July 1, 2025 • 43 mins
There are three notable people missing from the May 2023 coronation of King Charles III: Wallis Simpson, Diana Spencer, and Meghan Markle. These three outsiders each fell in love with a member of the royal family during different eras, created scandalous headlines, and ultimately challenged the monarchy’s core beliefs and enduring values. They offer a keyhole into the inscrutable inner workings of the royal family and provide a new perspective on what the monarchy could stand for in a modern era.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Introduction. There are two radically different ways to think about
King Charles the Third's coronation in London in the spring
of twenty twenty three. The first is that this great,
frothy spectacle was a bomb to the world's agitated soul,
a welcome expression of stability and tradition in a tumultuous time.
(00:30):
Britain's beloved Queen Elizabeth had died after more than seventy
years on the throne, and her son had seamlessly taken
her place, without a revolution, without a power struggle, without
even so much as a fuss.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
I think it was in keeping with everything it should
be a mix of tradition and current. I mean, this
goes back to the sixteenth century and were mustn't forget that.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
More than that, this ancient ceremony in which the British
monarch is anointed with holy oil, was a signal of
continuity during a time of bewildering change and turmoil, not
just in Britain but around the world. Elected officials come
and go, Governments might rise and fall, the political contract
might tear itself to pieces. But except for a spot
(01:17):
of regicide and non royal government rule in the sixteen hundreds,
the British monarchy was still going strong after more than
a millennium. The second way of thinking about the coronation
(01:57):
was that it was completely ludicrous. Man sits on chair
was the way the satirical magazine Private Eye described it
that illustrated the viewpoint that the whole thing, said to
cost more than one hundred million pounds, was an exercise
in anachronistic pomp and superfluous circumstance. Charles's throne was from
the fourteenth century a wooden structure built for King Edward.
(02:21):
The first nestled within it was something called the Stone
of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, a
massive nearly three hundred and fifty pound rock that was
used for centuries in the coronations of Scottish kings. Seized
by the English King Edward the First after the Battle
of Dunbar in twelve ninety six, the stone was returned
(02:41):
to Scotland seven hundred years later. There it remained until
Charles's coronation, and there it was returned when the coronation
was over. The ceremony also required Charles for some reason
to put on two different crowns, one containing a room
be said to have been worn by Henry the Fifth
(03:02):
At Agincour, he carried a scepter called the Rod of
Equity and Mercy. He traveled back to Buckingham Palace from
Westminster Abbey in a horse drawn carriage known as the
Gold State Coach, which no one likes because it has
no suspension and no air conditioning or heating, and is
notoriously uncomfortable. Queen Victoria criticized what she called its distressing oscillation.
(03:26):
King William fourth, a former naval officer, compared riding in
it to being tossed in a rough sea. Nonetheless, it's
part of the tradition. The ceremony also included not one,
not two, not three, but four separate jewel studded swords,
the sort of State symbolizing royal authority, the sort of
(03:47):
temporal justice symbolizing the monarch's role as head of the
armed forces, the sort of spiritual justice symbolizing his role
as defender of the faith, and the sword of Mercy,
with its tip blunted, symbolizing his mercy. The leader of
the House of Commons, Penny Mordant, resplendent in a bespoke
teal dress with a cape and gold detailing over the
(04:10):
shoulders like epaulets, spent much of the ceremony holding one
or another of these eight pounds swords aloft in front
of her, like something out of Wagner or Game of Thrones.
For me, it mostly conjured the movie Monty Python and
the Holy Grail, the scene in which a bunch of
peasants argue with King Arthur about why he gets to
(04:30):
be king.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
The lady of the lake, her arm clad in the
purest shimmering semite, held aloft excaliba from the bosom of
the water, signifying by divine providence that I Arthur was
to carry excaliba. That is why I'm your king. Listen,
strange women lying in ponds distributed sword is low basis
(04:51):
for a system.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Of government the peasants in the movie, though obviously fictional,
reflected a bait that has become more urgent as the
years go on. In real life, there's a large Republican
movement in Britain, and on the day of King Charles's coronation,
a number of its representatives were out protesting during not
by durg not by during no. While a majority of
(05:14):
people in the country still say they're in favor of
the monarchy. A poll taken in the spring of twenty
twenty three found that the number dropped precipitously among younger people.
It found that support for the monarchy among people aged
eighteen to twenty four had reached an all time low.
Just thirty two percent said it was good for the
country and let's not forget the Irish and their bitter
(05:36):
history with British monarchs. In The Irish Times in twenty
twenty one, the writer Patrick Frayne had articulated the national
viewpoint with one of the most bracing opening paragraphs I've
ever read in a newspaper article. It said having a
monarchy next door is a little bit like having a
neighbor who's really into clowns and has dabbed their house
(05:59):
with clown murle, displays clown dolls in each window, and
has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown
related news stories. It went on to say, more specifically,
for the Irish, it's like having a neighbor who's really
into clowns, and also your grandfather was murdered by a clown.
Whatever you think about the monarchy, if you watched the
(06:22):
coronation that day, and in Britain alone, more than fifteen
million people tuned in in real time. You could not
help but notice who was not present for the celebration.
There were two women missing, Two women who each in
their time had been welcomed into the British royal family
as a breath of fresh air, as new arrivals who
(06:43):
would bring light and openness and popular appeal to this
musty old institution. The first missing woman was Diana, the
former Princess of Wales and King Charles's first wife. She
died in nineteen ninety seven, one year after the bitter divorce,
a horrific end to what had begun as a joyous
(07:04):
fantasy promoted as a real life royal fairy tale. In
her place was the woman Diana had famously referred to
as the Rottweiler, Charles's longtime mistress, formerly known as Camilla
Parker Bowles, the woman who'd helped wreck Charles and Diana's
marriage and now his wife. There she was sitting on
(07:27):
the throne that originally had been intended for Diana. The
ceremony made no mention of the late princess, whose two
sons with Charles William and Harry were right there in
Westminster Abbey watching their stepmother being crowned queen. Not even
Queen Consort, which had been the original plan cooked up
by the Palace to appease diana partisans, but straight up Queen.
(07:50):
It was as if Diana had been erased from history.
The second missing woman was Megan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex,
the very much alive wife of Prince Harry, Charles's younger son.
Meghan had very conspicuously stayed behind at the couple's house
in Montecito, California, with their two children and their menagerie
(08:13):
of rescue dogs and chickens. Only five years after her
marriage to Harry. She'd become such a hated figure in
Britain that there was really no point in her coming
at all. Prince Harry was there, however, seated in a
dubious position in the third row of the abbey, between
the husband of one of his cousins and an elderly
relative named Princess Alexandra. In any case, he was almost
(08:37):
entirely obscured by the large feather atop the military hat
protruding from the head of his aunt, Princess Anne, part
of the costume for her ceremonial position at the coronation,
an ancient job with the almost unparsable title of gold
Stick in waiting. In addition, there was a third woman
(08:57):
hovering in the ether, a kind of ghost, mosely forgotten
character who had long since been written out of the
family narrative, but who had once had a starring role
in the royal drama The Duchess of Windsor, once and
then again known as Wallace Simpson, the American divorcee whose
scandalous affair with King Edward the Eighth in the nineteen
(09:18):
thirties had led him to abdicate from the throne. For
many years, it was Wallace, the so called woman who
had stolen the King, who is possibly the most hated
woman in Britain. How did we get here and why
are these absences even notable? What does all of this
say about the monarchy at this delicate moment as a
(09:39):
throne passed from Queen Elizabeth to King Charles. If you
look at these three women, one of the things that
connects them is Queen Elizabeth. All of them, in their
different ways, were defeated by her.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
This is BBC News from London.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Buckingham Palace has announced the death of Her Majesty, Queen
Elizabeth the Second.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
When she died in the fall of twenty twenty two,
Elizabeth Second was ninety six. She'd reigned for seventy years,
longer than any British and Commonwealth monarch in history. In
many ways, the legitimacy of the British monarchy rested on
the things that she represented duty, stability, discretion, longevity, history,
(10:22):
and tradition. She'd been on this throne for so long
that it sometimes felt like she would be there forever.
