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Andrew Roberts is the author of “Churchill: Walking with Destiny” (Penguin Books, 2018).
LONDON — The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s blockbuster interview with Oprah has sent royal watchers and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic into a frenzy of speculation. Where will the royal family go from here?
History suggests there are two possible scenarios that could develop, each with very different potential outcomes for the House of Windsor. Buckingham Palace, which is highly history-conscious, will be looking at each of them keenly to try to avoid the pitfalls inherent in each.
The palace’s official 71-word milksop response to the two-hour barrage of accusations and allegations from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle implies that the royal family hopes the Sussexes will go down what I’ll dub “The Wallis Route.”
After his abdication in 1936, the ex-King Edward VIII and his wife Wallis Simpson, who were made the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, were considered a potential long-term threat to the prestige and legitimacy of the monarchy. They turned out not to be.
The couple left Britain and made their lives elsewhere — only coming back very briefly, usually on family occasions they could not avoid, such as funerals. They did not attempt to set up a rival court, and did not criticize King George VI and Queen Elizabeth publicly, however malicious they might have been in private. (They nicknamed Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, whose figure was the opposite of the stick-thin Wallis, “Cookie.”)
The Windsors lived off the money that the duke had inherited from his father King George V and had a sideline in making money from illegal sterling-franc currency transactions. They lived in some style in the Bois de Boulogne, outside Paris.
Because they were childless, the royal family back in London knew that any potential embarrassment over their very existence would die with them. But there was no further embarrassment, as they lived respectably and caused few problems. They even gave a party to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.
The potential for embarrassment was there, not least when the Nazis conceived a plot — Operation Willi — to kidnap them from Spain in 1940 and set the duke up as a puppet king and rival to his younger brother, but it never materialized. Spending the rest of World War II in the Bahamas — where the duke was governor — and making occasional trips to New York to see friends, the Windsors never posed a threat to the royal family.
Today’s palace will hope that Harry and Meghan will follow a similar tack. The allegations of bullying and “emotional cruelty” made by former employees — which will have to be investigated as they are serious and have now been made public — might be a serious impediment to this, however.
The investigation could be risky for the palace. If the Sussexes feel that they are being attacked by a process that undermines their own victimhood status as established by their public therapy session with Oprah, they could respond by going down what I’ll call the “The Diana Route.”
By the summer of 1997, there was a serious concern at court that Diana, Princess of Wales, was likely to become a serious threat to the prestige of the House of Windsor for decades to come, with the added problem that she was going to be the mother of a future king. Had she set up residence in the Bois de Boulogne (not coincidentally the same house as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had lived in) with Dodi Fayed, and become a global celebrity, fashion icon, publicity magnet and glamorous alternative to the Windsors in London, it was widely feared that her alternative court might have sucked the oxygen of publicity away from the royal family. Of course, any such danger was extinguished by the tragic accident in Paris on the night of August 31, 1997.
Today, palace officials will be understandably concerned that the Harry and Meghan show, transferred to California, will be consistently directed against the House of Windsor, with more revelations, more accusations and a lifetime of private conversations being slowly revealed, such as the alleged concerns from an unnamed member of the royal family about their son Archie’s skin color.
Unlike the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Sussexes will soon have two children, which adds to the couple’s capacity to embarrass the palace, as the row over Archie’s title has already proved. Meghan’s new friends such as Meena Harris, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ niece, and Canadian fashion stylist Jessica Mulroney, have already shown in their tweets and statements an eagerness to go on the offensive. (In Harris’ case, branding any criticism whatsoever of Meghan as racist.)
Going down “The Diana Route” of covert, undeclared-but-obvious opposition to the House of Windsor will be easy for the Sussexes, as they will be financially independent with their Netflix, Spotify and possible Disney deals, while their status as victims of the sinister, racist palace will make them virtually untouchable in the American media. The emotional cost for the prince in breaking with his family seems to have been factored in already, if his remarks to Oprah Winfrey are taken at face value.
It might well be that Harry will prefer the easier, less psychologically damaging “Wallis Route,” and Meghan the more combative and undeniably lucrative “Diana Route” — or perhaps vice versa. Either way, it will become fairly clear soon.
Certainly, “The Wallis Route” will be far less damaging for the royal family’s relations with the dozen majority non-white countries of the Commonwealth, which have been profoundly damaged already by the Sussex’s accusations of institutional racism.
The global media interest in Prince Philip’s 100th birthday, and/or his funeral, will now be dominated not by a review of his truly extraordinary record of service to his country — including his distinguished wartime service in World War II — but instead by the body language and glances across the Abbey between Meghan and Kate, Harry and Charles, Harry and William, and the Sussexes and the Mystery Racist.
All this must of course be profoundly depressing for the queen, for whom the abdication crisis was one of her earlier memories — she was 10 years old at the time — and the event that made her heir to the throne. The crisis surrounding Diana’s death was perhaps the most testing of her reign.
To now have the twilight of her beloved husband’s life overshadowed by the fallout of an Oprah interview was something that few would have predicted. Like every good soap opera, the royal one has produced yet another unexpected twist.
