“Never marry outside your class.”
As a conservative man, one of the old customs I’ve always respected is that nobility / royalty always kept a closed shop when it came to marriage. If a royal princess came of marriageable age, some other royal prince would be found — mostly in Europe — to be her husband, and ditto for the future Earl Whatsit to find himself a brood mare wife among the dozens of well-bred girls available either locally, or else abroad.
Yes I know, such customs have led to inbred morons and black sheep in the various families, but over time, the benefit of said unions have outweighed the potential disadvantages. Both parties know the rules of the game, and behave accordingly.
There have been some notable exceptions to this rule, of course, most notably in the case of Prince William’s wife, the former commoner Kate Middleton (now the Duchess of Cambridge) who will one day became Queen Catherine of Great Britain. As a commoner-turned royal, she has been an outstanding success and is a tribute to Britain’s Royal Family.
The same cannot be said for the other prince (William’s brother Harry) who not only married someone way below his class, but a foreigner to boot, who not only has no background in the vagaries of Britain’s class system (not always a Bad Thing, mind you) but also seems determined to inflict her New Age / New Woman bullshit on the long-suffering Windsors. Hence:
Once he was a beer-drinking bachelor with a penchant for fast food, who was most likely to be found at the heart of the party.
But then our action man prince met a free-spirited Californian actress living by the ethos that most things can be ‘cured with either yoga, the beach or a few avocados’, as she wrote on her now-defunct blog The Tig.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Ever since Prince Harry met Meghan Markle something has changed. Last week they were spotted leaving a Notting Hill wellness shop which offers ‘energy healing’ and meditation with ‘singing bowls’.
Then it was revealed they had stayed at Heckfield Place hotel in Hampshire for three nights. It boasts an organic ethos, a yoga studio and a spa offering ‘all-natural treatments’, and holds mind-expanding talks on subjects such as ‘How the world thinks’.
And it gets better:
The Duchess of Sussex has delivered an astonishing snub to the Queen’s highly-regarded doctors, insisting she doesn’t want ‘the men in suits’ to oversee the birth of her first child.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, in a significant break with Royal tradition, 37-year-old Meghan has appointed her own delivery team, led by an unnamed female doctor.
Royal Household gynaecologists Alan Farthing and Guy Thorpe-Beeston – who is a specialist in high-risk births – attended at the arrival of all three of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s children. They are among the best in the world but neither has been given the leading role in Meghan’s care.
FFS. The only was this could get any worse would be if the “unnamed female doctor” turns out to be that chick from Gray’s Anatomy.
Look: Britain has had a long and storied tradition of eccentric royals, most of whom were kept out of view of the public (unless they were actual monarchs, in which case they were kept more or less in check by Parliament). And over time, their effect on the Royal Family has been either minimal or else forgotten.
Nowadays, of course, there is no privacy for Royal Loons, and the tabloid press (no longer restrained by lèse-majesté laws of old, more’s the pity) seize on every little eccentricity and bray it out loud to the world.
In the grand scheme of things, of course, none of this matters — especially to us Murkins, who look on these goings-on with, at best, bemused indifference — and in centuries to come, the Pussification Of Prince Harry will be (perhaps) just a footnote in someone’s book about royal foolishness.
But for those like me who are interested in things like tradition and long-established customs (especially when they’ve been proven to work), this dim-witted modernist broad has done more damage to the Royal Family than Hitler’s bombs.
