Three weeks ago, a petition was submitted to the city council of Brighton and Hove, in the county of Sussex, calling for the rejection of the terms “Duke and Duchess of Sussex.” The petition, started by a resident named Charles Ross, characterized the use of these titles by Prince Harry, the second son of the heir to the throne, and his wife, Meghan Markle, as “morally wrong and disrespectful to the county of East Sussex.” It called upon the council members “to not refer to these individuals by such titles which we believe to be entirely non democratic and symbolic of the oppression of the general public by the wealthy elite” and demanded that the council not invite or entertain the couple, “nor afford them any hospitality or courtesies above and beyond that of an ordinary member of the public.”
The petition garnered nearly four thousand signatories, and was brought before a meeting of the full council at Hove Town Hall on December 19th. Ross said that it was not his intention to malign Prince Harry—whom he referred to as Harry Windsor, his given name—or Meghan Markle, whose personal accomplishments, as a helicopter pilot and an actress, respectively, he respected. Rather, he intended to draw attention to the entrenched social inequality that the institution of the monarchy perpetuates in Britain. “Are we still obedient serfs, or are we ready as a forward-thinking town to throw out these perverse ceremonies and traditions which enshrine the class system and let many sleep in shop doorways while others sleep in palaces?” Ross asked, according to a report that appeared in Brighton & Hove News. It would be a proud moment, Ross concluded, if Brighton’s councillors were to set the city on the path “to being the first openly republican city in the United Kingdom.”
Brighton, a resort on the south coast, is well known as a raffish, radical place. The only Green Party M.P. in the House of Commons, Caroline Lucas, represents the Brighton Pavilion constituency, a district in the center of town. The city has long been a welcoming place for members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and also, traditionally, metropolitan adulterers absconding to the seaside for a dirty weekend. It also has a celebrated history of welcoming, rather than rejecting, royals who swerve from the prescribed path. The town became fashionable in the late eighteenth century, largely thanks to the patronage of the eldest son of King George III, who was then the Prince of Wales. The Prince, later crowned George IV, established a residence in Brighton in his early twenties, finding it a congenial place to carry on a relationship with his longtime companion, Maria Fitzherbert—who, as a twice-widowed Catholic commoner, was triply inappropriate as a royal spouse. Under the terms of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, the monarch was required to give consent to any marital match of his or her heirs under the age of twenty-five; this requirement persists, in a different legal form.
It should be acknowledged that the Prince Regent, as he became known after his father was incapacitated, in 1811, offered a signal example of the perverse ceremonies and traditions that underpin the British monarchy. He was famously dissolute and extravagant, burning through the generous allowance that the King granted him and incurring so much debt by the age of twenty-five that Parliament was obliged to grant him what would today be tens of millions of pounds. The gesture hardly curbed the Prince’s expensive tastes. Beginning in 1815, he started construction on an opulent seaside palace, the Brighton Pavilion, designed by John Nash, the most celebrated architect of the time. From the outside, it looks like a Mughal temple. Inside, it was decorated in decadent chinoiserie, with a thirty-foot glass chandelier clutched in the claws of a silvered dragon suspended above the dining table. Even the cast-iron columns that support the ceiling of the kitchen were decorated so as to look like palm trees, with painted copper leaves sprouting at the top. The prodigious output of those kitchens contributed to the Prince’s obesity, flatteringly disguised in the embroidered tabard and ermine-lined cape that he wore for his official coronation portrait, executed by Thomas Lawrence, in 1821. By the time the Pavilion was finally completed, in 1823, George IV was so fat that he could no longer climb the stairs to its upper floors, necessitating the installation of a bedroom suite on the ground floor.
