Six weeks later, Prince Harry entered her life and her political world went straight to the back burner—though after their second date together she still registered her disappointment when Britain voted to leave the European Union, posting an Instagram snap of the famous placard “If EU leave me now, you take away the biggest part of me.” Fast-forward to February 2017, when a story appeared in US Weekly magazine revealing that Harry was not a fan of President Trump, not by a long shot.
The Sun newspaper went further, suggesting that Harry thought Trump “terrifying” and a “threat to human rights.” He supposedly called on the same words reportedly used by Trump’s secretary of state Rex Tillerson to describe the president of the United States: “A moron.”
While Kensington Palace refused to comment on anonymously sourced stories, alarm bells were ringing in Whitehall. By now, every diplomat in the world knows that Trump is a narcissist who bears a grudge. With Britain in a state of post-Brexit paralysis, Prime Minister Theresa May needed all the help she could get to land trade deals, and North America was a prime target.
The last thing she wanted was a popular prince taking potshots at the US president. Not that he seems to have noticed. When Trump was asked by Piers Morgan in a TV interview in January about the royal couple, he said he wasn’t aware if he had been invited to the wedding but wished the couple well. When Piers helpfully reminded him that Meghan was not a fan, accusing him of being a “divisive misogynist,” Trump seemed unruffled: “Well, I still hope they are happy.”
Closer to home, there were other ticklish decisions about whom to invite. While Meghan’s own family is fractured, there are also rifts in the royal family, which the wedding may help to heal. The Duchess of York, who is divorced from Harry’s uncle Prince Andrew, was not invited to the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. She later confessed to Oprah Winfrey that the snub left her feeling “so totally worthless.” A palace source indicated that this time around, Sarah Ferguson will indeed be going to the wedding of the year. “Harry and Meghan have total control over who goes to the wedding and there was never an issue at the Palace about Sarah being invited,” noted a palace official.
The thorny issue of the guest list—St. George’s Chapel can accommodate eight hundred—was just one of the items on their wedding agenda. As they had chosen the day of the FA Cup football final to say their vows, they had to ensure that William, as both president of the Football Association and Harry’s best man or supporter, was able to attend the nuptials before driving to Wembley Stadium in North London, where he would be meeting the teams and presenting the trophy.
Once that logistical headache was resolved, the couple went to Monaco, flying coach to see in the New Year with friends. Then Harry flew alone to Botswana as part of his work for the Rhino Conservation charity, leaving Meghan at Nottingham Cottage with her friend Jessica Mulroney, a bridal consultant who flew in from Toronto to help with arrangements. They had loads of ideas to discuss. As the wedding represents the symbolic union of two nations, there was debate how about best to integrate the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. Naturally Meghan wanted it to be classy—her favorite word—not cheesy. The flowers in the chapel, her dress, and even the tiara she will borrow from the queen’s collection were all ways of symbolizing the theme of two nations united.
When she visited the Chapel and looked around the magnificent fourteenth-century building, after pinching herself, she’d have been forgiven for perhaps wondering what it would be like to have her Emmy-winning father in charge of the lighting for the TV broadcast. With an expected audience of 2 billion, it would have been the biggest gig of his career—and no doubt he would have preferred to have a behind-the-scenes role. And what would he have thought about his Valley Girl daughter getting her own coat of arms? Fancy that.
One concern was aircraft noise. With so many aircraft taking off and landing from nearby Heathrow Airport, the world’s busiest, Meghan worried that the billions at home wouldn’t be able to hear the service. As many an American tourist has wondered, why on earth did they build Windsor Castle so near Heathrow? During the big day would air traffic control at least divert aircraft onto a different flight path so that everyone could hear her say, “I do”? The Civil Aviation Authority answered in the affirmative, agreeing to move all flights away from Windsor for “security and safety” reasons.
