America is in the process of losing its mind once again for the British royal family. This time due to the impeding marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, a lowly American without title of pedigree.
You’d think a country that fought a democratic revolution in favor of what Jefferson called “a natural aristocracy” of virtues and talents, and against “an artificial aristocracy” of wealth and birth, would find all of this antique folderol of titled, royal, aristocratic, hereditary privilege revolting. Many Brits do. But no, we’re gaga for it.
Predictably, not all Brits are wild about the bride. Her black mother, Doria Ragland, is descended from Georgia slaves, while her white father Thomas Markle has Dutch and Irish roots with several ancestors who arrived in New England before the Revolution. A shocking development, a divorced American with ancestors from Africa, Ireland and the Netherlands is invading the hallowed bastions of England’s royals.
And yet, turnabout is fair play. it’s worth asking who the groom is. How does Prince Harry sign his checks? Well, he’s Henry Albert David Mountbatten-Windsor. Does that mean he’s English through and through? And therefore superior to a colonial upstart of mixed race? Not exactly.
His grandfather, Prince Phillip, adopted the Mountbatten name when he married Elizabeth Windsor in 1947 because his father’s name might have been troubling to Britain just two years after Hitler’s Third Reich stopped killing his wife’s people. Phillip was actually a member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. Mein Gott, what a Teutonic mess.
In truth, the Mountbatten moniker, from his mother’s side of the family, wasn’t that much of an improvement. It too was adopted by British members, this time during World War I to disguise the real name and origin of the family. They were Battenbergs from Hesse, Germany, which might have incited the public to string them up from London lamp posts at a time when the Kaiser was busy killing 700,000 Brits.
Similarly, Queen Elizabeth’s family only became Windsors recently. They borrowed the name from a very nice royal castle built in the 11th century by William the Conquerer. Of course, he was also not British, but a Viking from Normandy. He built the castle to protect his invaders from actual residents of the British Isles while he subdued and exploited them. Treated them, in fact, rather like Americans of British lineage treated Meghan Markle’s enslaved ancestors.
But I digress. Queen Victoria’s husband, dear Prince Albert, bequeathed to the royal family his pedigree. He was Prince Albert Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. And Victoria was his first cousin, which may account for some of the inbred traits of he royals. She was from the House of Hanover, from Brunswick-Luneberg, which ruled Britain from 1714 on. Once again the Germanic name became a problem in WWI, so they morphed magically into Windsors for PR purposes.
I could go on, but you get the drift. It looks like the last time an English monarch was arguably any more English than Meghan Markle was a lot further back than the American Revolution. King Alfred the Great, maybe? On Prince Harry Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Hanover-Schleswig-Battenberg etc.’s Mum’s side, however, there seems to be a glimmer of hope.
Princes Di was a Spencer, and they have a fine, unbroken English pedigree back to the Middle Ages, but there you discover they were Despensers, which looks rather Frenchy. So they too were probably the spawn of Vikings who conquered Normandy in France before conquering England.
On Markle’s side, genealogists have been busy showing that she has oodles of ancestors who were kings and queens, just like Harry. Of course, this is no big deal. So do you and I. As Adam Rutherford demonstrates in “A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived,” There are 8 billion or so people now alive, but there were fewer in each earlier generation. In 1960, there were 3 billion, in 1800 just one billion, in 1000 about 350 million. So, go back far enough and mathematically we are all necessarily related to Charlemagne, Genghis Khan and Cleopatra. And to each other.
Royal or slave, blue blood or black isn’t important. It’s character that counts and Doria Ragland, yoga instructor and social worker, seems to be at least as nice a person as Princess Di. They probably would have liked each other. And could have dissed the royals over tea.
Tennyson had it right
Howe’er it be, it seems to me,
’Tis only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.