Compared with the excesses of Prince Harry’s ancestor in building the Brighton Pavilion, which is maintained today as a museum, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s much-maligned refurbishment of Frogmore Cottage—their home on the Queen’s estate at Windsor, which was renovated last year, to the tune of 2.4 million pounds in taxpayer funds—seems like relatively small potatoes. But the Sussexes—whose title was bestowed on them by the Queen upon their marriage, in 2018, and who have no particular connection to Brighton and Hove beyond having visited the county on one occasion, to cheering crowds—have, during the short duration of their marriage, become characterized in the popular press as the Royal Family’s most profligate, self-serving, and self-righteous members. They have been lambasted for taking private planes while lecturing others about the dangers of climate change; for withholding information about the location and time of the birth of their son, Archie; and for declining to name his godparents publicly. They have been accused of undermining the reproductive choices of Prince William, Harry’s brother, and his wife, Catherine Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, who welcomed their third child, Prince Louis, in 2018; Prince Harry recently let it be known that, due to global overpopulation, the Sussexes would be restricting their own procreativity to no more than two offspring. They have been saved from being deemed the Windsors’ most out-of-tune members only by the utter self-immolation of Prince Andrew, the Queen’s second son, whose lack of repentance in a BBC interview about his friendship with the late Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died in jail, last summer, obliged Andrew to stand down from all his official royal duties. When shifty Uncle Andy is the only thing standing between you and total Fleet Street denigration, you know something’s gone very wrong.
Having just returned from a six-week stay in the United States and Canada—skipping the traditional royal Christmas festivities at Sandringham, the Queen’s estate in Norfolk, and thereby generating even more negative commentary from the press, who helpfully noted that the Queen, ninety-three, and her husband, Prince Philip, ninety-eight, won’t be around forever—this week, the Sussexes upped the ante. On Wednesday evening, they issued a statement, reproduced on their Web site and posted on their Instagram page, in which they declared an intention to “carve out a progressive new role within this institution.” They intended, the statement said, to “step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family” and to “work to become financially independent.” The statement asserted their intention to divide their time between the United Kingdom and North America, the Duchess having lived in Canada for five years while filming the television drama “Suits,” the role for which she was best known before becoming Prince Harry’s girlfriend, in 2016. “This geographic balance will enable us to raise our son with an appreciation for the royal tradition into which he was born, while also providing our family with the space to focus on the next chapter,” the statement continued.
The result was a clean sweep of the front pages of British newspapers on Thursday morning, with the Sun’s tabloid headline, “Megxit,” capturing the shocked tone of the coverage. (The New York Post went for the same irresistible neologism.) Before Wednesday evening was out, the Palace had issued a two-sentence statement that spoke volumes: “Discussions with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are at an early stage. We understand their desire to take a different approach, but these are complicated issues that will take time to work through.” It was swiftly reported that, despite the statement’s assertion that the Sussexes would “continue to collaborate” with the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Cambridge, the Royal Family had been blindsided by the announcement. “They Didn’t Even Tell the Queen” was the headline on the front page of the left-leaning Daily Mirror. Judgment by the royal commentariat was swift and largely damning. Piers Morgan, of the Daily Mail, wrote that “for pure arrogance, entitlement, greed, and willful disrespect, nothing has ever quite matched the behavior of the ‘Duke and Duchess of Sussex’ ”—adding that he was putting their titles within quotation marks because he sincerely hoped that they would be revoked by Her Majesty.
Other commentators dug into the financials, noting that the Sussexes’ stated move toward financial independence commits them to declining only the funds they have thus far received through the Sovereign Grant—public money paid to the Crown to fund the public duties of the monarchy. As the Sussexes note on their Web site, their portion of the Sovereign Grant amounts to only five per cent of their income. (Considerable additional public funds are, however, provided to pay for their security and official travel costs.) The vast majority of the remainder comes from Harry’s father, Prince Charles, out of the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, which amounted to more than twenty million pounds last year. To give up the Queen’s contribution without also giving up that of the Prince, commentators noted, hardly amounts to weaning oneself from the royal teat altogether.
Prince Harry, whose abhorrence of the tabloid press is understandable, given the manner of his mother’s death, issued an unusual and forcefully worded critique in the fall of 2016, before his engagement was announced. A statement from Kensington Palace cited “a wave of abuse and harassment,” noting the “racial undertones of comment pieces.” Harry’s outrage was justified, given that the coverage of Markle trafficked in racial stereotypes and dwelled upon such matters as her “exotic DNA” and her shapely “Suits” wardrobe. His pain was also evident: the statement concluded, “Commentators will say ‘this is the price she has to pay,’ and that ‘this is all part of the game.’ He strongly disagrees. This is not a game—it is her life and his.”