Meghan certainly wouldn’t be saying the traditional “love, honor, and obey,” as did the Duchess of York when she became Prince Andrew’s wife and Sophie Rhys Jones when she married Prince Edward. She will follow the lead of Diana and Kate, who promised to “love, comfort, honor, and keep” her royal spouse.
Decisions, decisions, decisions. The couple wanted to surprise their family and friends with “quirky and imaginative” elements. The Middleton sisters had led the way; in 2011 Catherine installed a posh ice cream van and burger stalls at Buckingham Palace for her evening reception, while her sister, Pippa, brought in table tennis tables for her nuptials. She played a match with tennis star Roger Federer, who then took on Catherine, William, and Harry.
As fun as all this was, the centerpiece for the last great royal wedding for a generation was Meghan’s wedding dress. Like every bride, royal or not, she wanted to keep the wedding dress secret, only unveiling the unique creation on the big day. With a royal bride, the chosen couturier goes to extraordinary lengths to keep the design and fabric under wraps. Sarah Burton, who designed Kate’s wedding dress, put up net curtains in her studio, changed the door code, and banned cleaners from the building. Other royal couturiers have burned samples and shredded pencil drawings to leave no clue for the beady eyed. For Meghan’s wedding dress the bookies’ favorite was the queen’s designer, Stewart Parvin, who made the wedding dress for Zara Phillips, daughter of the Princess Royal. Other runners and riders included Erdem, Roland Mouret, Victoria Beckham, and of course Stella McCartney.
In anticipation of Meghan’s final appearance on Suits and the royal wedding hoopla, Suits producers released a trailer for the climax of season 7, which featured Meghan in a wedding dress. After all the twists and turns of their relationship, Meghan’s character, Rachel Zane, was about to marry her on-screen lover, Mike Ross. This was indeed art imitating life, and the show’s producers knew that the ratings would be as happy and glorious as Meghan’s real-life affair.
While the world eagerly sought scraps of wedding information, this time Meghan wasn’t giving out any clues on her social media platforms as she had during the very early days of her royal romance. She had already closed The Tig the previous March, but in January 2018 she went further, closing all her social media platforms—Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook—and removing all her pictures and comments.
During their lifetime she had accumulated a substantial fan club, with 1.9 million followers on Instagram, 350,000 on Twitter, and 800,000 likes on her Facebook page. This decision outraged her fans, who began a petition to have the sites reinstated. The petition, which was started by Sabrina A., who also runs the website Meghan Maven, argued that by shutting down these accounts the royal family was cutting off the chance to reach an entirely new audience.
She has a point. The royal family’s website enjoyed one million more hits in the months after Meghan formally joined the royal family. After all Princess Beatrice, the Duchess of York’s eldest daughter, has a Twitter account, and other European royals, notably Princess Charlene of Monaco and Princess Madeleine of Sweden, have personal sites on social media. Then there is that other American princess, the former Sarah Butler, now Princess Zeid of Jordan, who has her own Twitter account, which focuses on worthy topics such as global learning, refugee relief, and disaster philanthropy. Her slogan is “Determined that mothers and newborns survive and thrive everywhere.”
In recent months, information regarding Meghan and Prince Harry has been shared through Kensington Palace and official royal family accounts. Eventually Meghan may want her own vehicle to promote her
work and chosen causes. Her fans argue that it should be launched via her existing base.
If she still had her social media accounts, she would have had a few choice words to say about the controversial decision by Simon Dudley, leader of the council borough that is home to Windsor Castle, asking the police to ensure that “aggressive” homeless beggars were removed from the castle surroundings before the big day.
His comments were described as inappropriate, and there were calls for his dismissal. Ironically the fight broke out in early January just as Megan was getting down to wedding details with Jessica Mulroney. As Meghan’s first-ever charity commitment was to the homeless in downtown LA when she was a teenager, and Jessica is cofounder of the Shoebox project, which has so far donated ninety-one thousand boxes of toiletries to homeless women living in shelters, there was no need for a hotline to Kensington Palace to gauge the reaction. Moreover, as both Prince William and his late mother are and were patrons of Centrepoint, the charity for youth homelessness, the council leader could not have picked a target more likely to arouse regal ire.
