American Princess Read online

  Dedication

  For Scott—my husband—my prince

  Epigraph

  With fame comes opportunity, but it also includes responsibility—to advocate and share, to focus less on glass slippers and more on pushing through glass ceilings. And, if I’m lucky enough, to inspire.

  —MEGHAN MARKLE

  The world is changing as everybody knows, and we’ve changed with it. I think everybody can see that.

  —PRINCE HARRY OF WALES

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword: This Scept’red Aisle

  Childe Harry

  Hollywood Royalty

  Goodbye, Mummy

  [You Gotta Have] Heart

  The Playing Fields of Eton: Acting Out

  Fitting in a Box: Acting

  Attention Must Be Paid: Growing Up

  Uniforms: You’re in the Army Now

  Moving On and Moving Out: Suits and Charities Abroad

  Charities Begin at Home

  When Harry Met Meghan

  Harry Hitches His Wagon to a Star

  American Princess

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  This Scept’red Aisle

  Once upon a time—right up to the dawn of the twentieth century, in fact—royal marriages were arranged relationships, peace treaties that secured borders and cemented political alliances. Those who wanted to marry for love were considered to have abrogated their duties.

  And yet the most modern love story in the history of the thousand-year-old British monarchy began in a similar way to many royal matches of centuries past: as a setup.

  On the cloudy afternoon of November 27, 2017, Prince Harry of Wales, then fifth in line to the throne, descended a series of flagstone steps into Kensington Palace’s Sunken Garden with his beautiful raven-haired fiancée. They were there for the obligatory photo session that followed Clarence House’s official announcement of their engagement a few hours earlier. The gray waters of the reflecting pool mirrored their images variously holding hands, arms entwined, heads inclined toward each other, a pair of terrestrial swans in a mating dance, able to read and anticipate each other’s body language. The couple’s radiant smiles more than made up for the absence of the sun. With no coat over his royal blue suit, Harry must not have felt the autumnal nip in the air. Wearing a belted white trench coat, his intended bride, Meghan Markle, was already breaking royal protocol by not wearing pantyhose.

  That fashion statement alone was enough of a clue that Meghan was already doing things differently; and their frequent and public displays of affection are another hint that she and Harry already are and will be like no other couple the monarchy has ever seen.

  Their fateful blind date had taken place less than seventeen months earlier; and in the intervening time they had been as inseparable as they could manage for two people who lived on different continents and whose individual professional commitments kept them occupied nearly every day. Meghan was no nubile foreign princess waiting to be told which dynastic marriage awaited her, or a teenage English rose with little experience of the world.

  Meghan Markle is a foreigner. But even a generation ago, her marriage to Harry would have been unimaginable.

  Cut to a soggy polo match at Smith’s Lawn during one rainy day at Windsor in 1970. As the story goes, a five-foot-eight-inch blonde bearing a remarkable resemblance to the Prince of Wales’s childhood nanny sauntered up to him through the mud; and with supreme confidence, complimented his pony. “That’s a fine animal, sir! I thought you played wonderfully well.” Having won Prince Charles’s attention, on their second encounter she blatantly propositioned him. “My great-grandmother and your great-great-grandfather were lovers: how about it?”

  Camilla Shand’s father was a courtier with the somewhat priapic title “Silver Stick.” The ancestress she’d alluded to was Alice Keppel, known as “La Favorita,” mistress for more than a dozen years to Edward VII—who’d had to be bodily removed from the dying king’s bedside by command of the queen, who wanted her rival out of sight.

  Queen Elizabeth’s oldest son fell head over heels for Camilla, and the pair dated before Charles entered the Royal Navy. But he never proposed, and Camilla was unwilling to wait for him. In 1973, she wed Andrew Parker Bowles, a captain of the household cavalry eight years her senior. But at the time she and Charles began dating, even if the Prince of Wales had evinced no fear of commitment, Buckingham Palace would have been unwilling to accept Camilla as a suitable bride. Despite the fact that her father was a courtier and she’d attended good schools, the Shands were not considered aristocratic enough for Camilla to be future-queen-of-England material. Moreover, Camilla was not a virgin.

  Queen Elizabeth’s own mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, was not royal. But her father was an earl and she was as pure as the driven snow when she married the then–Duke of York in 1923. When she was still the heir apparent, in 1947 Queen Elizabeth had wed a foreign royal, her fourth cousin Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark; but theirs was a love match. Moreover, in the wake of World War I, when most European monarchies had been relegated to the history books, it was no longer necessary to cement foreign alliances for political gain.

  Yet to the Windsors, even in 1981, it was still important for the bride of the Prince of Wales, the heir to the throne, to pass the purity test.

  Enter Lady Diana Spencer, the youngest daughter of the 8th Earl Spencer. Her pedigree was older, far posher—and more English—than Charles’s. In 1603, King James I had created the 1st Baron Spencer, and the title was upgraded to an earldom by George III in 1765. The Palace determined that “Shy Di,” a blushing, virginal kindergarten teacher, would make the perfect match for the Prince of Wales. The reader knows the rest of the story, of course.