But the statement, however strongly worded and strongly felt, was also ineffective as a means of changing the press dynamic. So have been the couple’s subsequent, repeated attempts to beat back the beasts of Fleet Street—including, this fall, the Duchess’s issuing of a lawsuit against the Mail on Sunday for reprinting and reporting on a private letter that she sent to her father, Thomas Markle, and the Prince’s issuing of a lawsuit against several tabloid papers over alleged phone-tapping. “I’ve seen what happens when someone I love is commoditised to the point that they are no longer treated or seen as a real person,” Prince Harry wrote, in another extraordinary statement issued last year. Those lawsuits were launched at the end of the couple’s first overseas tour with their son to Africa, during which they also spoke to a correspondent from ITV, Tom Bradby, about their frustrations. In an interview, Prince Harry alluded to the trauma of the loss of his mother and the way in which it is reignited by his every encounter with the paparazzi—“every single time I see a camera, every single time I hear a click, every single time I see a flash, it takes me straight back,” he said—while the Duchess spoke about how unprepared she was for the scrutiny and commentary. “I never thought that this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair,” she told Bradby. “It’s not enough to just survive something. That’s not the point of life. You’ve got to thrive. You’ve got to feel happy.” She had tried, she continued, to adopt the British attitude of the stiff upper lip, “but what that does internally is probably really damaging.”
The internal well-being of members of the Royal Family, as opposed to their outward conduct, has rarely been a subject of paramount concern to the British press. Self-care is one of those American imports, like the yoga studio that the Sussexes reportedly had installed at Frogmore Cottage, about which the British are reflexively skeptical. It was inevitable that Markle, as an American import herself, would be subject to withering critique. One measure of her adaptation to her new country would, of necessity, be her acceptance of the confining strictures of duty to which British royals are bound, especially those as high in the succession as is Prince Harry, who, until the birth of his nephews and niece, spent most of his life being third in line to the throne—only an abdication and an accident away from the Crown itself. Markle is hardly alone in thinking that duty to misery sounds like a hellish way to live; she’s only moved more quickly to the expression of that belief than did any of her equally unhappy predecessors, including her late mother-in-law.
In the years before meeting Markle, Harry said publicly that being King or Queen was a job that no one wants, but he added that, speaking of the Royal Family, “we will carry out our duties at the right time.” How the couple intend to marry the continuation of their duties with their newly declared independence will, presumably, become clearer as time goes on, though by Friday morning it was reported that Meghan had already flown back to Canada, leaving Harry to handle the family fall-out. The Sussexes may have hoped for a conscious uncoupling from the rest of the Windsors, but the drama of the breach was immediately symbolized by the removal of their wax likenesses from the Royal Family display at Madame Tussaud’s in London. (The couple are not to be melted down, just stationed elsewhere.) What is already clear is that the Sussexes intend forthwith to redraw the lines of engagement with the press. They are opting out of the Royal Rota, the arrangement whereby, for decades, the royals have given access to a pool reporter from the national papers; instead, they will invite coverage from personally selected media outlets “focused on objective news reporting to cover key moments and events,” and will use their own social-media accounts, especially Instagram, to communicate directly with the public. Having railed against the media’s commodification of his wife, Prince Harry now seems prepared to take its commodification into his own hands: it was reported last month that he and the Duchess have lately submitted a trademark application for hundreds of items, from clothing to printed items, that may be issued with the couple’s personal brand, Sussex Royal.
This step is unlikely to please critics who insist that Sussex is a title, not a brand name, and that it is no more Harry and Meghan’s to exploit than Buckingham Palace is the Queen’s to sell off. This is a position in which the republican-leaning petitioners of Brighton and Hove find themselves in unlikely unity with the royalist and would-be Sussex canceller, Piers Morgan. That the monarchy is an intolerable institution can be widely agreed; the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are merely the latest and loudest to say it, just as George IV, with his bedizened escape hatch by the sea, was one of the most flamboyant to express it. There are many reasons to argue for the monarchy’s abolition; it is only lately that the human rights of those born and married into it have come into focus as among the most compelling arguments for the institution’s obsolescence.
