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March 25, 2021
Current Issue
Image of the March 25, 2021 issue cover.
<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/issues/2021/03/25/>
The Great Disenchantment: Harry, Meghan & the Monarchy
Matt Seaton
<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/contributors/matt-seaton/>
Thanks to this latest, very public family rift, more cracks are
appearing in the façade of the United Kingdom’s royalist consensus.
New York Review of Books, March 9, 2021
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Even by royal standards, the press and public relations broadside
delivered by Harry and Meghan in their interview with Oprah Winfrey this
past Sunday was impressive. This is praise, of a sort: for over a
century now, the Windsors have been in a class of their own for
providing spectacle, scandal, feud, tragedy, and disgrace—and doing very
well out of it. So it takes some chutzpah to trump all that—even if, for
many decades, the worst of the Firm’s snobbery, vindictiveness, and
chicanery was carried on behind a veil of pageant and respectability
held up by establishment deference and media compliance.
It has to hurt, though, when a prince (still sixth in line to the
throne) and his consort go on the world’s biggest talk-show franchise
and baldly call you racist. In 2021, is there enough ERII-branded livery
to counter that shade?
Of course, Harry was following the playbook his mother, Princess Diana,
developed—of cultivating media allies to counter the smears and spiteful
briefing of the Firm’s formidable press operation. “My family literally
cut me off financially,” he told Oprah. “I’ve got what my mum left me.
Without that, we never would have been able to do this… I think she saw
it coming.”
In that regard, too, the couple’s CBS appearance was simply an
escalation, not a radical departure. It takes its place in the long,
steady convergence of the Windsors with the Kardashians, or even,
indeed, with the Trumps—all now broadly belonging to a common genre of
celebrity-dynasty reality TV. And for all the show’s pseudo-revelations,
this episode was a great deal less scandalous and shocking than the
allegations laid against Ghislaine Maxwell and the late Jeffrey Epstein
that they sex-trafficked a seventeen-year-old for Prince Andrew’s
pleasure—an accusation only lent credence by his disastrous 2019 TV
interview.
Where Meghan and Harry scored palpable hits, though, was in nailing down
a sense of the Windsor family as aloof, superior, and chilly. Wittingly
or otherwise, the Sussexes succeeded in claiming to be victims of the
institutionally abusive culture of the court—a theme that aligns
precisely with the through-line of the Netflix original/The Crown/,
especially in the focus of later seasons on first Charles, then Diana.
The early seasons’ interest in retelling some of the true political
scandals—the Duke of Windsor’s treasonous plotting, the Duke of
Edinburgh’s potential part in a coup—has given way to a more prime
time-friendly study of adultery and emotional cruelty among the equine
classes.
For its part, the British press greeted the Oprah appearance with a
predictable blend of titillated schadenfreude and bad-faith indignation.
The UK media’s cake is all the sweeter for having-and-eating-it-too
because the warring royals story breaks the relentless grind of the
endless pandemic reporting that followed Brexit fatigue.
So, for now, this latest show made a very good season finale to the
storyline of the Sussexes’ alienation, and/The Windsors/soap opera still
looks like solid box office. But no series runs forever: public tastes
change, favorite actors/characters fall by the wayside, media markets
look for new, younger audiences. So what if, at some point not so far
off, the royals do not get recommissioned as value-for-money popular
entertainment?
The British monarch is very unusual among royalty worldwide for having a
constitutional role. And the monarch commands this position not only
within the British state, but across the British Commonwealth, that
polite vestige of empire. But if people—in the UK and beyond—should lose
interest in the show because of the toxic tawdriness of it all (so
opposed, after all, to the Firm’s official aura of courtly
sophistication), what then? If the Windsors were no longer boffo, what
would become of the British monarchy?
Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but the royal family is
especially unhappy in its unique way. And the author of/War and
Peace/would hardly need telling that, for this kind of aristocratic
family, the personal is supremely political—in world-historical ways.
So, at what point does the “Enchanted Glass” of the British monarchy, as
historian Tom Nairn called it, crack—and a disenchantment with the
institution’s flaws set in?