She seemed essential not just to the twelve hundred year
story of the English monarchy, but also to Britain's own
identity and to much of the world's understanding of its
more recent history. In the last half of her reign,
(10:46):
Elizabeth's vision for the monarchy had been buffeted by forces
beyond her control and maybe beyond her understanding. The first
of these forces was the erosion of the media's traditionally
automatic deference to the monarch and the attendant public explosion
of damaging personal stories about members of the family, stories
(11:07):
that regular people treated as episodes in an ongoing reality show.
Throw in social media, and with it the increasingly voluble
democratization of opinion. This expanded and complicated the conversation around
the monarchy, making it more vulnerable to the fickle vicissitudes
of public opinion. The third destabilizing factor came from within
(11:31):
the royal family itself, with the arrival of outsiders Wallace, Diana,
and Megan, whose presence threatened Elizabeth and by extension, the
monarchy's core beliefs and enduring values. The scandals precipitated by
these women punctuated the Queen's reign, Wallace before she took
the throne, Diana in the middle of her reign, Megan
(11:53):
at the end, and Elizabeth and her unshakable view of
the royal family's purpose and responsibility in British life dictated
the monarchy's response. I got to thinking about all this
in the awful spring of twenty twenty one. The world
was limping into the second year of the global pandemic.
(12:15):
We were mostly still stuck at home, fretting about political
discord and climate change and COVID and racial inequity. In
what the future, if there even was one, would look like.
We were desperate for diversion. We needed a way out
of our own anxious heads and our own tedious problems.
That might help explain why more than forty nine million
(12:38):
people around the world, some eighteen million of them in
the US alone, turned on their television sets on the
night of March seventh, twenty twenty one, to watch Oprah
Winfrey interview an aggrieved thirty six year old englishman and
his aggrieved American wife. Obviously, I'm not counting everyone who
saw the interview or excerpts from it on streaming platforms
(13:01):
or social media later on.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
Thank you both for trusting me to share your story.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Thank you for giving us the space to do it.
Thank you. Before her marriage to Prince Harry, then six
in line to the British throne, Megan Markle was an actress, blogger,
and social media influencer who'd racked up an impressive million
followers on Instagram. She was a star of Suits, a
guilty pleasure TV drama where she played a hot paralegal
(13:29):
who works her way up the ladder to become a
hot lawyer. Hi, I'm Rachel Zane. I'll be giving your orientation. Wow,
you're pretty good. You've hit on me. We can get
it out of the way that I am not interested
in it. But never mind all those things. In this interview,
Megan was just a girl sitting with a boy telling
a woman and the entire world how unfairly they'd been treated.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
There has not been an agreement. You don't know what
I'm going to ask now, and there is no subject
that's off limits, and you are not getting paid for
this interview.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
All that's correct, And what an explosive story. It was
a tale of epic love and bitter resentment, of pride
and prejudice and racism, of following tradition and chafing at
its limitations, of an ancient monarchy riven by modern preoccupations.
It was a tale being misunderstood, mishandled, and mistreated by
(14:27):
one of the world's most rigid, scrutinized, gossiped about anachronistic
and opaque of institutions, the British Royal family.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
Were you silent or were you silenced? The latter? So
when I asked the question why did you leave, the
simplest answer is.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Lack of support and lack of understanding and a tale
of hurt feelings over Let's be honest here, Details like
whether Meghan offended her sister in law, the former Kate
Middleton and the future Queen of England, or whether in
fact it was Kate who had offended Meghan who made
who cry in an incident over Meghan's bridesmaids stresses. Honestly,
(15:13):
why was this even an issue? It made me cry
and it really hurt my feelings.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
So all the time the stories out there you had
made Kate cry, You knew all along, and people around
you knew that wasn't true.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Everyone in the institution knew it wasn't So why didn't
somebody just say that? It's a good question. And then
came the most incendiary thing of all. Meghan said that
the royal family, or at least one member of it,
she didn't say who it was, had openly speculated about
what color skin her first child would have.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
There is a conversation to hold it, hold up conversations.
There's a conversation about how dark your baby is going.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
To be potentially and what that would mean.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Or look like.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Oh, these were shocking things to utter out loud from
inside a family that hates more than anything to talk
publicly about itself. If the Brits is a nation are reserved, stiff,
upper lipped, and unwilling to discuss their feelings about private
or family matters. All those cliches, then members of the
British royal family are even more buttoned up exaggerated versions
(16:19):
of that archetype, as we now know with the publication
of Harry's best selling memoir Spare. The Oprah interview was
just the first and most explosive stop in what would
essentially be an ongoing multi year grievance tour by Harry
and Meghan. It's had the effect of somewhat deluding the
urgency of their complaints. They told their story to Oprah,
(16:42):
but they also told it to the British TV journalist
Tom Bradby of ITV News, and to assorted other sympathetic
interviewers on both sides of the Atlantic, and they told
it in a six part Netflix series. Megan talked about
it while interviewing other people on her own podcast, which
she described as invest mistigating, dissecting, and subverting the labels
(17:02):
that try to hold women back. Harry talked about it
on another podcast, the popular and much listened to Armchair Expert,
hosted by the actor Dax Shepherd. But when they sat
down with Oprah. Nobody had seen or heard anything like
this before. To witness this couple uttering these things publicly,
(17:22):
intimate details about who said what to whom and who
did what behind closed doors. The neglect, the bullying, the
racism was shocking.
Speaker 5 (17:33):
Outside Buckingham Palace, the world's media digest the enormity of
it all. A suicidal senior royal left unsupported accusations of
racism and a family splintered. But will it signal a
new dawn for an institution seen as a symbol of
British values?
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Where were you when the Oprah interview aired? Where were
any of us? In early twenty twenty one? I watched
it on my laptop, dressed in a pair of sweatpants,
wearing a pair of headphones, at home in Brooklyn, New York,
where I was hold up for much of the pandemic.
I also helped cover the interview as it was happening
as one member of a huge royal reporting team at
(18:13):
the New York Times, where I've worked for more than
thirty years. This was a huge story for us, for everyone, really,
the hugest royal story in many years. As strange as
that may be to believe. The thing about the royal
family that we all noticed as we watch this is
that it expects outsiders who join it, the people who
(18:36):
marry into it, to seamlessly embrace its traditions and values
and wardrobes and activities, while relinquishing their own lives and identities.
They have to erase their individuality in service of the
greater whole. Sometimes it can remind you of the Borg
collective in Star Trek, the next generation gobbling up all
(18:59):
interlopers and independent thinkers and putting them in thrall to
one giant, all encompassing brain.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been is over.
From this time forward, you will service us.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
It was shocking to witness this, like hearing a disturbing
cry for help from inside a fortress. But it wasn't
the first time. Megan wasn't the first modern royal wife
who'd been bewildered by what she'd married into, and she
wasn't the first to say so publicly. In fact, something
very like Meghan and Harry's interview had happened twice before.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
My conversation with the Duke, and that just took place
at their house in Paris and the Buas de Boulogne,
twenty minutes by car from the center of the city.
What do you make of young people today? I think
they look like they're having dyo fun mysel.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
The first public royal interview of this kind took place
nineteen seventy and it was significant almost for what was
left out as for what was said. It featured the
Duchess of Windsor, the former Wallace Simpson, a brittle, dark
haired American divorcee who in nineteen thirty six had precipitated
the most explosive constitutional crisis in modern British history. That
(20:19):
was when her lover, King Edward the Eighth renounced the
British throne, relinquishing his title and consigning himself to permanent
exile in order to marry her. They had lived a
life of continual resentment and mostly public silence, but more
than three decades into their marriage, the couple submitted to
an interview with the BBC to discuss their years of
(20:41):
bitter banishment. For many of the Britons who watched the program,
it was the first time they'd ever heard Wallace Simpson's voice.
