Meghan refuses to join the ranks of the not-so-merry wives of Windsor

For Harry and his wife, like Margaret, there will be no top job: so was their choice a good one?

Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in 1980.

It’s astonishing the amount of real-life drama the royal family continues to provide to the English­-speaking world. It was not so long ago that the third season of The Crown — with Oscar-winner Olivia Colman as Her Majesty and Helena Bonham-Carter as the turbu­lent Princess Margaret — almost­ had its thunder stolen by that extraordinary Newsnight interview­ Prince Andrew gave about his dealings with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Now Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, have decided to “step back” as senior members of the royal family and work to become financially independent. They will spend half their time in North America (mostly Canada) and ­half in England.

The Queen is not amused and the palace has declared “these are complicated issues that will take time to work through”.

The development raises all sorts of questions about what Harry and Meghan mean to do and how anyone can justify them keeping their royal titles or whatever cash they will presumably continue to get from the royal purse while opting out of public duties.

All the while, no doubt, while proclaiming how “woke” they are.

None of this accords with Prince Charles’s plan to cut back the royal family to something like an acceptable Scandinavian model, concentrating the spotlight on the heirs to the throne.

However, it does provide a chance to mediate on the women in the recent history of the royal family. Both the staid, sensible types and the kicking-up-their-heels tearaway, a distinction we hear Prince Philip making to his monarch wife in The Crown.

Think of Queen Mary, the wife of George V and the mother of both Edward­ VIII — the king who abdicated­ to marry his twice-divorced­ American love, Wallis Simpson — and George VI, the shy and stammering brother who replaced him as king. Photos of Queen Mary after George VI’s death suggest a harrowing grief and she declared with immense dignity and gravity: “I have lost three sons through death, but never been privileged to be there to say a last farewell to them.”

Then again, her abdicator son thought she was incredibly cold and hard when she refused ever again to meet Simpson, the future Duchess of Windsor. Of course, Queen Mary thought the duchess was damaging the monarchy. Alread­y you can see the pattern: the stable, self-sacrificing queen rising above the interloping American (like Meghan) who wants her own way.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor pose at their wedding in France in 1937. Picture: Getty Images

The story goes that the Queen Mother, the woman who replaced Simpson in the role of queen consort­, initially had her own attractio­n to Edward VIII, known as the “playboy king”. It’s certainly true that it took some time for her to accept the proposal of his younger brother, Bertie, who went on to become George VI and with whom she had daughters Elizabeth and Margaret. She said she was afraid she would never be able to speak her mind again if she was married to the king.

The Duchess of Windsor ­referred to the woman born Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon as “Cookie” ­because she looked like a fat Scots cook.

But the Queen Mother was pretty remarkable for consistently speaking her mind. During World War II, she endeared herself foreve­r to the people of Britain and the Commonwealth because she made it known she would not leave Buckingham Palace, despite the German bombing of London. “The children won’t go without me. I won’t leave the King. And the King will never go.”

Her husband wanted to go into battle himself — a fact he was revered­ for during my childhood even by staunch people of the left in Australia. One of the reasons for the Queen Mother’s antagonism to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor came from the fact she knew the crown would kill her husband.

She also made one of the most famous fierce and defiant statements of WWII — which is pretty formidable for a woman who was famous for her love of racehorses, grog and food (and whose competitors in the quotability stakes are those such as Churchill and Hitler).

When Buckingham Palace was bombed, she said: “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End (of London) in the face.”

The Queen Mother managed to straddle the gap between rectit­ude and feistiness. According to English journalist Charles Moore, she was the only member of the royal family who had much time for that grocer’s daughter, Margaret­ Thatcher.

The other Margaret, the Queen’s better-looking sister, was always a worry. They wouldn’t let her marry her first love, Group Captain Peter Townshend, and she ended up — or started out — with Antony Armstrong-Jones, poshish but arty and bohemian.

