Fight to the death.

History Repeats Itself: The Meghan and Harry Saga

The Return of the Repressed

Two houses, each alike in indignity. For there can be no dignity when the world knows your business because your exiled brother and his American wife are complaining about you to the media. The Meghan and Harry saga is what Sigmund Freud and Elizabeth II would have recognized as “the return of the repressed.”

History repeats as farce with a Netflix contract. Edward and Wallis were tabloid material at the time. The difference was that while the British media obliged Buckingham Palace by suppressing the story of the king’s romance with a divorcée, the American media had fun. This pattern endured after 1945. While the royals did their best to pretend that Edward and Wallis did not exist, Edward and Wallis sold England by the pound in the United States. Prince Harry may be too slow to see it, but in escaping The Firm, he has merely sidestepped into another family business.

The Suppressed Story

This pattern of British suppression and American exposure has also had a consistently serious aspect, a shadow story whose outlines are often hard to define, but whose drift is cumulatively clear. What exactly requires repression, and what would return to public awareness if we had the complete story?

At the end of World War II, American troops captured some 400 tons of Nazi documentation at Marburg Castle in Germany. Among them were some 60 prewar letters between Edward VIII and the Nazi high command, including correspondence relating to Operation Willi, a Nazi plot of 1940. The idea was to persuade Edward to move from neutral Portugal to Germany, where he could assist in imposing a negotiated peace with Britain.

The Windsors at War

The Windsors are an ordinary family of German ex-pats, except when they are not. The Windsors at War picks up where Larman left off in The Crown in Crisis, his account of the Abdication Crisis of 1936. There was nothing normal about that episode: the Archbishop of Canterbury moralizing against the marriage to the government, Churchill campaigning on Edward and Wallis’s behalf because he was both a romantic and out of office, the public support of Edward and Wallis’s love-conquers-all media spin. Wallis, like Meghan, threatened to “let the world know” when she felt Buckingham Palace wasn’t showing proper respect.

Gossip is the mortar in the bricks of royal biography. Larman has an impish wit; when I was working at The Spectator, he was my first choice when we needed a barbed comment on the latest act of royal folly. He relates this farrago of vanity, snobbery, and wickedness with brio. The outlines of the story may be familiar, but there is real historical weight to his handling of the story. He especially relishes the second-string characters who bring out the tawdry and comic aspects of the royal costume drama.

The Duke of Kent

Further evidence that the default toward which monarchy descends is the rougher end of show business is provided by Edward’s younger brother, Prince George, Duke of Kent. He was introduced to “myriad pleasures” (“cocaine, morphine, group sex … the list is long”) by the American socialite Kiki Preston (“the girl with the silver syringe”). Noël Coward was one of the prince’s lovers. An MI5 report “grimly noted” that Kent and Coward “had been seen parading together through the streets of London, dressed and made up as women, and had once been arrested by the police for suspected prostitution.” When the duke got married, Coward hissed “I had him first” at the bride.

In August 1942, the Duke of Kent was decapitated. Shortly after taking off from Scotland on a mission to Iceland, his plane crashed in bad weather. This made him the first royal to die on active service since the death of James IV, King of Scotland, in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden. Various rumors have arisen from the accident, including that he commandeered the aircraft in an attempt to fly it to Sweden to meet German contacts; that the British security services engineered his death because he had been in contact with the Nazi defector Rudolf Hess; and, not impossibly, that one of the passengers on this urgent military mission was Kent’s boyfriend, who “was wearing make-up.”

Larman sifts through the testimonies and concludes that the duke drank too much with his friends when their takeoff was delayed, and then insisted on taking the controls. This seems entirely likely. The Duke of Kent was not the only member of the family to overrate his abilities. He just paid for it faster. Edward and Wallis, meanwhile, condemned themselves to an extended purgatory of irrelevance and vanity. To keep the money coming in, they became frequent visitors to the United States. This is more than can be said for Prince Andrew.