Fast forward to nineteen ninety five. This was when the
second of the Royal TV interviews took place.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
When no one listens to or you feel no one's
listening to you, the things stought to happen.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
That was when Diana, the Princess of Wales and the
wife of Prince Charles, then heir to the throne, made
a surprise appearance on British television. It was an interview
whose incendiary revelations were as explosive as its inception had
been secret. She delivered a searing indictment of her husband
and the entire Windsor family, the Queen, Prince Philip, the Palace,
(21:25):
the whole royal industrial complex. That's when we learned about
the firm, the name that Diana Riley gave to the
royal family. At the time, the Princess was perhaps the
most photographed, the most glamorous, and the most famous woman
in the world. Her life and marriage were the subject
of intense feverish interest. By then, she was also formally
(21:48):
separated from Charles and trying to lay the groundwork for
a favorable financial settlement in their inevitable divorce. The story
Diana told was shocking and devastating. It was an account
of crippling insecurity, of mental distress, of bulimia, of self harm,
of suicide, attempts and cries for help that always went unanswered.
(22:11):
Diana spoke of a husband who had never loved her
and was openly sleeping with someone else, and of a
family of royal in laws who didn't care, didn't understand,
and even openly mocked and shamed her. Diana's interview represented
the first time in the modern history of the British
monarchy that a member of the royal family, let alone
(22:34):
one who was so prominent, had openly discussed topics this
personal and this sensitive. And it was the first time
an individual member of the family had directly blamed not
just particular people, but the royal establishment, the system itself,
which brings us back to the Megan and Harry interview.
(22:54):
Even in a world convulsed by grave existential problems, the
couples exit from Britain and rupture from the royal family
became a major global news story, one that's still unfolding.
Wallace Diana Meghan. Each of the three interviews was specific
to its time. Wallace's was old fashioned, formal, quaint, reserved,
(23:20):
even kind of boring, but it reflected a lifetime of
pent up grievance and indignation that had calcified into delicate
self defensiveness. Diana's interview was calculated and also heartfelt, at
once an epic cry of pain and an artfully crafted
salvo in a long war with her in laws. Meghan
(23:43):
and Harry's conversation with Oprah was a triumph of pr
a cinematically choreographed whirligig of victimization and empowerment done in
the maw of media and social media attention. All three
raised the same question, a question that would be amplified
by the death of the queen. What is the point
(24:03):
of the monarchy? Is it sustainable into the twenty first century?
What happens next? Another question, and when I've often asked
myself ever since I began covering this subject, is why
do we care so much? I spent nearly two decades
as a correspondent in the Times of London office from
(24:23):
nineteen ninety five to twenty thirteen. Because of England's special
role in American history, and by virtue of the fact
that we share sort of the same language, the UK
is both very like and very different from the US.
The British both envs and feel superior to us. We
in turn have an uneasy and unresolved relationship with them.
(24:47):
For an American reporter, the country is an endlessly fascinating subject.
From London, I covered elections and natural disasters, riots and
media scandals, the downfall of the post th to write
Tory Party, and the rise and fall of Tony Blair
and New Labor. I covered the era of Cool Britannia,
(25:08):
the country's involvement in the Iraq War, the beginnings of Brexit,
the rise and fall and resurrection and final defenestration of
Prime Minister Boris Johnson. I also wrote about culture, books
and plays and movies, and did quite a bit of
reporting in Western Europe, so I was very busy. There
was a lot of news, so it was interesting and
(25:31):
honestly slightly perplexing to experience the never ending, ravenous appetite
for stories about the royal family whenever I traveled back
home to New York. What did people want to talk
about the royal family? Back then? It was all about
Princess Diana. Had I ever met her? What did I
think of her? Was she a tragic victim or a
(25:53):
pathological narcissist or maybe a bit of both. The answers were, yes,
I had met her, and yes she was a very
complicated person. They also wanted to hear what I thought
about Prince Charles and Camilla. Wasn't he a bit of
a blowhard or maybe a little dim and boring? And
how likely was it that she would ever be queen?
(26:15):
Very likely? As it turned out, she is now Queen Camilla.
More recently, I've been asked, is it possible that Prince
Harry was in fact the child of Captain James Hewitt,
the hunky officer his mother Diana had an affair with
back in the nineteen eighties. After all, both have red
hair and they do look vaguely alike. The answer to
(26:36):
that question is no, The timing of the affair doesn't
work out. And what about Kate? Is William cheating on her?
She seems so perfect? But have you ever noticed she
never says anything interesting, and that no matter where she
is or what she does, she is always always smiling.
Interest in the Royal family runs along two tracks, and
(26:58):
it's sometimes hard to separate rate one from the other.
On the surface, it's clearly gossip. The labyrinthine interpersonal dynamics,
the spats, the feuds, the clothes, the public appearances, the
banal public remarks, the speculation about private conversations and private feelings.
(27:19):
But deeper down there are serious questions about what all
this means for the future of Britain. How can a
modern country move ahead when its system of government is
inextricably tied to such an archaic, hereditary institution. How much
can the royal family modernize, especially when one of its
features is its anachronistic appeal for better or worse. The
(27:43):
British public cares deeply about these questions, and so does
much of the rest of the world. My time in
London was bookended by royal stories. I reported for duty
in the thick of the Princess Diana era, when her
crumbling marriage was the subject of daily newspaper specula. Her
explosive TV interview took place only a few months after
(28:04):
I got to London, and then, nearly two decades later,
with my bags packed and most of my worldly possessions
in boxes ready to be shipped home, I had to
delay my trip because Kate William's wife was about to
give birth to their first child. My last days in
London were spent waiting for this new baby to arrive
a perfect mix of importance and absurdity. As far as
(28:27):
news coverage went, as the always deadpan magazine Private Eye
described it on its front cover Woman as Baby. In
between the bursts, the marriages, the divorces and the deaths,
there were other stories royal events and royal scandals. Charles Still,
the Prince of Wales, gives a speech denouncing modern architecture.
(28:50):
Britain's modern architectural establishment erupts in horror. Prince William goes
to college, the press goes crazy. Prince Harry is photographed
at a cost party wearing a Nazi uniform. Everyone is upset.
Prince Edward, attempting to earn a living, makes some bad documentaries.
Everyone finds them funny. Princess Diana sues a newspaper for
(29:14):
publishing photographs of her doing thigh exercises in a leotard
at the gym. I could go on and on. These
were some of the actual things that actually happened and
were considered worthy of actual coverage, But more often than not,
many royal stories circulating in the press are based on
hearsay and conjecture. For example, Charles supposedly tells someone how
(29:39):
he felt about some political issue or other that he's
not supposed to have an opinion on, or people behind
the scenes are said to be trying to plant positive
stories about Camilla in the press, or Kate is offended
that she could only invite a few members of her
family to Charles's coronation whereas Camilla got to invite a
(30:00):
of her family members. Then they are the follow up
stories about how the public feels about these people based
on the stories published about them, or based on their
own uninformed opinions, the way we might think about a
reality TV show. The real royals of Buckingham Palace. Often
(30:21):
what we in the foreign press were covering back then
when I lived there, in effect, was how the other
news media, particularly the tabloids, covered these things that they
themselves had only a shadowy grasp of. This meant that
when real events happened to the royals, like when Sarah Ferguson,
the Duchess of York, got caught on camera having her
(30:41):
toes kissed and maybe sucked by one of her lovers,
these had outsize importance because they provided the meat on
which the tabloids could then justify their buffet of gossip.
A lot of coverage is driven by the royal's own
obsession with their relationship to the press, the push and
pull between transparency and privacy, between deference and the desire
(31:04):
to get the story and sell the copies, and a
lot of it has to do with behind the scenes
courtiers trying to promote their own members of the royal
family at the expense of the others. It was actually
pretty fun to be on the royal beat. Covering the
British monarchy isn't like writing about a normal topic, and
(31:24):
the normal rules do not apply. First of all, they
the actual members of the family, are not going to
talk to you, even privately, even off the record in public.
If they do say something, it will almost certainly be
so innocuous as to be meaningless. Full of platitudes. There
are words to quote, but not much of anything newsworthy
(31:47):
behind them. Royal appearances are tightly controlled and highly choreographed,
and their public activities consist mainly of attending charity events,
dropping in on places like schools and local organisms and hospitals,
reviewing the troops, making anodyne remarks, waving to the crowds
while wearing inexplicable, metal laden military uniforms and often wildly
(32:11):
unfashionable hats, hit chatting with the locals, meeting awe struck
members of the public, and then leaving. These activities, while
wildly popular with localities and charities, when the royals show
up to give their regions or causes a boost, are
not in and of themselves exciting or even interesting to behold.
