The wedding, this weekend, of Britain’s Prince Harry and the American actress Meghan Markle has already generated a number of Pavlovian, and entirely predictable, responses.

A surprisingly large percentage of the American public takes an interest in the comings and goings of the British royal family—especially its marriages and (in recent decades) divorces—and this, in turn, reliably annoys that smaller portion of Americans who have no interest in the royals. They ask: Why should anyone, on this side of the Atlantic, care one way or another about the British royal family; and come to think of it, didn’t we fight a revolution in order not to have a royal family?