  Prince William, Charles and Diana’s elder son, met the girl of his dreams, Catherine Middleton, during their freshman year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Catherine, a willowy brunette with incomparable poise, charm, and athleticism, came from an upper-middle-class home: her father had been a British Airways flight dispatcher; and her mother, Carole, was a stewardess. Later, the online party planning business that Carole launched as an in-home start-up skyrocketed into a multimillion-dollar industry.

  After cohabitating for the better part of a decade-long courtship, William and Catherine finally married on April 29, 2011. It was the first time in three hundred and fifty years that an heir to the British throne had wed a female commoner without a patrician pedigree.

  So much for the hard-boiled rules handed down to Charles four decades earlier that he must marry a virgin from an aristocratic family.

  Now Charles and Diana’s younger son, Prince Harry, for years the most eligible bachelor in the world, the lovable, mischievous “bad boy” of the Windsors, is about to smash every taboo regarding royal marriages—and more.

  Rebel, rakehell, rule breaker. Soldier, prince, private man: there’s a little bit of his royal forebears in Harry, including those with a fondness for divorcées and actresses. But there is so much more that is unique and different about his choice of Meghan Markle to be his wife than there is in common with his ancestors’ liaisons.

  After several years of devoting his life to military service as well as to numerous philanthropic causes that are dear to his heart, Harry is ready to settle down, most likely to continue his charitable efforts, with a beautiful and spirited soulmate by his side.

  She attended a Catholic school, although she was not raised a Catholic.

  She is most
certainly a commoner. A professional actress, in fact. For centuries, actresses, viewed as no better than tavern wenches, weren’t even considered acceptable as royal mistresses.

  She’s divorced.

  She’s also biracial.

  And furthermore, Meghan Markle is not even British.

  A British prince chose to marry a biracial divorced American actress.

  The last time a British royal insisted on wedding an American divorcée, it nearly provoked a constitutional crisis.

  In 1934, when the future Edward VIII was still Prince of Wales, he fell wildly in love with the homely, brittle Wallis Warfield Simpson, a Baltimore belle who was on her second marriage. Their extramarital affair remained just as passionate when Edward became king in January 1936; but in that era the British press did not report about the royal family’s personal lives. Therefore, Edward’s subjects never knew that Wallis was still married during the first few years of her affair with Edward; and that the king very likely—and illegally—colluded in getting Wallis her divorce from Ernest Simpson.

  The public also had no idea that the government had been secretly compiling information on both Wallis and Edward, and was keenly aware of their Nazi and pro-Fascist sympathies. MI6, Britain’s equivalent of the CIA, knew that the feckless sovereign left the contents of his red dispatch boxes lying about; and they suspected that he might have shared some of the highly sensitive information both with Wallis and with their aristocratic cadre of pro-Reich cronies. Water stains on the papers indicated that some documents had even been used as cocktail coasters!

  With Hitler on the rise across the Channel, a Nazi puppet on Britain’s throne would have been a disaster for democracy.

  As a way of removing an existential threat to the nation, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin reminded His Majesty that ever since the reign of Henry VIII, the English sovereign is also the Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England—a church that in the 1930s refused to recognize divorce. As king, Edward could never wed Wallis, because in the eyes of the Anglican Church she was still considered married to her second husband, Ernest Aldrich Simpson. If His Majesty nonetheless wished to marry Wallis, then he could no longer remain on the throne. If Edward stubbornly chose to remain king and marry his paramour in spite of his government’s wishes, they would resign en masse, resulting in a constitutional crisis.

  Faced with the most difficult decision of his life, the man who was bred in the bone to choose duty above all else chose love instead. On December 11, 1936, at 1:52 Greenwich Mean Time, Edward VIII made history when he became the first British monarch to voluntarily relinquish the crown.

  Known as the Abdication Crisis, Edward VIII’s abandonment of the throne for Wallis Simpson—in shorthand, an American divorcée—sent a shock wave through the Windsor dynasty that reverberated for decades. As a result, the current monarch, Elizabeth II, found herself in direct succession to the throne. In the wake of Edward VIII’s complete dereliction, her father, the shy, stammering, chain-smoking Duke of York, became king, taking the name George VI.

  In 1937, Edward, then titled Duke of Windsor, married the twice-divorced Wallis in France. But to the rest of the family, his new duchess would always be “that woman,” the root cause of every bit of angst visited upon the reluctant George VI for the entirety of his reign.

  And now, an American divorcée—a phrase that in itself sent shudders through the Windsor dynasty for nearly three quarters of a century—is about to marry Queen Elizabeth’s grandson.

  This book celebrates the once unthinkable, once impermissible royal love story of Prince Henry of Wales and Meghan Markle.

  A love story that will change the face of the British monarchy forever.

  To understand why and how Harry and Meghan’s relationship—and royal marriage—makes history, defying centuries of arcane rules and traditions, it’s important to see how far the British monarchy has come since another redheaded Harry—Henry VIII—first, irrevocably, changed its face.

  Prince Harry of Wales

  Born September 15, 1984

  -and-

  Meghan Markle

  Born August 4, 1981

  Childe Harry

  Oh, God, it’s a boy. And he’s even got red hair.”