(32:34):
When members of the royal family do give interviews, it's
usually to British news organizations, and always under the most
controlled of circumstances. As an American reporter, there's only so
much you can do. You can't, or at least I
didn't want to do what the British papers often do
and quote royal insiders or palace sources or friends of
(32:57):
Charles or people in Megan's camp, peddling anonymous gossip. When
journalists do that without identifying their sources, they're just acting
as a surrogate to whatever pr battle is brewing among
the various palaces and their inhabitants. Not to mention the
fact that British tabloids are happy to pay their sources
(33:18):
for information as a matter of routine that's something most
American reporters wouldn't do. On the whole. I found royal
coverage by the UK media to be frustrating, slippery, speculative,
full of opinions disguised as facts and judgments disguised as news.
But I had to figure out a way to play
(33:39):
the game. I arrived in London in nineteen ninety five
as a new bride, having just married an englishman. I
moved from New York to live with him, settling originally
in Islington in North London. I was personally excited, but
my own love story clashed with the big royal story
(34:01):
of the decade. It was taking place in full public view,
the slow motion controlled implosion of the marriage between Diana,
the willowy, mercurial, unhappy Princess of Wales, and Charles, the
hapless heir to the throne. He had a Hamlet like
melancholy and a perpetual air of seeking the answers to
(34:22):
questions he couldn't quite articulate. The war was being played
out in the press, and the Prince and princess were
colluding with reporters to spin the story their way. The
papers took sides. The Telegraph and The Times of London
supported Charles. The Daily Mail was in Diana's camp. It
(34:42):
felt like we were watching a tennis match. Serve return,
rush to the net, lob overhead, smash, point after point
in a tournament that would never be over. Each event
seemed more shocking than the one before, and each underscored
how ill equipped this ancient institution was at dealing with
these modern events. The monarchy felt like it was an
(35:05):
old wooden boat creaking along in the age of supersonic jets,
and then events began to accelerate. In nineteen ninety six,
Charles and Diana got divorced. She died the next year
at the age of thirty six. I was there to
cover her funeral, and I was also there to cover
Prince Charles's wedding to Camilla in two thousand and five.
(35:28):
In twenty eleven, Prince William married Kate Middleton in a
massive public extravaganza watch by something like three billion people
around the world. William and Kate's was just another royal wedding,
but it also ensured the dynastic future of the monarchy
and gave the country something non political and mostly non
controversial to celebrate, Except for the people who hated the monarchy,
(35:51):
who thought it was a waste of money. Everyone marveled
at Kate's grace Kelly esque dress, which reportedly cost two
hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and at William's bright red
military Irish guard's uniform, threaded with real gold flourishes and
festooned with a light blue sash and a long golden
tassel hanging fetchingly down one side of his waist. We
(36:13):
admired Kate's younger sister, Pippa's tight fitting bridesmaid's outfit that
bestowed on her a new tabloid nickname Rear of the year.
There were Kate's middle class parents, who had made a
fortune running a male order party favors business whose themed
plastic plates and party bags I recognized from my own
daughter's birthday parties, now mingling with the aristocracy that swirls
(36:37):
around the royal family, a snobbish world of ancient families
with enormous estates. The papers noted who sat were in
the church and what William's ex girlfriends were wearing. And
the hats, so many hats, hats that looked like manhole covers,
like flower pots, like upside down wastebaskets, like flying saucers
(36:57):
and surfboards and frisbees. Every single one of these aspects
of the wedding was covered at nauseum by the British press,
and also in some form or another by me. And then,
luckily for the future of the monarchy, Kate got pregnant.
As her due date approached, A gaggle of reporters and
photographers set up camp outside Saint Mary's Hospital in Paddington
(37:21):
and stayed there for several weeks, waiting for news. I,
of course, was waiting to go home. The blessed event
finally arrived, announced on an ornate easel set up outside
Buckingham Palace, and confirmed by Kate and William themselves, who
briefly posed on the steps of the hospital holding their
(37:41):
new baby, Prince George. It was only then that my
assignment in London ended and I returned to the non
monarchical democracy that is the United States. But interest in
the monarchy did not wane with the arrival of this
new prince. In fact, social media only as the sense
that the royal family were all actors in a larger
(38:03):
than life drama conducted for the amusement, and with the
participation of the public, I certainly couldn't shake it off.
Even when I stopped covering Britain and began writing about
other topics, I kept getting rope back into the royal beat.
In twenty eighteen, I appeared on some sort of early
Twitter based web program to preview another royal wedding, Harry
(38:26):
and Megan's, and I was horrified to see that I
was identified on the screen not as a New York
Times newspaper reporter, which is my job, but as a
quote royal expert. The worse the rest of the news got, politics,
climate change, global unrest, epidemics, the more it seemed people
craved royal news. In the nineties, the Times usually had
(38:50):
just one reporter, mostly me, sometimes a colleague, writing about
the Royals, With the exception of the fallout from Diana's
death when they were four of us, almost every story
was covered by a single person. By the time Megan
came along, there was a cast of what felt like
thousands at the Times but also everywhere else. Social media,
(39:12):
of course, meant that everyone was weighing in. In twenty sixteen,
the new Netflix series The Crown turbocharged the public's interest
in the life and times of the royal family, taking
us back to Queen Elizabeth's early life and first days
on the throne. The Crown took history and made it
into a dramatic story, and it also took stock characters
(39:35):
a queen, her husband, their family and made them into
flesh and blood people playing out their closed door dramas
in public. The creators declared that the show was based
on meticulous historical research, but it was also full of speculation,
invented scenes, and made up dialogue. Many viewers treated it
(39:55):
as virtually a documentary film, as opposed to fictional entertainment
that is based on reality, and now that the plot
is getting closer to the present day, actual participants in
the events are beginning to raise objections. The British historian
William Shawcross, whose books include a biography of Queen Elizabeth's
(40:15):
late mother, is not a fan. As he said in
an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the Crown is an
odious series, filled with lies and half truths encased in velvet.
It is astonishingly and deliberately hurtful to individual members of
the royal family public servants who cannot answer back. Let
alone sue for damages. The show's fifth season, which came
(40:40):
out in twenty twenty two and focused on the later
years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, was publicly condemned by the
actress Judy Dench and by two former Prime Ministers, John
major Atty and Tony Blair, a member of the Labor Party,
both of whom were played by actors on the screen. Again,
(41:00):
I ask the question why do we care so much?
Why do we care about everything from the explosion of
the tabloid press around Diana to the billions of people
who watch Kate in William's wedding to the fury around
Megan and Harry's interview. Here's what I think. Royal coverage
is mostly gossip, but it has the patina of real news.
(41:22):
It's not political in the same way that wars and
elections are, so it's a safe topic in an era
of polarization, or at least it's safe until you get
to the fraught topics of privilege and race. The British
monarchy is one of the few topics in this attention
diffused world that everyone knows about and everyone has an
(41:45):
opinion on, even if their opinion is that it's stupid,
and they question why we're wasting our time talking about it.
It's like a TV show with very low stakes. In America,
it appeals to our snobbery. Our fascination with British Royalty
is part of an atavistic fascination with this older, perhaps
(42:05):
more refined version of ourselves and our ambivalence about the
country we fought a revolution to escape. Its reflection of
a society strictly stratified by class is endlessly fascinating to
a society that is meant to be classless, but of
course is not. But with our faces pressed against a
(42:26):
door mostly barred shut by an inscrutable queen for so
many decades, the cast out wives of Windsor have become
one keyhole through which we can get a glimpse, or
what we think is a glimpse, of the palace inside.
It's worth taking a closer look at how they each
crashed into the Royal narrative, how it crashed into them,
(42:46):
and how each woman held and handled the public's obsession
with their fates. Enjoying Unroyal with a Pushkin plus subscription,
you can access the entirety of Unroyal.
