Commoner touch: Meghan Markle rings the royal changes
When Meghan Markle walks down the aisle on May 19, listen carefully for a low humming below the singing of the choir.
When Meghan Markle walks down the aisle at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle on May 19, listen carefully for a low humming below the singing of the choir. It will be the sound of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who are buried within the castle grounds, furiously spinning in their graves. While the duchess was the last American to marry into the royal family, her fate was the polar opposite to that of the charismatic Ms Markle. Their lives stand as vivid testimony to the changes in British society — and the House of Windsor — over the last two royal reigns.
The issue that binds and divides them is that of divorce. How differently they were treated: former actress Meghan, who divorced her film producer husband Trevor Engelson after less than two years of marriage, has been warmly welcomed into the royal bosom. She was invited to spend Christmas with the royal family at Sandringham even though she is not yet officially part of it, and she walked arm-in-arm with fiance Harry, chatting with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, as they left St Mary Magdalene Church after the Christmas Day service — ahead of the Princess Royal, the Duke of York and Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie towards the front of that hierarchical family procession. The duchess-in-waiting also received an oblique shout-out in the Queen’s Christmas broadcast.
By contrast, when King Edward VIII decided that he could not reign without, as he said in his famous abdication broadcast, “the help and support of the woman I love”, he and his future wife Wallis Simpson were effectively exiled from the realm. For the rest of their lives they were condemned to roam the Earth without purpose or plan — at various times living in Paris, New York, the Bahamas and the south of France — the British government turning a deaf ear to the Duke’s pleadings to be given a worthwhile job.
Though the decision to abdicate was his and his alone — “You are a damned fool” his future wife told him when the King broke the news — Wallis Warfield Simpson was singled out as the primary culprit in the constitutional crisis that gripped the nation in the dying days of 1936, the year Britain had three kings. The King’s mother, Queen Mary, considered her a “sorceress” for luring Edward Vlll from his destiny and duty; some senior government ministers thought her a Nazi spy; while high society gossiped that she had seduced the sovereign using exotic sexual techniques that she had learnt in the singsong houses of Hong Kong and Shanghai. “Venom, venom, venom,” countered the woman at the centre of the ugly speculation.
Fast-forward 80 years and the next American to marry a royal prince is already in danger of becoming a fully certified national treasure. Her radiating warmth, easy manner and beauty remind me of you-know-who; while her love of cooking at home in her “cosies” with a glass of wine in hand, and the fact that she’s a grafter (as a jobbing actress she did calligraphy to pay the bills) make her seem more down-to-earth than any other royal — despite also being a product of Hollywood. And though she has only smiled, shaken hands and, at Harry’s instigation, had group hugs at a handful of royal engagements, she has taken to this malarky as if to the manor born.
Coincidentally, both these Americans — Meghan, from California; Wallis from Baltimore, Maryland — met their future royal husbands when they were 34. At that time neither had much of a clue about the workings of the royal family or the country that would shape their lives. Meghan famously remarked in her engagement interview that she didn’t know much about Prince Harry before she met him for their first date at a private members’ club in central London in July 2016. Of course, the Suits actress knew the basic plot — second son of Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in a car accident in Paris in 1997 — but not much about the supporting cast, or the backstory.
Her ignorance was captured for posterity in October 2015 when she was asked, in a quick-fire quiz filmed for Hello! magazine in Canada, whom she preferred: Harry or William. She looked nonplussed and had to be prompted by the interviewer to choose the unmarried Harry rather than his attached older brother. “I don’t know ... Err, Harry, sure.” Around the time she met the man in question, she appeared on yet another televised Q&A — this time, on the comedy channel Dave to promote Suits — and was tested on her knowledge of Britain. She flunked out, gamely failing to identify the national animals of England, Wales and Scotland (correct answers: lion, dragon and unicorn) and looked bewildered when asked what “apples and pears” meant in cockney rhyming slang.
Wallis Simpson would have felt her pain. When she first arrived in London as the wife of Anglo-American shipping agent Ernest, whom she married in 1928 (having previously been married to Navy pilot Earl Winfield Spencer), she had no time for English people and didn’t understand the pitch of their humour, their love of military history, their pride in the flag and their passion for dogs and horses. When she met Edward, Prince of Wales at a house party in Leicestershire, hosted by his mistress Viscountess Furness in 1931, she still found the British a mystery, particularly the national fascination with the royal family. “That a whole nation should preoccupy itself with a single family’s comings and goings — and not too exciting ones at that — seemed to me incomprehensible,” she would later write in her memoir The Heart Has Its Reasons, published in 1956.
It was the fact that neither American was marinated in the minutiae of the monarchy that was half the attraction for their future husbands. In Wallis’s famous — if dubiously accurate — account of her first meeting with the Prince of Wales, she recalls that his opening conversational gambit concerned the dismay American visitors felt about the lack of central heating in English country houses. She retorted: “I’m sorry sir, you have disappointed me. The same question is asked of every American woman who comes to your country. I had hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales.” In the eyes of the future king, her sassy, irreverent response was a refreshing antidote to the deference he normally encountered.
Decades later, Prince Harry admitted that he had to up his conversational game when he first met Meghan. On the surface she is a sunny and uncomplicated California girl who claims to live by the ethos that “most things can be cured with either yoga, the beach, or a few avocados”, but beneath that she is a successful, even steely, career woman with a Hollywood CV and an impressive pedigree as a humanitarian, speaking at a United Nations women’s forum. As Meghan herself has said, “I never wanted to be a lady who lunches — I’ve always wanted to be a woman who works.”