While the fight rumbled on, Meghan and Harry made their second joint official visit, touring the social enterprise radio station Reprezent 107.3 FM in Brixton, South London, home to many of the capital’s Afro-Caribbean community. As the excited crowd chanted, “We love you,” Meghan smiled, waved, and blew kisses. When the noise reached a ragged crescendo, she coyly put her hand in front of her mouth.
During her tour of the station, which trains hundreds of young people every year in media and related skills, the gender equality campaigner singled out presenter YV Shells, asking the twenty-four-year-old if he was the guy who supported women DJs, empowering women and creating a space that is not so male driven. “I think that’s incredible,” she said.
Inevitably, attention focused on what she was wearing—a £45 bell-sleeve black wool sweater, a staple from the midmarket Marks and Spencer clothing and food chain. It was a marked contrast to the £56,000 dress she wore for her engagement portrait.
On a walkabout outside, she met with American students Jennifer Martinez and Millicent Sasu from Baltimore. Jennifer approved of the American import: “She’s black, she’s white, she’s an actor, she’s American. She brings a bit of everything and has so many different qualities. She brings so much to the table.”
Not everyone thought so. During her time on the TV reality show Celebrity Big Brother, former member of Parliament and committed Christian Ann Widdecombe described Meghan as “trouble,” the former MP saying that she was “worried about the background and attitude” of Harry’s fiancée.
Matters got uglier as racist remarks made by the girlfriend of Henry Bolton, leader of the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party, were made public. In a series of text messages, glamour model Jo Marney told a friend that Meghan would “taint” the royal family with “her seed” and pave the way for a “black king.” She went on to say that she would never have sex with “a negro” because they are “ugly.” Many of the party’s front bench spokesmen walked out in protest when Bolton refused to quit.
He was eventually ousted after a vote by the party’s shrinking membership. The vote took place before the alarming revelation in February that an envelope containing a white powder and a racist letter was sent to Meghan and Prince Harry at Kensington Palace. While the white powder was deemed harmless, it brought back memories of the anthrax scares in the US a week after the 9/11 attack in 2001, when various senators and others were sent the deadly powder through the mail by, it was believed, an American biodefense scientist. This domestic terrorism left five dead and seventeen others affected by the anthrax spores, the incident so alarming that it enabled mischief makers to cause chaos and disruption for the price of a postage stamp.
The incident, which was officially treated as a race hate crime, was a further example, if any more were needed, that racial prejudice was still a potent issue in multiracial Britain. These sensitive subjects of race and color were issues that concerned those who wondered what happened inside the royal palaces once the cameras and microphones are switched off.
The answer is perhaps surprising: class rather than color is the great divider. Though the Duchess of Cambridge now seems part of the royal wallpaper, it wasn’t always the case. She has faced much more prejudice from those on the inside, the first commoner for four hundred years destined to be queen, than the biracial Californian. When she and William were students together at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, Kate was seen by royal courtiers simply as the girl who encouraged him to stay on when he had a well-publicized wobble in the first semester. She was viewed as a perfectly pleasant middle-class girl, who, at some point, would marry someone of her own class when she had finished her degree. When casual friendship morphed into romance, it is safe to say that royal courtiers were stunned. “She got in under the wire,” said one.
Once she started moving in his circle of aristocratic friends, she faced snide remarks and out-and-out bigotry. The focus was on her mother, who was raised in a council house in Southall and snagged a job working as a flight attendant: “Doors to manual” was the cry of William’s snooty pals. It didn’t help Catherine that, in the early days, William was sending mixed messages about her. His ambivalence gave others the chance to criticize and snipe. Not so Harry. From the get-go he was certain that Meghan was the one. No ifs or buts. It has left no room for anyone inside the palace to raise an eyebrow at his choice of bride—commoner or not. It is fair to say that eyebrows have remained studiously unraised. The lead has been taken from the top, and that lead has been entirely positive.