Speaker 4 (42:57):
Three women who Shook the Monarchy by Sarahlyle till August
thirty first, and after that there'll be a new audiobook
from Pushkin waiting for you for the next sixty days,
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Speaker 1 (43:21):
Sign up on the Pushkin Plus audiobook show page on
Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus
Introduction. There are two radically different ways to think about
King Charles the Third's coronation in London in the spring
of twenty twenty three. The first is that this great,
frothy spectacle was a bomb to the world's agitated soul,
a welcome expression of stability and tradition in a tumultuous time.
(00:30):
Britain's beloved Queen Elizabeth had died after more than seventy
years on the throne, and her son had seamlessly taken
her place, without a revolution, without a power struggle, without
even so much as a fuss.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
I think it was in keeping with everything it should
be a mix of tradition and current. I mean, this
goes back to the sixteenth century and were mustn't forget that.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
More than that, this ancient ceremony in which the British
monarch is anointed with holy oil, was a signal of
continuity during a time of bewildering change and turmoil, not
just in Britain but around the world. Elected officials come
and go, Governments might rise and fall, the political contract
might tear itself to pieces. But except for a spot
(01:17):
of regicide and non royal government rule in the sixteen hundreds,
the British monarchy was still going strong after more than
a millennium. The second way of thinking about the coronation
(01:57):
was that it was completely ludicrous. Man sits on chair
was the way the satirical magazine Private Eye described it
that illustrated the viewpoint that the whole thing, said to
cost more than one hundred million pounds, was an exercise
in anachronistic pomp and superfluous circumstance. Charles's throne was from
the fourteenth century a wooden structure built for King Edward.
(02:21):
The first nestled within it was something called the Stone
of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, a
massive nearly three hundred and fifty pound rock that was
used for centuries in the coronations of Scottish kings. Seized
by the English King Edward the First after the Battle
of Dunbar in twelve ninety six, the stone was returned
(02:41):
to Scotland seven hundred years later. There it remained until
Charles's coronation, and there it was returned when the coronation
was over. The ceremony also required Charles for some reason
to put on two different crowns, one containing a room
be said to have been worn by Henry the Fifth
(03:02):
At Agincour, he carried a scepter called the Rod of
Equity and Mercy. He traveled back to Buckingham Palace from
Westminster Abbey in a horse drawn carriage known as the
Gold State Coach, which no one likes because it has
no suspension and no air conditioning or heating, and is
notoriously uncomfortable. Queen Victoria criticized what she called its distressing oscillation.
(03:26):
King William fourth, a former naval officer, compared riding in
it to being tossed in a rough sea. Nonetheless, it's
part of the tradition. The ceremony also included not one,
not two, not three, but four separate jewel studded swords,
the sort of State symbolizing royal authority, the sort of
(03:47):
temporal justice symbolizing the monarch's role as head of the
armed forces, the sort of spiritual justice symbolizing his role
as defender of the faith, and the sword of Mercy,
with its tip blunted, symbolizing his mercy. The leader of
the House of Commons, Penny Mordant, resplendent in a bespoke
teal dress with a cape and gold detailing over the
(04:10):
shoulders like epaulets, spent much of the ceremony holding one
or another of these eight pounds swords aloft in front
of her, like something out of Wagner or Game of Thrones.
For me, it mostly conjured the movie Monty Python and
the Holy Grail, the scene in which a bunch of
peasants argue with King Arthur about why he gets to
(04:30):
be king.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
The lady of the lake, her arm clad in the
purest shimmering semite, held aloft excaliba from the bosom of
the water, signifying by divine providence that I Arthur was
to carry excaliba. That is why I'm your king. Listen,
strange women lying in ponds distributed sword is low basis
(04:51):
for a system.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Of government the peasants in the movie, though obviously fictional,
reflected a bait that has become more urgent as the
years go on. In real life, there's a large Republican
movement in Britain, and on the day of King Charles's coronation,
a number of its representatives were out protesting during not
by durg not by during no. While a majority of
(05:14):
people in the country still say they're in favor of
the monarchy. A poll taken in the spring of twenty
twenty three found that the number dropped precipitously among younger people.
It found that support for the monarchy among people aged
eighteen to twenty four had reached an all time low.
Just thirty two percent said it was good for the
country and let's not forget the Irish and their bitter
(05:36):
history with British monarchs. In The Irish Times in twenty
twenty one, the writer Patrick Frayne had articulated the national
viewpoint with one of the most bracing opening paragraphs I've
ever read in a newspaper article. It said having a
monarchy next door is a little bit like having a
neighbor who's really into clowns and has dabbed their house
(05:59):
with clown murle, displays clown dolls in each window, and
has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown
related news stories. It went on to say, more specifically,
for the Irish, it's like having a neighbor who's really
into clowns, and also your grandfather was murdered by a clown.
Whatever you think about the monarchy, if you watched the
(06:22):
coronation that day, and in Britain alone, more than fifteen
million people tuned in in real time. You could not
help but notice who was not present for the celebration.
There were two women missing, Two women who each in
their time had been welcomed into the British royal family
as a breath of fresh air, as new arrivals who
(06:43):
would bring light and openness and popular appeal to this
musty old institution. The first missing woman was Diana, the
former Princess of Wales and King Charles's first wife. She
died in nineteen ninety seven, one year after the bitter divorce,
a horrific end to what had begun as a joyous
(07:04):
fantasy promoted as a real life royal fairy tale. In
her place was the woman Diana had famously referred to
as the Rottweiler, Charles's longtime mistress, formerly known as Camilla
Parker Bowles, the woman who'd helped wreck Charles and Diana's
marriage and now his wife. There she was sitting on
(07:27):
the throne that originally had been intended for Diana. The
ceremony made no mention of the late princess, whose two
sons with Charles William and Harry were right there in
Westminster Abbey watching their stepmother being crowned queen. Not even
Queen Consort, which had been the original plan cooked up
by the Palace to appease diana partisans, but straight up Queen.
(07:50):
It was as if Diana had been erased from history.
The second missing woman was Megan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex,
the very much alive wife of Prince Harry, Charles's younger son.
Meghan had very conspicuously stayed behind at the couple's house
in Montecito, California, with their two children and their menagerie
(08:13):
of rescue dogs and chickens. Only five years after her
marriage to Harry. She'd become such a hated figure in
Britain that there was really no point in her coming
at all. Prince Harry was there, however, seated in a
dubious position in the third row of the abbey, between
the husband of one of his cousins and an elderly
relative named Princess Alexandra. In any case, he was almost
(08:37):
entirely obscured by the large feather atop the military hat
protruding from the head of his aunt, Princess Anne, part
of the costume for her ceremonial position at the coronation,
an ancient job with the almost unparsable title of gold
Stick in waiting. In addition, there was a third woman
(08:57):
hovering in the ether, a kind of ghost, mosely forgotten
character who had long since been written out of the
family narrative, but who had once had a starring role
in the royal drama The Duchess of Windsor, once and
then again known as Wallace Simpson, the American divorcee whose
scandalous affair with King Edward the Eighth in the nineteen
(09:18):
thirties had led him to abdicate from the throne. For
many years, it was Wallace, the so called woman who
had stolen the King, who is possibly the most hated
woman in Britain. How did we get here and why
are these absences even notable? What does all of this
say about the monarchy at this delicate moment as a
(09:39):
throne passed from Queen Elizabeth to King Charles. If you
look at these three women, one of the things that
connects them is Queen Elizabeth. All of them, in their
different ways, were defeated by her.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
This is BBC News from London.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Buckingham Palace has announced the death of Her Majesty, Queen
Elizabeth the Second.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
When she died in the fall of twenty twenty two,
Elizabeth Second was ninety six. She'd reigned for seventy years,
longer than any British and Commonwealth monarch in history. In
many ways, the legitimacy of the British monarchy rested on
the things that she represented duty, stability, discretion, longevity, history,
(10:22):
and tradition. She'd been on this throne for so long
that it sometimes felt like she would be there forever.