Meghan would have been a rare bird in Wallis’s day. In that era the only pedigree that counted was family and finance. With an African-American mother and ancestors who worked as slaves on the cotton plantations of Georgia, the bi-racial actress would probably not have been countenanced by the snobbish socialite Wallis Simpson.
Until abolition in 1865, Wallis’s family, the Warfields, had built their various fortunes on the back of slave labour. Her third cousin, Edwin Warfield, who was elected 45th Governor of Maryland in 1903, gave several speeches in which he discussed “slavery as I knew it”. Though Wallis was a poor relation of the Warfield clan — largely because her father had died from tuberculosis when she was a baby, leaving her and her mother Alice reliant on a Scrooge-like uncle — she was still surrounded by black butlers, maids and other staff. In correspondence and in conversation, she used what would now be considered highly racially offensive language to describe African-Americans. As far as she was concerned, they were downstairs staff. She later confessed that the first time she had shaken the hand of a person of colour was on a walkabout during World War II, when the Duke of Windsor was Governor of the Bahamas.
On the subject of race, Meghan has been candid about some upsetting experiences in her past: when she was a baby, her mother, “caramel in complexion with a light-skinned baby in tow”, was often mistaken for a nanny, and once when Meghan was in college, she heard her mother being called the N-word during a road-rage incident. Later, as an actress, she says she “wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white ones, leaving me somewhere in the middle as the ethnic chameleon who couldn’t book a job”. Nonetheless she flourished in her acting career, just as she had done earlier in her education, studying theatre and international relations at the prestigious Northwestern University in Illinois.
In Wallis’s day, it was an oddity for a woman to attend college, and a positive rarity for a woman of colour to gain a degree, as Meghan did. Even though Wallis had, in her own words, a 24-hour photographic memory and sailed through school exams, the height of her ambition was to marry — and marry well. She spent her early adult life racing to find a husband, then rushing to divorce him. As her uncle Sol solemnly informed her in 1927, when she divorced her first husband, Spencer, who had turned out to be a moody alcoholic, Wallis was the first Warfield in 300 years to divorce. Ten years later, she divorced a second time, after a nine-year marriage to Ernest Simpson.
By contrast, in Meghan’s family, short marriages and quick divorces seem to be the norm. Her father Thomas, now 73, already had two children from a previous marriage when he met Meghan’s mother, Doria, on the set of a soap opera where they both worked — he as a lighting director and she a temp, 12 years his junior. They went on to have their daughter and they too divorced when she was six. Then in August 2013 Meghan ended her own two-year marriage to Engelson, swiftly, painlessly and discreetly, never divulging her reasons beyond “irreconcilable differences”.
Where Wallis and Meghan would recognise one another is in their unquestioned ability as networkers. Wallis’s social triumph was to import the American tradition of the cocktail hour, where her growing circle of mainly American friends dropped in for drinks and conversation for an hour or so in the early evening. The modern-day equivalent is Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the personal blog — and Meghan often used social media to speak to and post pictures of her famous friends. A voracious networker herself, she also used her lifestyle blog, The Tig, to communicate with other women she admires, such as Ivanka Trump, whom she went on to interview in 2014 and described as “staggeringly beautiful, no question, but so incredibly savvy and intelligent”. Her blog posts also conveyed her passion for food, travel, beauty and fashion, combined with her advocacy for women’s rights and gender equality, and give glimpses into her inner life. By the time she closed down her internet portals following her engagement last November, she had accumulated three million followers on Instagram alone.
Where Wallis, Meghan and Diana, Princess of Wales reign supreme is in the power of fashion. The short black “revenge dress” worn by the princess for a charity event in 1994 on the night the Prince of Wales admitted his adultery on television will go down in history as an iconic moment that defined their marriage and revealed her liberation as an independent woman.
Wallis also used her wardrobe as a weapon, her sleek, crafted style in sharp contrast to the homely fashions preferred by her enemy, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother whom she called “Cookie”, since she said she resembled a cook. What became known as the Windsor style — a neat but fluid silhouette — ensured she was able to elegantly display the jewellery showered upon her by her husband. She amassed such a collection that it made history when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s Geneva in 1987, a year after her death, fetching $50 million — a record for a single-owner jewellery collection at the time.
Meghan’s induction into the royal family is an opportunity to influence her new army of fans by wearing the labels of ecologically and ethically minded designers, as well as companies that have a philanthropic element in their business ethos. She is completely aware that anything she wears — be it make-up, clothes or jewellery — has an impact, which is why during her visit to Cardiff in January she carried a bag by DeMellier, a British label that funds life-saving vaccines through its sales, and a cruelty-free coat by Stella McCartney.
In their markedly different ways, Wallis Simpson and Meghan Markle have changed the monarchy, or at least the way the monarchy is perceived. The presence of Wallis arguably saved the country from a pro-German monarch during Britain’s darkest days at the beginning of World War II. Edward VIII’s decision to abdicate so that he could marry the twice-divorced American placed the burden of kingship on his younger brother, George VI, who together with the Queen Mother proved to be stalwart and steady. Meanwhile, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor sniped from the sidelines, secretly asking the Nazis to look after their homes in Paris and Cannes during hostilities. In the end, Wallis’s life was a frivolous and ultimately vacuous counterpoint to the House of Windsor, the victory of style over substance.
Yet while Wallis divided the nation, Meghan, simply by being herself — bi-racial, divorced and American, and certainly not from the upper classes — is a uniting figure. Her presence in the royal ranks demonstrates that the monarchy has become a more inclusive and down-to-earth institution than arguably at any time in its history.
Wallis in Love: The Untold True Passion of the Duchess of Windsor, by Andrew Morton (Michael O’Mara Books)
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