It will be interesting to see at which point in her development Meghan switches from acquisitiveness to preservation. To date, Meghan has moved from a No Money world to a New Money then an Old Money one when she married Harry. She and Harry have set about joining the Real Money world, in the stated hope of making enough for them to end up with having Real Money. Old Money, New Money, No Money and Real Money all have distinguishing features, and each has impacted upon the couple’s lives.
Old Money has the grand houses, castles, and palaces that are stuffed full of chattels which would seriously deplete the bank accounts of New Money and even make a dent with Real Money, should they be able to buy the items which are seldom if ever for sale. Old Money might not have readily realisable assets, but what they have is an accumulation of riches, now mostly in everything but cash, which New Money can only replicate, in a contemporary setting, by consuming its funds in a latter-day version of the real thing. Old Money also has some things that New Money and Real Money cannot buy. It has history, tradition, and breeding. These can be very discomfiting to a newcomer like Meghan, for the one thing that someone like her would find difficult is relating to people who, because of their heritage, are so unconsciously themselves that they wear their every advantage lightly and take no one, including themselves, too seriously. This conflicts with neophytes who are far more conscious of themselves and invariably take themselves far more seriously.
The philosophical differences between Old Money and New Money are at the root of many a misunderstanding. Several of Harry’s friends have confirmed that Meghan never fitted in with his old crowd. Not only did she not fit in, but she pointedly made no attempt to do so. From the very outset, her attitude was, ‘This is me. I am inflexible. I bend to no one.’ It is ironic that she would have had this attitude, bearing in mind that she had gone out of her way to scale the heights of Canadian society, and had done so successfully by doing her utmost to fit in. But there are differences between the upper reaches of Canadian and British society. Canadians of all classes are more similar to their American counterparts than to the British. They are also more simplistic than the British. Here, use of language, pronunciation, phraseology, body language, overt and unstated demeanour are radically different. If you are an American or Canadian who is authentically yourself, you will fit in without any difficulty into all strata of society in Britain. On the other hand, if you are a personality whose development has been as self-conscious as Meghan’s, the only class in Britain into which you will fit comfortably is the arriviste. This is because all other segments of the British population are renowned for their adherence to the mores of the worlds in which they function, with only the arriviste adopting new modes of behaviour and the attitudes to go along with their newfound status.
Had Harry been an entrepreneur who had started out in a council house in Dagenham prior to making a fortune and acquiring the trappings of wealth while remaining proud of his working class roots, or had he done a Cecil Parkinson and replaced his ordinary origins with a ‘classy’ persona, Meghan would have been perfectly at home in Britain, and would have found both scope for and comfort in her new way of life. She would then have lacked the option of returning to her birthplace as a great star, and would doubtless have settled in a way she never did as a royal. Meghan’s revulsion against Harry’s friends was not surprising once you realised what her origins and interests were. Although she was really of the No Money category, she had had enough worldly success to have acquired New Money tastes and attitudes, all fuelled with a generous amount of self-awareness. Meghan was intelligent enough to realise that Old Money, whether in the US or the UK, generally finds many of New Money’s practices vulgar and crass, and therefore unpleasant to be around.
New Money, on the other hand, finds what it regards as the prissiness and restraint of Old Money constraining, tiresome, and boring. It is also seriously disconcerted by the sudden way Old Money often lapses into unrestrained political incorrectness, riding roughshod over New Money’s treasured politically correct attitudes. Inevitably the values of these two worlds collide, and there is no doubt that they did with someone as dogmatically woke and politically correct as Meghan. Of special objection to her was their relish for the traditional country lifestyle, with its emphasis on blood sports; but worst of all, their supreme distaste for personal publicity. Also odious to a luxury-loving fashionista like Meghan was their tolerance of personal discomfort, born of their lifestyle’s activities such as hunting, fishing, shooting, and stalking, not to mention the tendency for their houses to be seriously under-heated. This, of course, was because Old Money homes are usually so large (a small house might be thirty rooms, a large one two or three hundred) that only the rooms the family uses on a regular basis will be heated constantly. Even when you stay in beautifully appointed castles like Naworth, you walk from one warm room to another via something on the more Arctic side. Old Money understands that comfort is always relative, that each individual must sacrifice some of what he would prefer in an ideal world if he is to retain the endowments good fortune has provided him with in this one. New Money does not accept like trade-offs like this, the New Age concept of Having It All being something it lives by, or at the very least, aspires to. Old Money would never waste its time on trying to
