Meghan and Harry: the long running royal soap goes on

It’s fun to see the storm that Harry and Meghan’s Netflix documentary has provoked.

Netflix promotes Meghan and Harry

Just to be clear, it’s the storm that’s fun. Not the documentary. If I spend six hours watching a TV show, I want it to be something a little more compelling than a self-justification by a couple, against their victimisation by the British royal family and media. Even if the complaint is true. Which it is.

What makes it even less interesting is that the couple is made up of a minor star whose claim to fame is a competent performance in a middle-ranking, entertaining but essentially superficial show, Suits. Her support is provided by a husband whose major claim to fame is his birth. Unless I’m much mistaken, birth is something that has been achieved by every one of the eight billion humans living on the planet.

So why all the fuss?

Well, I think Jonathan Freedland, one of my favourite Guardian journalists, got that about right. The real purpose of the royal family, since it doesn’t rule or do anything much else that’s useful, is to provide entertainment. Or, as he puts it, distraction.

How does this work? 

Well, the trick is to play on our emotions, like the writers of the best shows. They pull you one way – getting you to loathe a character, for instance – and then the other – painting them in sympathetic colours after all. And the British public loves this roller coaster of sentimentality. 

That public’s good at it too, since it’s nothing if not astoundingly fickle.

It happened with Diana. After her death, the upsurge of sympathy for the fairy-tale princess amazed the world. The Queen, on the other hand, and the family were seen as cruel, self-absorbed, and out of touch. 

Charles, many felt, should never inherit the throne, which should bypass him entirely and go to his son (or, more importantly her son), William. And Camilla, the scheming other woman who’d caused so much suffering to Diana, on no account should she ever be Queen Consort.

Funny to think back on all that now, isn’t it? Charles is on the throne and Camilla, naturally, is his Queen Consort. All those certainties have simply melted away, like snow in the spring. And the Queen’s death in September was mourned by millions, the outrage over Diana’s treatment simply washed away. 

Elizabeth II did her duty, we were breathlessly told. Well, she certainly did. But with taxpayers funding the monarchy to the tune of over a £100 million a year, I’d say doing her duty is pretty much the least we ought to expect.

Still, at least she and her family laid on plenty of the kind of distraction Freedland talks about. Not least with Harry and Meghan. She was initially welcomed with enthusiasm. Beautiful and a wonderful demonstration of how diversity is becoming anchored in British life, right up to the royalty. Until the racism started to come out, as well as the media persecution of the kind that had literally driven Harry’s mother, Diana, to her death. 

Harry and Meghan are just the latest episode in the long-running soap opera that is the British royal family. To see how long running, we don’t even need to go back to the time of Henry VIII and his six wives (two of whom he sent to the scaffold). A fine example is George IV, one of Queen Victoria’s uncles, entirely untouched by the kind of respectable and straitlaced morality we associate with the notion ‘Victorian’. 

He was a spendthrift, a heavy drinker and a womaniser. At 21, he fell for Mary Fitzherbert, a Catholic widow, and secretly married her, though it was against the law for the spouse of a Catholic to become king, and indeed against the law for the heir to the throne to contract any marriage without the monarch’s consent – which he certainly didn’t have.

Despite an income of over £6million a year, in modern terms, which most of us would probably find it possible to scrape by on, he needed a Parliamentary grant, out of the public purse, of the equivalent of £20 million. In addition, he received nearly £8 million to do up Carlton House, where he lived in London. 

Well, you know how expensive home improvements can be.

Caroline and George
An earlier episode in the soap

Eventually, he gave way to pressure from his father and married Caroline of Brunswick. This was possible because the previous marriage was illegal and therefore not binding. 

George and Caroline detested each other, and both continued to have lovers. For George, that included a long-lasting on-off relationship with Mary Fitzherbert, but it was by no means limited to her.

He and Caroline lived apart for years. She moved to Italy, living and travelling extensively with a servant, Bartolomeo Pergami. Few were in any doubt that he was her lover. There was even a rumour that she’d had an illegitimate child.

Like most husbands who’ve behaved badly themselves, George took a dim view of his wife’s alleged misdemeanours. He set up a commission to investigate her alleged adultery. The investigation concluded there was ‘no foundation’ to the rumours against her, but still he curtailed her access to their daughter Princess Charlotte.

That princess proved as self-willed as her father. She refused to marry the husband he’d found for her, instead choosing the man who later – much later – would become King Leopold of the Belgians. But then she died while giving birth to a stillborn son. That piece of devastating news only reached her mother from a passing visitor, as George hadn’t felt it necessary to tell her. 

When George IV mounted the throne after the death of George III, he decided that what he really, really wanted, more than anything, was to divorce his Queen. He demanded that parliament pass a Pains and Penalties Bill that would annul the marriage and strip her of the title of Queen. There was a public outcry over this suggestion. Eight hundred petitions were raised in her support, with over a million signatures between them. 

Even so, shocking evidence of adultery was submitted to the House of Lords for the debate on the bill, which became in effect a trial of the Queen. The Lords passed the bill, but such was the support for Caroline in the country that it was never even submitted to the Commons, since there was no prospect of its passing there. 

Meanwhile, Caroline decided that she rather liked the idea of being Queen. So she came back to England to claim what she saw as her own. This led to a lamentable scene, fully worthy of the finest traditions of soap opera, where she tried to get into Westminster Hall, where guests were gathering before the coronation ceremony. She was kept out by soldiers with fixed bayonets until a senior official slammed the door shut in her face.

With a wonderful sense of timing, wholly in keeping with the melodramatic character of the whole episode, she died just three weeks later. 

A few months earlier, the French emperor Napoleon, against whom Britain fought a long and bloody war, had died. The king was told “Sir, your bitterest enemy is dead”. 

“Is she, by God!” he replied.

The British public loved Caroline. Just like they loved Diana. Just like they would love Meghan. But with Caroline, as with Meghan, the love evaporated quickly.

It soon emerged that after the King’s extraordinary behaviour in excluding her from his coronation, she had accepted a government offer of £50,000 a year (close to £6 million today) to leave the country permanently. Many of her former fans decided that she was just another hypocritical money-grubber after all. So they went off her.

But, boy, they’d got their money’s worth in the meantime. Loving her. Going off the king. Going off her. Who could want more from a soap?

Like the Diana story. Like the Harry and Meghan story. The show just goes on.

And on.