone from the palace should have raced to Tijuana faster than a teen on spring break and helped manage the situation. Instead, they have presided over the biggest strategic bollock-drop since the snap election.
With barely a week to go, perhaps the palace was congratulating itself that the worst press to befall this wedding was the news that having invited 2,460 members of the public inside the castle walls to “share their special day”, the couple weren’t actually going to feed them or anything. Some suspected they were just backdrop for the TV pictures, the most displeased peasant extras since Buttercup’s forced marriage to Humperdinck in The Princess Bride.
But now … well. The final countdown has been marked by such eye-covering TV moments as Meghan’s half-sister raging that her father snapped because he had been relentlessly hounded by paparazzi. As she put it: “I think there are examples in history of how dangerous that can be.” Oof. Plotlines never go away in the House of Windsor, they just lie dormant for a couple of series.
Alas, there undoubtedly remains a persistent feeling among some courtiers that it is the commoners who bring vulgarity to the royal family, who are themselves always unimpeachable. Anyone who recalls Prince Andrew bellowing at John Travolta, who was dressed as a giant vegetable, during Prince Edward’s dignicidal Grand Knockout Tournament will find that take hard to get behind. (Edward had earlier stormed huffily out of a press conference wearing a sweatshirt reading “NO I JUST LOOK LIKE HIM”.)
There was much sympathy for Meghan over the business with her father among those camped out on Friday morning. “It’s terrible what they’ve done to her,” remarked one woman in a camping chair, who, it must be said, had still bought three newspapers to read about it all. “She’s tough enough to survive it though,” judged her friend.
None of this is new, naturally, having happened to various brides of Windsor before. Indeed, once you are “in”, it is your turn to take the reins and disparage the latest newbie and their ghastly family. Roy Strong’s diaries feature one encounter with Princess Michael, who is keen to define herself against the then 23-year-old mother-of-one, Princess Diana. Strong recounts Princess Michael’s thoughts: “Droves of the household were leaving, and then there was the terrible mother, Mrs Shand Kydd …” (I don’t know about you, but I never trust a take on terrible relatives unless it comes from someone whose own father was a Nazi SS officer.) “Poor Prince Charles, who had bought Highgrove to be near his former girlfriend.” Can’t bear it for the guy. Strong then moves on to quoting Princess Michael directly: “Being rude to servants is the lowest thing you could do, and she does it.” The Kents, of course, will be neighbours of Harry and Meghan when they move into their 21-room marital apartment in the same quadrangle of Kensington Palace, so doubtless Meghan can expect a warm and supportive welcome there.
Looking at the formbook, then, marrying into the Windsors has frequently proved a reverse fairytale. It starts with you becoming a princess, and unravels from there. Tied ends are loosed, and afters are not ever happy. Even so, the weddings themselves are a type of restoration comedy, briefly and amusingly refreshing the view of the monarchy to something light, youthful and positive, and allowing many people to stave off the gathering realisation that the Queen is the last big-hitting link with the postwar consensus, and if she and Attenborough go in the same year we’ll have effectively lost the rights to our country to Sky.
We’ve already lost the rights to this wedding to the US news site TMZ, which has wiped the floor with their British counterparts on scoops, in arguably the most shaming defeat since Yorktown. Certainly since England capitulated to the US in the 1950 World Cup. Wasn’t it OUR tabloids who used to go into hospitals and try to get stories off recovering patients? Wasn’t it OUR tabloids who used to goad relatives to say terrible things for money? Aren’t WE the best at ruining lives? What happened to us, man? Perhaps another sort of changing of the guard has occurred.
Still, the cast of thousands taking their piece of this wedding remains a sight to behold. Incredible, really, that no one in our royal family has ever eloped. Couple of the Saudis have done it, obviously, and you get a bit of it in Thailand. But at more than one moment this week, Harry and Meghan must surely have been tempted to run off to Vegas, a city of marginally less excess than one of Prince Charles’s weekend journeys to stay with friends in Herefordshire.
Yet here we are. At some point on Saturday a “body language expert” on some network’s dime will divine from the specific manner in which Meghan Markle steps from her golden landau that “she has a lot on her mind”. Body language will be just one of the ancient disciplines being brought to bear on proceedings. The erstwhile royal butler Paul Burrell has been handling etiquette and so on for ITV’s Lorraine, though he’s unlikely to furnish viewers with a digression on the etiquette of hiding a load of one’s late employer’s dresses in the attic and then betraying her secrets in a series of lucrative books.
Then there are all the bookies, of course, and the hundreds of broadcast technicians taping cables to the pavements all the way around Windsor Castle, in a Sleeping Beauty metaphor I’m sure Kay Burley will be hacking through in due course. And all the American television anchors, and all the souvenir sellers, and the childhood bodyguards who’ve cashed in. And the security consultants, and the lip readers. (For William and Kate’s wedding, the Sun had lip readers trained on various members of the royal family. An executive decision was taken not to publish what had been gleaned from Princess Anne as it was – how to put this? – not thought to fit with the otherwise positive and upbeat mood of the day.)
Then there’s Liam Fox, declaring on Thursday that the wedding will boost the UK’s trade ties with the US. There’s Marks and Spencer, changing its name to Markle and Sparkle for three days, and all the many pubs holding royal wedding parties, and all the many pubs holding anti-royal-wedding parties. Just two people getting married, then, trailed by a vast army of chancers and cheerleaders and chisellers and critics also taking their cut – including me, by the writing of this article. As that other medieval saying goes, it’s all in the game, yo. And just look how long it’s been played. Helluva drug.