The custom of the Home Secretary bearing witness to the delivery of all royal infants was only discontinued after the birth of Princess Alexandra in 1936, by which time it was deemed to be redundant, qualified Court physicians being seen as equally safe preventatives to the smuggling in of illegitimate babies.
Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, royal infants were born at home rather than in hospital. The Queen’s four children were born at Buckingham Palace while Princess Margaret’s son was delivered at Clarence House, home of the Queen Mother, and her daughter at her own home, Kensington Palace. There was no secrecy. The medical professionals in charge were all known to the public.
This tradition extended into the next generation but for one important difference. Royal babies started being delivered in hospitals. The Lindo Wing of St. Mary’s Paddington in London became the favoured place. Once more, there was no secrecy. The royal mother was surrounded by medical staff, the senior doctors’ names being made public as a way of eliminating any suspicion of subterfuge. Although it is unlikely to have been common knowledge, this was an extension of the age-old practice whereby royal births were always publicly verifiable through unimpeachable witnesses. The public, after all, had a right to know that their potential monarch had a right to the throne, and both sets of rights were respected through the reinforcing presence of witnesses. This was true even under absolutist monarchies, hence why Marie Antoinette’s room was so stuffed full of courtiers at the birth of her first child that she grew faint from the lack of air, necessitating the removal of several of the witnesses. This might have been an extreme example, but the reality is, potential monarchs are living representatives of the people and, as such, a form of public property. Their provenance needs to be beyond doubt.
It was therefore contrary to all known custom for Harry and Meghan to decide that they would not be revealing the names of her medical team. This, they stated, was private. Their argument was that they were private individuals and, as such, entitled to the same degree of privacy as anyone else. This premise, of course, was simply not factual. Harry was sixth in line to the throne. A child born to him and his wife would automatically be seventh in the order of succession. William and Catherine sometimes travelled with their three children in the same aircraft something which no other heir to the throne had done before. Should the ‘plane crash, Harry and Meghan would be the heirs assumptive after Prince Charles. As the Queen was in her nineties, there was the presumption that sooner or later Charles would be king. But if he should die before the Queen, and the Cambridge family had been wiped out in an accident, that meant that Harry and Meghan would become the next Prince and Princess of Wales, with their child third in line to the throne. Once the Queen died, they would become King and Queen, their child its father’s immediate heir. The possibility was not so remote as to be beyond contemplation, which meant that their demands for privacy were spurious and unconstitutional.
Moreover, by creating a degree of opacity that had never before existed, Harry and Meghan were, whether through ignorance or obduracy was beside the point, feeding the rumours that she was not pregnant and that their expected child was being borne by a surrogate. Had Buckingham Palace wanted a worst case scenario to deal with, they would have been hard-pushed to invent one, and this, to the courtiers, meant that their lives were being made quite unnecessarily impossible for no better reason than that Harry and Meghan were putting their desires before the Crown and the Nation’s interests.
Bad as that was, Harry and Meghan then decreed that the baby would not be born in a hospital, but at home. There had been no home births for two generations. Not only was this bucking the trend, but it was adding a whole new layer of opacity to an already needlessly dark situation. Medical wisdom was that home births might be relatively safe for young mothers, but geriatric motherhood starts at twenty eight and Meghan was a decade older. Putting aside the political inadvisability of a home birth, Harry and Meghan were putting herself and the baby in unnecessary danger. ‘The whole thing was just insane,’ a courtier said.
Despite all of this, Meghan and Harry had decreed how they would disport themselves and they were not prepared to countenance any opposition. They continued to insist that they were private individuals who had a right to have their baby as and when and how they pleased. They wanted this time for themselves, and could see no
