Any family, confronted with the possibility of a union which had the hallmarks of becoming problematic, would try to delay the ultimate commitment in the hope that time might bring insight and it would collapse under the weight of its unsuitability if that turned out to be the case. Both the Queen and Prince Philip had a good relationship with Harry. Philip is known within royal circles for being an accommodating pragmatist who will always try to find a way that reconciles royal duty with personal urges. In his eyes, there would be no better outcome than Harry and Meghan pursuing their relationship without matrimony until all the doubts were cleared up. And if they were not, Harry could still remain with Meghan, but without the ultimate commitment.
Harry knew that his grandfather was of a generation and persuasion in which marriage was not only about personal fulfilment but also about dynastic obligation. In the past, paramours had been people’s private business. A man could sleep with whomever he pleased, but marriage was another matter entirely. Issues such as duty to the nation and the family, as well as suitability, must be factored into any marital equation, and if you could not guarantee a positive outcome, you must resist the urge to marry. History was littered with awful warnings, such as the marriage of Prince Philip’s cousin Princess Ena of Battenberg to King Alfonso XIII of Spain, which ended in predictable misery and helped to undermine the Spanish Crown. But when a man gets the bit between his teeth, and wants to marry a woman, caution doesn’t always prevail.
It has been widely, and I gather accurately, reported that, when Harry brought up the subject of marriage to his grandparents, Prince Philip, already up-to-speed about why Meghan Markle would find it impossible to fit into the role of royal duchess without a personality transplant, pointed out to him that ‘we step out with actresses; we don’t marry them.’ This was not snobbishness on his part. The qualities that make an actress successful are the absolute opposite of those which make a good royal duchess, and there was no doubt in his mind that it would be unfair to both Meghan and the monarchy to expect her to fulfill a lifetime of royal duty with a fully developed personality at odds with the requirements of the royal role.
What has not been reported is the remainder of the conversation, which came to me via two different sources, one a close friend of the Queen, another a prince. Harry, desperately in love with Meghan and willing to do anything to keep her, discounted his grandfather’s suggestion with the intensity of an addict being threatened with deprivation. He informed his grandfather that he would be marrying Meghan no matter what.
In fairness to Harry, Meghan also wanted to marry him. She had also closed her eyes and ears to all warnings, such as given by Gina Nelthorpe-Cowne, about why she would find it impossible to make the adjustment from television actress to royal duchess. No one had actually envisaged a scenario in which she could marry Harry and, rather than adjust to her new situation, she would convince him to create a new one that suited her better, by abdicating their royal roles. So the three participants to the conversation had imagined only one possibility, namely Meghan adjusting to the royal role, when in fact there existed an alternative, Meghan and Harry abandoning their royal roles and inventing new ones for themselves.
A material fact in agreeing to the marriage was Harry’s place in the line of succession. Harry, the Queen and Prince Philip were aware that he would shortly be slipping down to sixth place once the Duchess of Cambridge’s third child, due in April 2018, was born. This position was crucial, for, following the repeal of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which was replaced with the 2013 Succession to the Crown Act, Harry was peripheral in the true meaning of the word. The likelihood of his succeeding to the throne was now so remote that withholding permission for any marriage, even one which might be problematic, would seem like an act of spite, or worse, prejudice.
The Queen likes consensus and is always extremely well briefed as to what is going on in the world as well as within her own family, so when Philip’s interdict raised the temperature, Elizabeth II intervened with the intention of lowering it. Harry did not even let her finish what she saying. He cut her off mid-sentence with the imprecation that he was ‘going to marry her and if you don’t like it, you’ll just have to suck it up.’ The Queen had never heard the expression before, nor indeed had I until the conversation was recounted to me, but I fully identified with her comment that ‘I didn’t need any explanation as to what it meant. As soon as I heard it, I knew.’
That, however, was not the end of the matter. The prince who recounted the conversation to me said that Harry then issued the coup de grace by telling his grandparents that they would be accused of racism unless they agreed to the marriage. Of course, Harry knew only too well that Meghan’s race was not a negative to the family, but a positive. But the public would not know that, so this was his ace in the hole. Faced with what the Queen’s grandmother Queen Mary called ‘a fine kettle of fish’, Elizabeth II and Prince Philip had no option but to give way to their determined grandson. ‘We all only hope to God it doesn’t turn out to be the catastrophe everyone fears it will be,’ the prince said.’
The family’s great fear was that, aside from Meghan’s unsuitability for the royal role, she loved what she