She seemed essential not just to the twelve hundred year
story of the English monarchy, but also to Britain's own
identity and to much of the world's understanding of its
more recent history. In the last half of her reign,
(10:46):
Elizabeth's vision for the monarchy had been buffeted by forces
beyond her control and maybe beyond her understanding. The first
of these forces was the erosion of the media's traditionally
automatic deference to the monarch and the attendant public explosion
of damaging personal stories about members of the family, stories
(11:07):
that regular people treated as episodes in an ongoing reality show.
Throw in social media, and with it the increasingly voluble
democratization of opinion. This expanded and complicated the conversation around
the monarchy, making it more vulnerable to the fickle vicissitudes
of public opinion. The third destabilizing factor came from within
(11:31):
the royal family itself, with the arrival of outsiders Wallace, Diana,
and Megan, whose presence threatened Elizabeth and by extension, the
monarchy's core beliefs and enduring values. The scandals precipitated by
these women punctuated the Queen's reign, Wallace before she took
the throne, Diana in the middle of her reign, Megan
(11:53):
at the end, and Elizabeth and her unshakable view of
the royal family's purpose and responsibility in British life dictated
the monarchy's response. I got to thinking about all this
in the awful spring of twenty twenty one. The world
was limping into the second year of the global pandemic.
(12:15):
We were mostly still stuck at home, fretting about political
discord and climate change and COVID and racial inequity. In
what the future, if there even was one, would look like.
We were desperate for diversion. We needed a way out
of our own anxious heads and our own tedious problems.
That might help explain why more than forty nine million
(12:38):
people around the world, some eighteen million of them in
the US alone, turned on their television sets on the
night of March seventh, twenty twenty one, to watch Oprah
Winfrey interview an aggrieved thirty six year old englishman and
his aggrieved American wife. Obviously, I'm not counting everyone who
saw the interview or excerpts from it on streaming platforms
(13:01):
or social media later on.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
Thank you both for trusting me to share your story.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Thank you for giving us the space to do it.
Thank you. Before her marriage to Prince Harry, then six
in line to the British throne, Megan Markle was an actress, blogger,
and social media influencer who'd racked up an impressive million
followers on Instagram. She was a star of Suits, a
guilty pleasure TV drama where she played a hot paralegal
(13:29):
who works her way up the ladder to become a
hot lawyer. Hi, I'm Rachel Zane. I'll be giving your orientation. Wow,
you're pretty good. You've hit on me. We can get
it out of the way that I am not interested
in it. But never mind all those things. In this interview,
Megan was just a girl sitting with a boy telling
a woman and the entire world how unfairly they'd been treated.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
There has not been an agreement. You don't know what
I'm going to ask now, and there is no subject
that's off limits, and you are not getting paid for
this interview.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
All that's correct, And what an explosive story. It was
a tale of epic love and bitter resentment, of pride
and prejudice and racism, of following tradition and chafing at
its limitations, of an ancient monarchy riven by modern preoccupations.
It was a tale being misunderstood, mishandled, and mistreated by
(14:27):
one of the world's most rigid, scrutinized, gossiped about anachronistic
and opaque of institutions, the British Royal family.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
Were you silent or were you silenced? The latter? So
when I asked the question why did you leave, the
simplest answer is.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Lack of support and lack of understanding and a tale
of hurt feelings over Let's be honest here, Details like
whether Meghan offended her sister in law, the former Kate
Middleton and the future Queen of England, or whether in
fact it was Kate who had offended Meghan who made
who cry in an incident over Meghan's bridesmaids stresses. Honestly,
(15:13):
why was this even an issue? It made me cry
and it really hurt my feelings.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
So all the time the stories out there you had
made Kate cry, You knew all along, and people around
you knew that wasn't true.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Everyone in the institution knew it wasn't So why didn't
somebody just say that? It's a good question. And then
came the most incendiary thing of all. Meghan said that
the royal family, or at least one member of it,
she didn't say who it was, had openly speculated about
what color skin her first child would have.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
There is a conversation to hold it, hold up conversations.
There's a conversation about how dark your baby is going.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
To be potentially and what that would mean.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Or look like.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Oh, these were shocking things to utter out loud from
inside a family that hates more than anything to talk
publicly about itself. If the Brits is a nation are reserved, stiff,
upper lipped, and unwilling to discuss their feelings about private
or family matters. All those cliches, then members of the
British royal family are even more buttoned up exaggerated versions
(16:19):
of that archetype, as we now know with the publication
of Harry's best selling memoir Spare. The Oprah interview was
just the first and most explosive stop in what would
essentially be an ongoing multi year grievance tour by Harry
and Meghan. It's had the effect of somewhat deluding the
urgency of their complaints. They told their story to Oprah,
(16:42):
but they also told it to the British TV journalist
Tom Bradby of ITV News, and to assorted other sympathetic
interviewers on both sides of the Atlantic, and they told
it in a six part Netflix series. Megan talked about
it while interviewing other people on her own podcast, which
she described as invest mistigating, dissecting, and subverting the labels
(17:02):
that try to hold women back. Harry talked about it
on another podcast, the popular and much listened to Armchair Expert,
hosted by the actor Dax Shepherd. But when they sat
down with Oprah. Nobody had seen or heard anything like
this before. To witness this couple uttering these things publicly,
(17:22):
intimate details about who said what to whom and who
did what behind closed doors. The neglect, the bullying, the
racism was shocking.
Speaker 5 (17:33):
Outside Buckingham Palace, the world's media digest the enormity of
it all. A suicidal senior royal left unsupported accusations of
racism and a family splintered. But will it signal a
new dawn for an institution seen as a symbol of
British values?
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Where were you when the Oprah interview aired? Where were
any of us? In early twenty twenty one? I watched
it on my laptop, dressed in a pair of sweatpants,
wearing a pair of headphones, at home in Brooklyn, New York,
where I was hold up for much of the pandemic.
I also helped cover the interview as it was happening
as one member of a huge royal reporting team at
(18:13):
the New York Times, where I've worked for more than
thirty years. This was a huge story for us, for everyone, really,
the hugest royal story in many years. As strange as
that may be to believe. The thing about the royal
family that we all noticed as we watch this is
that it expects outsiders who join it, the people who
(18:36):
marry into it, to seamlessly embrace its traditions and values
and wardrobes and activities, while relinquishing their own lives and identities.
They have to erase their individuality in service of the
greater whole. Sometimes it can remind you of the Borg
collective in Star Trek, the next generation gobbling up all
(18:59):
interlopers and independent thinkers and putting them in thrall to
one giant, all encompassing brain.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been is over.
From this time forward, you will service us.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
It was shocking to witness this, like hearing a disturbing
cry for help from inside a fortress. But it wasn't
the first time. Megan wasn't the first modern royal wife
who'd been bewildered by what she'd married into, and she
wasn't the first to say so publicly. In fact, something
very like Meghan and Harry's interview had happened twice before.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
My conversation with the Duke, and that just took place
at their house in Paris and the Buas de Boulogne,
twenty minutes by car from the center of the city.
What do you make of young people today? I think
they look like they're having dyo fun mysel.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
The first public royal interview of this kind took place
nineteen seventy and it was significant almost for what was
left out as for what was said. It featured the
Duchess of Windsor, the former Wallace Simpson, a brittle, dark
haired American divorcee who in nineteen thirty six had precipitated
the most explosive constitutional crisis in modern British history. That
(20:19):
was when her lover, King Edward the Eighth renounced the
British throne, relinquishing his title and consigning himself to permanent
exile in order to marry her. They had lived a
life of continual resentment and mostly public silence, but more
than three decades into their marriage, the couple submitted to
an interview with the BBC to discuss their years of
(20:41):
bitter banishment. For many of the Britons who watched the program,
it was the first time they'd ever heard Wallace Simpson's voice.
Fast forward to nineteen ninety five. This was when the
second of the Royal TV interviews took place.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
When no one listens to or you feel no one's
listening to you, the things stought to happen.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
That was when Diana, the Princess of Wales and the
wife of Prince Charles, then heir to the throne, made
a surprise appearance on British television. It was an interview
whose incendiary revelations were as explosive as its inception had
been secret. She delivered a searing indictment of her husband
and the entire Windsor family, the Queen, Prince Philip, the Palace,
(21:25):
the whole royal industrial complex. That's when we learned about
the firm, the name that Diana Riley gave to the
royal family. At the time, the Princess was perhaps the
most photographed, the most glamorous, and the most famous woman
in the world. Her life and marriage were the subject
of intense feverish interest. By then, she was also formally
(21:48):
separated from Charles and trying to lay the groundwork for
a favorable financial settlement in their inevitable divorce. The story
Diana told was shocking and devastating. It was an account
of crippling insecurity, of mental distress, of bulimia, of self harm,
of suicide, attempts and cries for help that always went unanswered.