Already, back in the 1980s, Nairn described the marketing of the
Windsors as a “mass illusion of intimacy.” And this was a decade before
Diana’s description of her royal marriage as an involuntary ménage à
trois. No doubt, Nairn was thinking of the way the trinkets and street
parties of the queen’s 1977 silver jubilee conjured a grotesque
national-popular identification with the royal family that was wholly
hallucinatory. For Nairn, the enchanted glass was like a magical mirror
on the wall that told every Briton that their queen was the fairest of
them all—and this mystificatory feudal-fantastical fealty obliterated
any truer understanding of their place in Britain’s caste-like class
society.
This critique of the absurdities of title and rank rings true to me. I
am from Sussex, it is my county: Why are Harry and Meghan even the duke
and duchess of it? I’m not their serf, or even their tenant. I did not
elect them. What allegiance do I owe them? The French writer and
political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, in his observations on
America, made a compelling distinction between aristocratic and
democratic societies. His main reference points were the US and France,
but he was not ignorant of Britain.
In De Tocqueville’s scheme, the monarchy undergirded the way in which
Britain, after its brief seventeenth-century republic and subsequent
royalist counterrevolution, regressed to an uneasy compromise between
the aristocratic and the democratic. But, through the eras both of
bourgeois hegemony and proletarian contention, always the
aristocratic/style/predominated, thanks to a royalist consensus that
enabled class conciliation beneath the social hierarchy it ordained.
That is the Nairn thesis: Britain, never again a republic after its
abortive pre-Enlightenment, Puritan experiment, has—in genuflecting to a
monarch, defender no less of an established church—consented to the
people’s democratic infantilization, and a permanent postponement of
their more radical, egalitarian impulses.
In the twenty-first century, however, this long self-exile to the
sclerotic daycare system of Britain’s aristocratic society topped by
Buckingham Palace is coming to an end. Democratic adulthood beckons, and
the coming of age does indeed begin with disenchantment: the bewitching
magic of class, caste, court, and throne are dissolving. All that is
solid melts into air—even the crown.
What Tom Nairn called “Ukania,” an imaginary kingdom of England, Wales,
Scotland, and Northern Ireland, is coming apart. (His best-known earlier
book was presciently titled/The Break-Up of Britain/.) Parts of it are
hastening to embrace disunion, so far gone is the disenchantment of the
Scots and the Irish. In the wake of Brexit, both realms are likely to
consult their peoples in plebiscites in the near future—Scotland on
whether to go independent, Northern Ireland on whether to unite with all
Ireland.
It is true that the republican cause is a dead letter in England,
commanding no more than roughly 10 percent of public opinion in polling
surveys, and—pre-pandemic at least—many people’s livelihoods depended on
the tourism industry based on Britain’s royal heritage. But Scotland and
Northern Ireland do not need to avow republicanism to vote for
democratic self-determination. What is the constitutional monarchy of
Ukania if its realm shrinks to England and, reluctantly, restively,
Wales—how far then does the royal writ run?
Not much beyond the Sussex coast, in fact. Among the Commonwealth
countries, more former colonial subjects are moving to sever the ties
that make the mother country’s monarch their head of state: Barbados did
so last year; its Caribbean cousin Jamaica has signaled intent to do
likewise.
Historical drift is turning into political momentum. Britain’s monarchy
would need to come up with a very good reason for empire unionism, which
today may be a letter even more dead in UK politics than outright
republicanism. On the Oprah interview’s evidence, that doesn’t seem
likely to be forthcoming. Once upon a time, the queen could have sent
rebels to the Tower and the headsman’s block, even relatives—especially
relatives. But reactionary, racist mean-spiritedness probably won’t cut
it in this century.
Given the Brexit-related rise of English nationalism, that corner of
Ukania will not soon abjure its royalist instincts. But for the other
nations of the British Isles, the mask of monarchy has slipped, and the
misrecognitions of the enchanted glass are falling away. The
alternatives to England’s creaking constitutional compromise are newly
available and apparent. It may be worth recalling that the British
national anthem, “God Save the Queen”—as emphatic an endorsement of the
aristocratic view as one might wish to find—has a democratic counterpart
to the self-same tune: “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”
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