The most remarkable thing about actress Meghan Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry is not that the princess-to-be is a woman of color—her mother is black, her father is white—or that she’s older than he is and has been married before. What’s really remarkable is that none of this would-be fodder for tabloid gossip seems to matter much anymore, and how the media-hounded Windsor family made that happen.
All the old attitudes—about race, remarriage, actresses—have evolved. With Prince Charles’s placid remarriage unremarkable by modern standards, it’s easy to forget the magnitude of the scandal that shrouded his grandfather King George’s accession to the throne, which happened only after King Edward VIII abdicated to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
Ms. Markle is not in line to be queen, as Mrs. Simpson would have been. But she is a successful working actress, which—as readers of Plato, Jane Austen, and P.G. Wodehouse know—classes her as an entirely different sort of commoner. Historically, anyway.
The royal family is obviously not impervious to social changes underway in the world. For so long, the dominant channel connecting them to the public was an adversarial press, one all too eager to uncover troubled relationships, from Princess Margaret’s affair with Peter Townsend in the 1950s to Charles and Diana and Andrew and Fergie in the 1980s. Princes William and Harry revealed in a recent documentary that they blame the media for Diana’s death in the 1990s.
But today, the royal family’s Twitter following more than doubles that of top tabloid the Sun. For now the feed is dominated by good wishes for Harry and Meghan Markle, with no shortage of photographs of the happy couple. The family has figured out that access to the Windsors themselves, these ceremonial objects of public attention, is what the people want. Less so the nuggets of gossip gleaned by a dying print media. And they’ve duly reclaimed the means of production. Tellingly perhaps, the Sun’s coverage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s engagement links to the official announcement from Clarence House and wonders about a wedding date, while the BBC’s coverage, meanwhile, more sharply nods to the historical significance of Ms. Markle, saying she “brings something different.”
But does she really? The most profound difference she brings is a calm and easy relationship with her own celebrity. And a respectable match for the former “party prince.” With a more or less unmolested remarriage of his own, plus the well-composed fairytale family of his first heir, the uncontroversial betrothal of his second to a previously married American actress cements Charles’s victory over the press.
