Unroyal: Three Women Who Shook the Monarchy

By Sarah Lyall

Wallis, Diana and Meghan: Three Wives, One Grave Narrative

Wallis Simpson, Diana Spencer and Meghan Markle all married into-and promptly challenged-the British royal family. In

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pushkin Industries
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781962556019

Sarah Lyall

SARAH LYALL has been a reporter for The New York Times for more than thirty years, nearly half of which was spent as a correspondent in the London bureau. She is currently a writer-at-large, contributing to a variety of desks.

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Introduction

There are two radically different ways to think about King Charles III’s coronation in London in the spring of 2023. The first is that this great frothy spectacle was a balm to the world’s agitated soul, a welcome expression of stability and tradition in a tumultuous time. Britain’s beloved Queen Elizabeth had died after more than seventy years on the throne, and her son had seamlessly taken her place—without a revolution, without a power struggle, without even so much as a fuss.

More than that, this ancient ceremony—in which the British monarch is anointed with holy oil—was a signal of continuity during a time of bewildering change and turmoil, not just in Britain but around the world. Elected officials come and go, governments might rise and fall, the political contract might tear itself to pieces, but—except for a spot of regicide and non-royal government rule in the 1600s—the British monarchy was still going strong after more than a millennium.

The second way of thinking about the coronation was that it was completely ludicrous. Man Sits on Chair was the way the satirical magazine Private Eye described it. That illustrated the viewpoint that the whole thing, said to have cost more than 100 million pounds, was an exercise in anachronistic pomp and superfluous circumstance. Charles’s throne was from the fourteenth century, a wooden structure built for King Edward I. Nestled within it was something called the Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny: a massive, nearly 350-pound sandstone block that was used for centuries in the coronations of Scottish kings. Seized by the English king, Edward I, after the Battle of Dunbar, in 1296, the stone was returned to Scotland 700 years later. There it remained until Charles’s coronation, and there it was returned when the coronation was over.

The ceremony required Charles, for some reason, to put on two different crowns, one containing a ruby said to have been worn by Henry V at Agincourt. He carried a scepter called the Rod of Equity and Mercy. He traveled back to Buckingham Palace from Westminster Abbey in an eighteenth-century, horse-drawn carriage known as the Gold State Coach, which no one likes because it has no suspension and no air-conditioning or heating and is notoriously uncomfortable. Queen Victoria criticized what she called its distressing oscillation. King William IV, a former naval officer, compared riding in it to being tossed in a rough sea. Nonetheless, it’s part of the tradition.

The ceremony also included not one, not two, not three, but four separate jewel-studded swords. The Sword of State, symbolizing royal authority. The Sword of Temporal Justice, symbolizing the monarch’s role as head of the armed forces. The Sword of Spiritual Justice, symbolizing his role as defender of the faith. And the Sword of Mercy, with its blunted tip, symbolizing his mercy. The leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, resplendent in a bespoke teal dress with a cape and gold detailing around the shoulders, like epaulets, spent much of the ceremony holding one or another of these eight-pound swords aloft in front of her, like something out of Wagner, or Game of Thrones. For me, it mostly conjured the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail—the scene in which a bunch of peasants argue with King Arthur about why he gets to be king.

The peasants in the movie, though obviously fictional, reflect a debate that has become more urgent as the years go on. In real life, there’s a large republican movement in Britain, and on the day of King Charles’s coronation, a number of its representatives were out protesting.

While a majority of people in the country still say they’re in favor of the monarchy, a poll taken in the spring of 2023 found that the number dropped precipitously among younger people. It found that support for the monarchy among people ages eighteen to twenty-four had reached an all-time low. Just thirty-two percent said it was good for the country.

And let’s not forget the Irish and their bitter history with British monarchs. In The Irish Times in 2021, the writer Patrick Freyne had articulated the national viewpoint with one of the most bracing opening paragraphs I have ever read in a newspaper article. It said: Having a monarchy next door is a little bit like having a neighbor who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window, and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. It went on to say: More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbor who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

Whatever you think of the monarchy, if you watched the coronation that day—and in Britain alone, more than 15 million people tuned in in real time—you could not help but notice who was not present for the celebration. There were two women missing—two women who, each in their time, had been welcomed into the British royal family, each as a breath of fresh air, as new arrivals who would bring modernity and light and openness and popular appeal to this musty old institution.

The first missing woman was Diana, the former Princess of Wales and King Charles’s first wife. She died in 1997, one year after the couple’s bitter divorce, a horrific end to what had begun as a joyous fantasy, promoted as a real-life royal fairy tale. In her place was the woman Diana had famously referred to as the Rottweiler—Charles’s longtime mistress, the former Camilla Parker Bowles, the woman who had helped wreck Charles’s marriage to Diana, and now his wife. There she was, sitting on the throne that originally had been intended for Diana. The ceremony made no mention of the late Princess, whose two sons with Charles, William and Harry, were right there in Westminster Abbey watching their stepmother being crowned queen; not even queen consort, which had been the original plan cooked up by the Palace to appease Diana partisans, but straight-up queen. It was as if Diana had been erased from history.