Indeed, even though she has only been officially engaged since November 2017, it is as if she has always been part of the family. Meghan has only made a handful of public appearances, but she is well on the way to being accepted as a bona fide National Treasure. By the time she traveled to Wales a week after her visit to South London, she was well into her stride, the slight reticence that had characterized her first couple of engagements replaced by a relaxed manner and a willingness to have fun, to go with the flow.
During their walkabout at Cardiff Castle—where Meghan exhibited spot-on sartorial diplomacy by sporting black jeans from the small Welsh brand Hiut Denim—Meghan described herself as a “super lucky woman” and even joked with two fans that the Welsh city would be a “fun” location for a bachelorette party. Unlike her first outing, she felt confident enough to pose for selfies, signed an autograph for one star-struck schoolgirl, and described her husband-to-be as a “feminist.” She was even presented with a wooden Welsh love spoon as an early wedding gift.
Meghan mania reached fever pitch by the time she and Harry arrived at Star Hub community leisure center in the economically deprived area of Tremorfa. Meghan was soon surrounded by youngsters desperate to meet her. They were given their cue by Harry, who told them: “Let’s all give Meghan a group hug!”
Her visit was a triumph, with even tabloid hacks going all misty eyed about her performance. “Centuries of royal traditions melted away as the US actress brought the warmth of modern celebrity to adoring crowds,” opined the Sun’s Jack Royston.
After the Cardiff visit Harry took Meghan on a short drive to meet the “other woman” in his life, his former nanny and companion, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who had mentored the princes following Diana’s divorce and subsequent death. For Meghan, who winces every time one of her own family opens their mouths, it was a chance to get to know and understand the woman who had such a striking impact on the upbringing of the man she was due to marry.
Though she would never meet Harry’s mother, reminders of her influence and presence were everywhere. Meghan’s first evening appearance was at Goldsmiths’ Hall in the City of London which, by extraordinary coincidence, was where Lady Diana Spencer also undertook her first evening engagement in the run-up to her wedding at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
A generation on and now Diana’s youngest son was taking his own bride-to-be. They were guests o
f honor at the Endeavour Fund Awards, set up by Harry’s Royal Foundation, to celebrate and honor the achievements of wounded, injured, and sick servicemen and servicewomen who have taken part in remarkable sporting challenges over the last year. A veteran of awards ceremonies, Meghan was cool and poised, unfazed when the envelope containing the winner of the award “celebrating excellence” went missing for a few seconds while her copresenter hunted for the errant piece of paper. “I am truly privileged to be here,” she told a specially invited audience of former service personnel and their families. Unlike Diana, who arrived for her first evening engagement in a low-cut dress that she almost spilled out of when she got out of the car, Meghan opted for a sleekly sophisticated Alexander McQueen trouser suit. The nineteen-year-old Diana would have surely been in awe of such confident self-assurance—in some ways, the groomed and camera-ready Meghan was the woman Diana always strived to become.
Yet much also connects them. Both women shared a humanitarian mission, albeit on a vastly different scale, both charismatic and glamorous, and both recognizing that they were invested with a power to do good in the world.
However, when Diana broke through the barriers of class and ethnicity on both sides of the Atlantic, her appeal as a celebrity lay as much in her vulnerability as her star status. She was all the more attractive because of that susceptibility, especially to women with unhappy marriages. Her social work, visiting those in hospices on their last lonely journey, was therapeutic, as healing for her as it was for those she comforted.
The word vulnerable does not immediately spring to mind when assessing Meghan’s many splendid qualities. Empathetic, certainly but also self-possessed, sophisticated, and poised, equally at home on a podium making a speech or on a photo shoot. She is a flag bearer for a new generation of confident, assertive women, determined to kick through the glass ceiling.
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