Is it an exaggeration to describe Meghan’s impending arrival on the balcony of Buckingham Palace as a potential earthquake? Not if you recognize that the Windsors, for all their impressive titles, crown jewels, castles, palaces, estates, artwork, bodyguards, helicopters, and armies of staff, are actually surprisingly insecure. Perhaps it’s because they know that almost all these trappings on which their special status depends are held in trust for the people over whom they have been set. Even the assets they might be entitled to call their own could be seen as fortuitously acquired rather than earned.
The knowledge, even subconscious, that all these tangible indicators of their royalness could be taken away or, almost as bad, carelessly lost through miscalculation, would shake the self-belief of a dynasty even as outwardly self-assured as this one. It’s worth noting that one of the very rare occasions on which Elizabeth II was seen to shed a tear in public was at the decommissioning of the Royal Yacht Britannia, a royal asset of unsurpassed elegance and charisma, axed by the Ministry of Defence as a cost-saving measure.
Add the amplifying effects of a modern news media whose pliability must constantly be repurchased through a complex system of trades and favors, and then add the online anarchy of social media that picks the scab off every rumor and defies any traditional form of control. Pretty soon the survival odds for the world’s last remaining major monarchy begin to look rather less impregnable.
Then add the unimaginable tectonic shift that will follow the not-far-distant end of Elizabeth’s reign, followed by the no less unsettling implications of the coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla, and the odds look shakier still.
Meghan and Harry may, in constitutional terms, be strictly irrelevant. They will never ascend the throne and their public function, insofar as they have one at all, is to support the crown…and avoid bringing it into disrepute. It’s a delicate structure—a democratic monarchy that has taken centuries to reach its current, finely-balanced state of broad public approval. For Meghan and Harry everything else, even developing a globally acclaimed portfolio of irreproachably good causes, is superfluous.
