By Monica Showalter
There’s class. And if you have none, you might be Meghan and Harry.
The “non-working” royals, as the matter is delicately put, are in a snit these days because now that the queen is dead, they didn’t get the spoils they thought they were entitled to:
According to the New York Post:
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s kids will not be given His and Her Royal Highness titles — leaving the exiled couple once again “furious” at the royal family over the snub, according to a report.
Harry’s dad, the new King Charles III, has agreed to soon bestow the titles of prince and princess on his California-based grandkids, Archie, 3, and Lilibet, 1, according to the Sun.
But after a week of tense negotiations, he has refused to allow them to be known as HRH, titles that were stripped from their podcasting parents after they abandoned the family and the UK in 2020.
“That is the agreement — they can be prince and princess but not HRH because they are not working royals,” one insider told the UK paper.
The decision follows “a lot of talks over the past week” since Harry’s dad became king the moment his 96-year-old mother died last Thursday.
“They have been relentless since the Queen died,” the insider said of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, saying they “have been insistent that Archie and Lilibet are prince and princess.”
So what are we reading here? That they want the titles and status of royalty, nice high royalty, not some Ruritanian eurochicken title from some long gone dynasty, but don’t want to put the work in of being royalty.
Meghan, of course, being classless, in the past has claimed it’s a matter of royal family ‘racism.’
That’s pretty questionable.
As we’ve learned from the various dramas around the British royal family, the royal family is actually an enterprise, and colloquially known as “the firm.” The members work pretty hard at making public appearances, tending to their charities, and going to every school and park opening in the British outlands — often the less well-known, or less glamorous, U.K. places such as Sheffield, Preston, Wolverhampton, Carlisle, Sunderland, Ripon, Blackpool, Leicester, Rotherham, Doncaster, Leeds, Kingston-on-Hull, Peterborough, St. Albans, Slough, Bolton, Stevenage, Truro, Bristol, Bournemouth to name a random few — to cut ribbons and make those stately airy waves to the adoring crowds. They smile sweetly, take teddy bears and wipe tears from gooey toddlers, sit still for hours for solemn ceremonies, and act delighted when huge bouquets of flowers are thrust into their hands by random members of the overenthusiastic public. They do this while wearing the uniform heels and stockings and other costumes of royal propriety, which, when one spends all day in them, is not exactly an easy life. They show patience with all sorts of idiocies as well as the odd faux pas as constitutional monarchs and call it a life of service, which to most people, particularly the Brits themselves, is obvious enough, particularly since we are seeing the public’s reaction to Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.
This is the stuff Harry and Meghan ran away from, in order to focus exclusively on red carpets and big Hollywood payouts, particularly from their tell-all books and interviews.
What they are saying they want is the titles, but not the work, which is not the British model of royalty, but more like perhaps the Saudi model of royalty, of being idle princelings with more money than they know what to do with, but no ‘service’ to their name.
That in itself shows zero class, but there’s actually a secondary aspect to this that doesn’t reflect well on them, either: It’s that their hankering for royalty and status, which they hardly need in their chosen life as private citizens, is the sort of gilded-age hankering we used to see at the turn of the 20th century, when the children of robber barons would go to Europe in search of a spouse with a title. People like that never amounted to anything, they were always the second and third generations of their industrialist patriarchs who sought out these royal titles.
Those who have actually experienced real royalty often go the other direction, with a longing for the freedom of the commoners. They feel confident because they know the both sides of such things. They aren’t strivers. Recall that Princess Anne refused to give her children fancy titles on the grounds that she wanted them to live life more “normally.”
Presumably, that was the reason Harry fled the royal family, and both Harry and Meghan claimed they longed for normalcy with their kids.
Turned out that was a load of hooey. The pair of them craved status for their kids same as any parvenu downwind of the main royal line, despite their protestations to the contrary. That’s embarrassing. The want status as an entitlement, not an earned honor. And now that this story is out, everyone can see right through it.