I remember as a child how much they looked and sounded like film stars at their wedding. Many years later, a friend, married to a great Australian performer, told me how she had been taken by the poet laureate John Betjeman and his girlfriend Lady Elizabeth Cavendish to Kensington Palace to have dinner with Princess Margaret and the photographer husband who was now Lord Snowdon.

She said she watched dumbstruck while Princess Margaret, having rapidly got rid of the servants, drank a bottle of Gordon’s gin in its entirety. She said to the small company, of her sister the Queen: “If I ever put my fingers in that woman’s purse, I would have them cut orf (sic).”

No wonder she was a friend of Gore Vidal and could move through international society full of damaged glamour. And still there is the sadness, the ageing quest for love, the affair with the young Roddy Llewellyn, the constant­ sense of someone born to rule but not capable of ruling even her own appetites or personality.

And so we jump a generation. Prince Charles. We know now he married the wrong woman. He had been in love with the bright, cultivated Camilla, now his easygoing and expert wife, the Duchess of Cornwall. But instead he ­married the 20-year-old Diana Spencer. He was 32.

Diana was one of the more extraordinary things that ever happened to this extraordinary, ordinary family. She did not know what she was getting herself into.

For a long while, the woman who would give birth to William and Harry seemed like the hopeless pawn of a man, nice chap and all, who didn’t love her. The art critic nun Sister Wendy Beckett compared her to Warhol’s screen print of Marilyn Monroe, which she thought represented ­celebrity as a kind of poignant nothingness.

Then something happened to Diana. She became a campaigner for AIDS victims, a campaigner against minefields, a campaigner for the insulted and injured. And she got older and stronger, as her popularity outstripped by light years her fuddy-duddy spouse. Diana grew in power and beauty.

Anyone who looks again at Martin Bashir’s TV interview will witness her dizzying and dazzling personal charisma as she spits Charles and Camilla out of her mouth and declares to the world that there were always three people­ in her marriage. She was audacious, magnetic; and it’s hard not to see her as doom-laden.

The world held its breath when Elton John sang — having rewritten Candle in The Wind for her — at the most famous funeral since … when? … John F. Kennedy’s? The novelist Julian Barnes might say she was more like a bloody great chandelier than a candle in the wind. But he, too, stood silent to watch her cortege pass.

The world wept, the world went crazy, even the Queen was forced to fly the royal standard at half mast, which to the crown is a contradict­ion in terms.

Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, was not cut from the same cloth. Prince Andrew’s ex-wife got into trouble early on for publicly having her toes sucked. She got into trouble recently — and was exposed through an undercover investigation — for taking money in return for offering to provide access­ to her own ­estranged hooray husband. They called her the Duchess of Pork when she got a bit stout. They derided her, as they’re always inclined to do with the royal women when they let their hair down.

They’ve never done it with Prince Charles’s sister, Princess Anne, because she is a woman of iron discipline, like her mother, and concerted public service.

Nor will the world deride Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, wife of the future king Prince William. She is good-looking, impeccably cautious, very acceptably warm and nice and decent, and according to acceptable type.

The biracial American ­Meg­han, the Duchess of Sussex, could not be more different. She carries like a banner her commitment to a personal variety of aggressive, buoyant confidence: not what she and her husband can do for the royal family, but what the royal family can do for her/them.

Is that unfair? Maybe, because misogyny is an open temptation in the face of an “ordinary” but fantasy-laden family and the women who try to make their way in a world that is forever trying to force them to follow conventional types.

Are we right to imagine ­Meghan is much more fiercely independ­ent and a few degrees brighter than her husband? It seems so, but who can judge?

For Prince Harry, like Princess Margaret­, there will never be the top job. That goes for his very attractiv­e, very “woke” American wife, too. And that’s a position — the position from the wings, as that old courtier Tommy Lascelles said to Princess Margaret on The Crown — from which only an ­assertion of will can achieve glamour and individuality. And why would the boy who walked behind the coffin of his mother, Princess Diana, not do her bidding?