(22:11):
Diana spoke of a husband who had never loved her
and was openly sleeping with someone else, and of a
family of royal in laws who didn't care, didn't understand,
and even openly mocked and shamed her. Diana's interview represented
the first time in the modern history of the British
monarchy that a member of the royal family, let alone
(22:34):
one who was so prominent, had openly discussed topics this
personal and this sensitive. And it was the first time
an individual member of the family had directly blamed not
just particular people, but the royal establishment, the system itself,
which brings us back to the Megan and Harry interview.
(22:54):
Even in a world convulsed by grave existential problems, the
couples exit from Britain and rupture from the royal family
became a major global news story, one that's still unfolding.
Wallace Diana Meghan. Each of the three interviews was specific
to its time. Wallace's was old fashioned, formal, quaint, reserved,
(23:20):
even kind of boring, but it reflected a lifetime of
pent up grievance and indignation that had calcified into delicate
self defensiveness. Diana's interview was calculated and also heartfelt, at
once an epic cry of pain and an artfully crafted
salvo in a long war with her in laws. Meghan
(23:43):
and Harry's conversation with Oprah was a triumph of pr
a cinematically choreographed whirligig of victimization and empowerment done in
the maw of media and social media attention. All three
raised the same question, a question that would be amplified
by the death of the queen. What is the point
(24:03):
of the monarchy? Is it sustainable into the twenty first century?
What happens next? Another question, and when I've often asked
myself ever since I began covering this subject, is why
do we care so much? I spent nearly two decades
as a correspondent in the Times of London office from
(24:23):
nineteen ninety five to twenty thirteen. Because of England's special
role in American history, and by virtue of the fact
that we share sort of the same language, the UK
is both very like and very different from the US.
The British both envs and feel superior to us. We
in turn have an uneasy and unresolved relationship with them.
(24:47):
For an American reporter, the country is an endlessly fascinating subject.
From London, I covered elections and natural disasters, riots and
media scandals, the downfall of the post th to write
Tory Party, and the rise and fall of Tony Blair
and New Labor. I covered the era of Cool Britannia,
(25:08):
the country's involvement in the Iraq War, the beginnings of Brexit,
the rise and fall and resurrection and final defenestration of
Prime Minister Boris Johnson. I also wrote about culture, books
and plays and movies, and did quite a bit of
reporting in Western Europe, so I was very busy. There
was a lot of news, so it was interesting and
(25:31):
honestly slightly perplexing to experience the never ending, ravenous appetite
for stories about the royal family whenever I traveled back
home to New York. What did people want to talk
about the royal family? Back then? It was all about
Princess Diana. Had I ever met her? What did I
think of her? Was she a tragic victim or a
(25:53):
pathological narcissist or maybe a bit of both. The answers were, yes,
I had met her, and yes she was a very
complicated person. They also wanted to hear what I thought
about Prince Charles and Camilla. Wasn't he a bit of
a blowhard or maybe a little dim and boring? And
how likely was it that she would ever be queen?
(26:15):
Very likely? As it turned out, she is now Queen Camilla.
More recently, I've been asked, is it possible that Prince
Harry was in fact the child of Captain James Hewitt,
the hunky officer his mother Diana had an affair with
back in the nineteen eighties. After all, both have red
hair and they do look vaguely alike. The answer to
(26:36):
that question is no, The timing of the affair doesn't
work out. And what about Kate? Is William cheating on her?
She seems so perfect? But have you ever noticed she
never says anything interesting, and that no matter where she
is or what she does, she is always always smiling.
Interest in the Royal family runs along two tracks, and
(26:58):
it's sometimes hard to separate rate one from the other.
On the surface, it's clearly gossip. The labyrinthine interpersonal dynamics,
the spats, the feuds, the clothes, the public appearances, the
banal public remarks, the speculation about private conversations and private feelings.
(27:19):
But deeper down there are serious questions about what all
this means for the future of Britain. How can a
modern country move ahead when its system of government is
inextricably tied to such an archaic, hereditary institution. How much
can the royal family modernize, especially when one of its
features is its anachronistic appeal for better or worse. The
(27:43):
British public cares deeply about these questions, and so does
much of the rest of the world. My time in
London was bookended by royal stories. I reported for duty
in the thick of the Princess Diana era, when her
crumbling marriage was the subject of daily newspaper specula. Her
explosive TV interview took place only a few months after
(28:04):
I got to London, and then, nearly two decades later,
with my bags packed and most of my worldly possessions
in boxes ready to be shipped home, I had to
delay my trip because Kate William's wife was about to
give birth to their first child. My last days in
London were spent waiting for this new baby to arrive
a perfect mix of importance and absurdity. As far as
(28:27):
news coverage went, as the always deadpan magazine Private Eye
described it on its front cover Woman as Baby. In
between the bursts, the marriages, the divorces and the deaths,
there were other stories royal events and royal scandals. Charles Still,
the Prince of Wales, gives a speech denouncing modern architecture.
(28:50):
Britain's modern architectural establishment erupts in horror. Prince William goes
to college, the press goes crazy. Prince Harry is photographed
at a cost party wearing a Nazi uniform. Everyone is upset.
Prince Edward, attempting to earn a living, makes some bad documentaries.
Everyone finds them funny. Princess Diana sues a newspaper for
(29:14):
publishing photographs of her doing thigh exercises in a leotard
at the gym. I could go on and on. These
were some of the actual things that actually happened and
were considered worthy of actual coverage, But more often than not,
many royal stories circulating in the press are based on
hearsay and conjecture. For example, Charles supposedly tells someone how
(29:39):
he felt about some political issue or other that he's
not supposed to have an opinion on, or people behind
the scenes are said to be trying to plant positive
stories about Camilla in the press, or Kate is offended
that she could only invite a few members of her
family to Charles's coronation whereas Camilla got to invite a
(30:00):
of her family members. Then they are the follow up
stories about how the public feels about these people based
on the stories published about them, or based on their
own uninformed opinions, the way we might think about a
reality TV show. The real royals of Buckingham Palace. Often
(30:21):
what we in the foreign press were covering back then
when I lived there, in effect, was how the other
news media, particularly the tabloids, covered these things that they
themselves had only a shadowy grasp of. This meant that
when real events happened to the royals, like when Sarah Ferguson,
the Duchess of York, got caught on camera having her
(30:41):
toes kissed and maybe sucked by one of her lovers,
these had outsize importance because they provided the meat on
which the tabloids could then justify their buffet of gossip.
A lot of coverage is driven by the royal's own
obsession with their relationship to the press, the push and
pull between transparency and privacy, between deference and the desire
(31:04):
to get the story and sell the copies, and a
lot of it has to do with behind the scenes
courtiers trying to promote their own members of the royal
family at the expense of the others. It was actually
pretty fun to be on the royal beat. Covering the
British monarchy isn't like writing about a normal topic, and
(31:24):
the normal rules do not apply. First of all, they
the actual members of the family, are not going to
talk to you, even privately, even off the record in public.
If they do say something, it will almost certainly be
so innocuous as to be meaningless. Full of platitudes. There
are words to quote, but not much of anything newsworthy
(31:47):
behind them. Royal appearances are tightly controlled and highly choreographed,
and their public activities consist mainly of attending charity events,
dropping in on places like schools and local organisms and hospitals,
reviewing the troops, making anodyne remarks, waving to the crowds
while wearing inexplicable, metal laden military uniforms and often wildly
(32:11):
unfashionable hats, hit chatting with the locals, meeting awe struck
members of the public, and then leaving. These activities, while
wildly popular with localities and charities, when the royals show
up to give their regions or causes a boost, are
not in and of themselves exciting or even interesting to behold.
