I‘m delighted, of course, by the news that Prince Harry, the Prince of Wales’s personable younger son, is now engaged to Meghan Markle, described by Wikipedia as an “American actress, model, and humanitarian.” I wish them both health and happiness.
Harry is fifth in line of succession to the British throne—and with the latest pregnancy of the Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William’s wife, swiftly receding as a candidate to be king. So Markle will undoubtedly become the duchess of something-or-other, but Great Britain is unlikely to have a Queen Meghan anytime soon.
The fact that Queen Elizabeth’s grandson intends to marry someone with a multi-ethnic background—Meghan Markle’s mother is black—has attracted a certain amount of comment, some of it unseemly. Of course, the British royal family is, itself, a polyglot mixture of European bloodlines, so her genetic background is especially irrelevant. What intrigues me is the fact that she is a) American and b) divorced, as recently as 2013. How times have changed.
Within living memory, after all, King Edward VIII was obliged to abdicate the throne because he wished to marry a divorced American, Wallis Simpson (1936). And just a generation ago (1955), the present queen’s younger sister, Princess Margaret, was forced to renounce her likely fiancée because he, too, had been divorced.
The late Group Captain Peter Townsend was not just a much-admired equerry to Margaret’s father, King George VI, but as a wounded squadron leader in the Royal Air Force had been a genuine hero of the Battle of Britain. Still, the Church of England of the pre-Beatles era was unwilling to countenance the marriage of a divorced person, especially to a member of the royal family.
So, in that sense, the engagement of Prince Harry is a milestone of sorts. The obstacle of an ex-colonial within the ranks of Britain’s monarchy is now being swept aside, and the stigma of divorce has been reduced to the briefest of footnotes. As it should be, in my view: Meghan Markle’s homeland survived intact the election of a divorced president (Ronald Reagan), and is now under the leadership of a twice-divorced chief executive. For that matter, Prince Harry’s father—heir to a thousand-year line of merry monarchs—was the first Prince of Wales to submit his marital status to the machinery of English law. Honesty is the best policy.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.