The second missing woman was Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, the very much alive wife of Prince Harry, Charles’s younger son. Meghan had very conspicuously stayed behind at the couple’s house in Montecito, California, with their two children and their menagerie of rescue dogs and chickens. Only five years after her marriage to Harry, Meghan had become such a hated figure in Britain that there was really no point in her coming. Prince Harry was there, seated in a dubious position in the third row of the abbey, between the husband of one of his cousins and an elderly relative named Princess Alexandra. Worse still, he sat directly behind his aunt, Princess Anne, and was almost entirely obscured by the large feather atop the military hat she wore, part of the costume for her ceremonial position at the coronation: an ancient job with the almost unparsable title of Gold Stick in Waiting.

In addition, there was a third woman hovering in the ether, a kind of ghostly forgotten character who had long since been written out of the family narrative, but who had once had a starring role in the royal drama: The Duchess of Windsor, once and then again known as Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée whose scandalous affair with King Edward VIII in the 1930s had led him to abdicate the throne. For many years, it was Wallis, the so-called woman who had stolen the king, who was possibly the most hated woman in Britain.

How did we get here, and why are these absences even notable? What does all this say about the monarchy at this delicate moment, as the throne passed from Queen Elizabeth to King Charles? If you look at these three women, one of the things that connects them is Queen Elizabeth. All of them, in their different ways, were defeated by her.

When she died, in the fall of 2022, Elizabeth II was ninety-six. She reigned for seventy years, longer than any British and Commonwealth monarch in history. In many ways, the legitimacy of the British monarchy rested on the things that she represented: duty, stability, discretion, longevity, history, and tradition. She had been on the throne for so long that it sometimes felt like she would be there forever. She seemed essential not just to the 1,200-year story of the English monarchy, but also to Britain’s own identity—and to much of the world’s understanding of its more recent history.

In the last half of her reign, Elizabeth’s vision for the monarchy had been buffeted by forces beyond her control, and maybe beyond her understanding. The first of these forces was the erosion of the media’s traditionally automatic deference to the monarch, and the attendant public explosion of damaging personal stories about members of the family—stories that regular people treated as episodes in an ongoing reality show. Throw in social media, and with it the increasingly voluble democratization of opinion, and the conversation around the monarchy is expanded and further complicated, making it more vulnerable to the fickle vicissitudes of public opinion.

The third destabilizing factor came from within the royal family itself, with the arrival of outsiders—Wallis, Diana, and Meghan—whose very presence threatened Elizabeth’s, and by extension the monarchy’s, core beliefs and enduring values. The scandals precipitated by these women bookended the Queen’s reign: Wallis before she took the throne, Diana in the middle of her reign, and Meghan at the end. And Elizabeth, with her unshakeable view of the royal family’s purpose and responsibility in British life, dictated the monarchy’s response.

I got to thinking about all this in the awful spring of 2021. The world was limping into the second year of the global pandemic. We were mostly still stuck at home fretting about political discord and climate change and COVID and racial inequity and what the future, if there even was one, would look like. We were desperate for diversion.We needed a way out of our own anxious heads, and our own tedious problems.

That might help explain why more than 49 million people around the world—some 18 million of them in the U.S. alone—turned on their televisions on the night of March 7, 2021, to watch Oprah Winfrey interview a thirty-six-year-old unemployed Englishman and his thirty-nine-year-old unemployed American wife. (Obviously, I’m not even counting everyone who saw the interview, or excerpts from it, on streaming platforms or social media later on.)

Oprah Winfrey: Thank you for trusting me to share your story.

Meghan Markle: Thank you for giving us the space to do it.

Prince Harry: Thank you.

Before her marriage to Prince Harry, then sixth in line to the British throne, Meghan Markle was an actress, blogger, and social media influencer, who had racked up an impressive one million followers on Instagram. She was a star of Suits, a guilty-pleasure TV drama, where she played a hot paralegal who works her way up the ladder to become a hot lawyer.

But never mind all these things. In this interview, Meghan was just a girl, sitting with a boy, telling a woman (and the entire world) how unfairly they had been treated.

Oprah Winfrey: There has not been an agreement. You don’t know what I’m going to ask. And there is no subject that’s off-limits, and you are not getting paid for this interview.

Meghan Markle: All of that’s correct.

And what an explosive story it was. A tale of epic love and bitter resentment. Of pride and prejudice and racism. Of following tradition and chafing at its limitations. Of an ancient monarchy riven by modern preoccupations. It was a tale of being misunderstood, mishandled, and mistreated by one of the world’s most rigid, scrutinized, gossiped about, anachronistic, and opaque of institutions: the British Royal Family.

Oprah Winfrey: Were you silent or were you silenced?

Meghan Markle: The latter.

Oprah Winfrey: So, when I asked the question, Why did you leave? The simplest answer is . . .

Prince Harry: Lack of support and lack of understanding.

And a tale of hurt feelings over, let’s be honest here, details like whether Meghan offended her sister-in-law, the former Kate Middleton and the