(32:34):
When members of the royal family do give interviews, it's
usually to British news organizations, and always under the most
controlled of circumstances. As an American reporter, there's only so
much you can do. You can't, or at least I
didn't want to do what the British papers often do
and quote royal insiders or palace sources or friends of
(32:57):
Charles or people in Megan's camp, peddling anonymous gossip. When
journalists do that without identifying their sources, they're just acting
as a surrogate to whatever pr battle is brewing among
the various palaces and their inhabitants. Not to mention the
fact that British tabloids are happy to pay their sources
(33:18):
for information as a matter of routine that's something most
American reporters wouldn't do. On the whole. I found royal
coverage by the UK media to be frustrating, slippery, speculative,
full of opinions disguised as facts and judgments disguised as news.
But I had to figure out a way to play
(33:39):
the game. I arrived in London in nineteen ninety five
as a new bride, having just married an englishman. I
moved from New York to live with him, settling originally
in Islington in North London. I was personally excited, but
my own love story clashed with the big royal story
(34:01):
of the decade. It was taking place in full public view,
the slow motion controlled implosion of the marriage between Diana,
the willowy, mercurial, unhappy Princess of Wales, and Charles, the
hapless heir to the throne. He had a Hamlet like
melancholy and a perpetual air of seeking the answers to
(34:22):
questions he couldn't quite articulate. The war was being played
out in the press, and the Prince and princess were
colluding with reporters to spin the story their way. The
papers took sides. The Telegraph and The Times of London
supported Charles. The Daily Mail was in Diana's camp. It
(34:42):
felt like we were watching a tennis match. Serve return,
rush to the net, lob overhead, smash, point after point
in a tournament that would never be over. Each event
seemed more shocking than the one before, and each underscored
how ill equipped this ancient institution was at dealing with
these modern events. The monarchy felt like it was an
(35:05):
old wooden boat creaking along in the age of supersonic jets,
and then events began to accelerate. In nineteen ninety six,
Charles and Diana got divorced. She died the next year
at the age of thirty six. I was there to
cover her funeral, and I was also there to cover
Prince Charles's wedding to Camilla in two thousand and five.
(35:28):
In twenty eleven, Prince William married Kate Middleton in a
massive public extravaganza watch by something like three billion people
around the world. William and Kate's was just another royal wedding,
but it also ensured the dynastic future of the monarchy
and gave the country something non political and mostly non
controversial to celebrate, Except for the people who hated the monarchy,
(35:51):
who thought it was a waste of money. Everyone marveled
at Kate's grace Kelly esque dress, which reportedly cost two
hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and at William's bright red
military Irish guard's uniform, threaded with real gold flourishes and
festooned with a light blue sash and a long golden
tassel hanging fetchingly down one side of his waist. We
(36:13):
admired Kate's younger sister, Pippa's tight fitting bridesmaid's outfit that
bestowed on her a new tabloid nickname Rear of the year.
There were Kate's middle class parents, who had made a
fortune running a male order party favors business whose themed
plastic plates and party bags I recognized from my own
daughter's birthday parties, now mingling with the aristocracy that swirls
(36:37):
around the royal family, a snobbish world of ancient families
with enormous estates. The papers noted who sat were in
the church and what William's ex girlfriends were wearing. And
the hats, so many hats, hats that looked like manhole covers,
like flower pots, like upside down wastebaskets, like flying saucers
(36:57):
and surfboards and frisbees. Every single one of these aspects
of the wedding was covered at nauseum by the British press,
and also in some form or another by me. And then,
luckily for the future of the monarchy, Kate got pregnant.
As her due date approached, A gaggle of reporters and
photographers set up camp outside Saint Mary's Hospital in Paddington
(37:21):
and stayed there for several weeks, waiting for news. I,
of course, was waiting to go home. The blessed event
finally arrived, announced on an ornate easel set up outside
Buckingham Palace, and confirmed by Kate and William themselves, who
briefly posed on the steps of the hospital holding their
(37:41):
new baby, Prince George. It was only then that my
assignment in London ended and I returned to the non
monarchical democracy that is the United States. But interest in
the monarchy did not wane with the arrival of this
new prince. In fact, social media only as the sense
that the royal family were all actors in a larger
(38:03):
than life drama conducted for the amusement, and with the
participation of the public, I certainly couldn't shake it off.
Even when I stopped covering Britain and began writing about
other topics, I kept getting rope back into the royal beat.
In twenty eighteen, I appeared on some sort of early
Twitter based web program to preview another royal wedding, Harry
(38:26):
and Megan's, and I was horrified to see that I
was identified on the screen not as a New York
Times newspaper reporter, which is my job, but as a
quote royal expert. The worse the rest of the news got, politics,
climate change, global unrest, epidemics, the more it seemed people
craved royal news. In the nineties, the Times usually had
(38:50):
just one reporter, mostly me, sometimes a colleague, writing about
the Royals, With the exception of the fallout from Diana's
death when they were four of us, almost every story
was covered by a single person. By the time Megan
came along, there was a cast of what felt like
thousands at the Times but also everywhere else. Social media,
(39:12):
of course, meant that everyone was weighing in. In twenty sixteen,
the new Netflix series The Crown turbocharged the public's interest
in the life and times of the royal family, taking
us back to Queen Elizabeth's early life and first days
on the throne. The Crown took history and made it
into a dramatic story, and it also took stock characters
(39:35):
a queen, her husband, their family and made them into
flesh and blood people playing out their closed door dramas
in public. The creators declared that the show was based
on meticulous historical research, but it was also full of speculation,
invented scenes, and made up dialogue. Many viewers treated it
(39:55):
as virtually a documentary film, as opposed to fictional entertainment
that is based on reality, and now that the plot
is getting closer to the present day, actual participants in
the events are beginning to raise objections. The British historian
William Shawcross, whose books include a biography of Queen Elizabeth's
(40:15):
late mother, is not a fan. As he said in
an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the Crown is an
odious series, filled with lies and half truths encased in velvet.
It is astonishingly and deliberately hurtful to individual members of
the royal family public servants who cannot answer back. Let
alone sue for damages. The show's fifth season, which came
(40:40):
out in twenty twenty two and focused on the later
years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, was publicly condemned by the
actress Judy Dench and by two former Prime Ministers, John
major Atty and Tony Blair, a member of the Labor Party,
both of whom were played by actors on the screen. Again,
(41:00):
I ask the question why do we care so much?
Why do we care about everything from the explosion of
the tabloid press around Diana to the billions of people
who watch Kate in William's wedding to the fury around
Megan and Harry's interview. Here's what I think. Royal coverage
is mostly gossip, but it has the patina of real news.
(41:22):
It's not political in the same way that wars and
elections are, so it's a safe topic in an era
of polarization, or at least it's safe until you get
to the fraught topics of privilege and race. The British
monarchy is one of the few topics in this attention
diffused world that everyone knows about and everyone has an
(41:45):
opinion on, even if their opinion is that it's stupid,
and they question why we're wasting our time talking about it.
It's like a TV show with very low stakes. In America,
it appeals to our snobbery. Our fascination with British Royalty
is part of an atavistic fascination with this older, perhaps
(42:05):
more refined version of ourselves and our ambivalence about the
country we fought a revolution to escape. Its reflection of
a society strictly stratified by class is endlessly fascinating to
a society that is meant to be classless, but of
course is not. But with our faces pressed against a
(42:26):
door mostly barred shut by an inscrutable queen for so
many decades, the cast out wives of Windsor have become
one keyhole through which we can get a glimpse, or
what we think is a glimpse, of the palace inside.
It's worth taking a closer look at how they each
crashed into the Royal narrative, how it crashed into them,
(42:46):
and how each woman held and handled the public's obsession
with their fates. Enjoying Unroyal with a Pushkin plus subscription,
you can access the entirety of Unroyal.
Speaker 4 (42:57):
Three women who Shook the Monarchy by Sarahlyle till August
thirty first, and after that there'll be a new audiobook
from Pushkin waiting for you for the next sixty days,
starting on the first of each month and running until
the end of the next month. Pushkin Plus subscribers can
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