  According to that boy’s mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, those were his father Prince Charles’s first words, spoken in hurtful alarm on seeing his newborn baby in Diana’s arms.

  Because she knew “Charles always wanted a girl,” Diana admitted to her biographer, Andrew Morton, that for the sake of marital harmony she had never told her husband about the results of her pregnancy scan, and carried the secret of Harry’s gender until the day he was born. On the misty late summer morning of September 15, 1984, one week shy of her projected due date, Diana awoke in her bed at Windsor Castle, but she realized she had better hightail it to London.

  It was time. She and Charles departed Windsor at six-thirty A.M., arriving an hour later at the Lindo Wing of St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where Diana had given birth to her first child, Prince William, on June 21, 1982.

  For her first six hours of labor she read a book while Charles, fetchingly dressed in a hospital gown, fed her ice chips. It was a cozy domestic scene.

  Prince Henry Charles Albert David arrived at four-twenty P.M., delivered by George Parker, the same obstetrician who had brought William into the world. It should have been one of the happiest hours of the Waleses’ lives.

  After all, the day little blond William was born, when a reporter asked Charles if the infant resembled him, the prince had joked self-effacingly, “No, he’s lucky enough not to.”

  But with son number two, his father’s first reaction was cruel.

  Meanwhile, downstairs in Praed Street, a crowd of three hundred well-wishers, comprised of civilians and members of the press, had waited for hours outside the Lindo Wing’s redbrick facade for news of the royal birth. They were so collectively excited by the announcement that the Princess of Wales had given the family a second son that a distracted motorist smashed his vehicle into an ambulance.

  Two forty-two-gun salutes ripped the air, fired simultaneously from the Tower of London and Hyde Park. A town crier clad in scarlet with a plumed hat strolled in front of the hospital bearing a scroll; he then proclaimed the official announcement of the prince’s birth like a performer from a cheesy Renaissance faire. How quaint and traditional! thought some television viewers. As it turned out, the town crier had been hired by a Japanese TV company to add a bit of color to the event.

  As an aside, a different faux town crier, Tony Appleton, whose scarlet doublet bears a violet badge that reads Royalist Town Crier, announced Meghan and Harry’s engagement on November 27, 2017, and has voluntarily shown up at the births of the Cambridge heirs and other Windsor milestones.

  A town crier was a charming touch, but the fourth grandchild to Elizabeth II was not born into a charmed household.

  Diana, who had insisted on wearing sexy maternity clothes in order to please her husband, said of his gut reaction to little Harry, “Something inside me closed off.”

  And rather than embracing this little “miracle,” Charles insulted him. If he’d taken a moment’s reflection, he might have been thankful, not only that Diana and the boy were healthy, but that after nine hours of labor, she had given the Windsor dynasty the proverbial “spare,” history’s insurance in case anything disastrous happened to the first son and heir to the throne.

  Or Charles might have considered that baby Henry could someday become the third in a great tradition of redheaded English kings of that name: namely, Henry II, patriarch of the Plantagenet dynasty; and England’s most notorious Henry, Henry VIII—espouser of six wives, and architect of both the Reformation and the Church of England. Henry’s daughters, Mary I and the legendary Elizabeth I, plus their Stuart cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, were famously redheaded as well.

  A bit closer to home, Diana’s siblings—her older sister Sarah and their
brother, Charles, now the 9th Earl Spencer—have russet hair, as do half their ancestors whose portraits grace the walls of Althorp, the family seat, including the ginger-bearded “Red Earl,” an antecedent who lived during the reigns of both Victoria and Edward VII.

  So what might have spurred the “and he’s even got red hair” insult?

  Diana, who was deeply unhappy in her marriage, feeling unwelcomed by the royal family and unloved by her adulterous husband, did stray on her own. And throughout Harry’s life there have been whispers that his father was not the Prince of Wales, but one of Diana’s lovers, the Londonderry-born redhead James Hewitt.

  The story for public consumption was that the couple’s first encounter took place in the autumn of 1986. By that time, Prince Harry was already two years old. So much for Hewitt’s possible paternity. It would not be revealed until later that Hewitt and Diana had first been intimate years earlier than anyone had been led to believe. Perhaps this was enough to plant a seed of doubt in Charles’s mind, even though Diana would refer to Harry as “my little Spencer” throughout his childhood.

  Little Prince Henry Charles Albert David, henceforth to be known as Harry, as he left the Lindo Wing nestled safely in his mother’s arms—Diana wearing a full-sleeved scarlet coat with her golden hair perfectly blown out—was not destined to spend his early childhood in a home filled with marital harmony. When Charles and Diana brought Harry back to their apartments in Kensington Palace, the new dad remained just long enough to down a martini, then dashed off to a previously arranged polo match.

  Diana felt abandoned once again.

  In the six weeks that had led up to Harry’s birth, Diana admitted that she and Charles were very close. But then “suddenly as Harry was born it just went bang, our marriage, the whole thing went down the drain.”

  That wasn’t entirely true, of course.

  The royal marriage of Charles and Diana was doomed from the start, and both of them knew it.