Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(5)
While Wallis was brought up in relative neediness—she and her mother were the poor relations of the wealthy Warfield family—she enjoyed the services of a black nanny, butler, and maids. They were part of her life, albeit as downstairs folk who never crossed a line of familiarity. Indeed, she once observed that the first time she shook the hand of a nonwhite person was when she and her husband, the Duke of Windsor, glad-handed the crowds in Nassau during his time as governor of the Bahamas during World War Two. People of color simply did not feature in the life of Wallis or her husband except to hold out a tray of drinks. She was from a class, an age, and a region where, quite unself-consciously, Wallis and her friends were nonchalantly racist. In letters and table talk she casually used the N-word and other derogatory terms for people of color. When Wallis was born in 1896, Meghan’s great-great-great-grandfather Stephen Ragland was scratching out a meager living as a sharecropper. The very idea that a biracial woman would marry a prince of the realm in the august setting of St. George’s Chapel, the scene of numerous royal weddings, including that of King Edward VII and more recently the queen’s third son, Prince Edward, would have been unthinkable.
Surprisingly, there are recent precedents. In 2004 the daughter of a prince, Lady Davina Windsor, married sheep shearer, surfer, and father Garry “Gazza” Lewis, a Maori, or New Zealand native, in a private ceremony at Kensington Palace. Now twenty-ninth in line to the throne, Lady Davina and her husband were invited to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton and look set to be present at Harry and Meghan’s betrothal. The royal family barely blinked an eyelid at this union between the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and a member of New Zealand’s second-largest ethnic grouping. Unsurprisingly, not all members of Britain’s aristocracy are quite welcoming of persons of color. When the glamorous food writer Emma McQuiston, the biracial daughter of a Nigerian oil tycoon, married Viscount Weymouth, the heir to the famous Longleat estate, in 2013 his mother’s reaction was: “Are you sure about what you are doing to four hundred years of bloodline?”
Ironically, Meghan herself is not such an outsider as some may think, and her European bloodline is way older than four hundred years.
Popular interest in Meghan has inevitably largely rested on her family’s history of slavery and how, through hard work and endeavor, her ancestors made a life for themselves in an unforgiving world. What is less familiar is that Meghan has, through her father’s family, links to the royal families of Scotland, England, and beyond. When she wrote, “Being biracial paints a blurred line that is equal parts staggering and illuminating,” she never realized for a moment that the blood of kings as well as slaves ran through her veins.
For starters, it is possible to trace a direct line through twenty-five generations to Robert I of Scotland, perhaps the most colorful of all Scottish kings. Better known as Robert the Bruce, he is the legendary warrior who, as he hid in a cave to avoid capture by the English enemy, watched a spider trying to spin a web. The spider repeatedly tried and failed to swing itself up from a long thread, a sign of Bruce’s own failure on the battlefield. He gave the spider one last chance. If it succeeded in swinging itself up, he would wage a final battle to liberate his country.
The spider triumphed, and so did Robert the Bruce, defeating the English at the bloody Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. He remained king until his death in 1329, and is acknowledged as one of the most successful and best-loved of all Scottish kings.
This fascinating connection to this distant world of kings comes through her father’s family, whose bloodline tells a story shared by so many—ancestors whose roots were in the Old World but who sailed west to seek a better life.
The Markles, who have their origins in Germany and Holland, lived in Pennsylvania for generations working as farmers, lime burners, carpenters, miners, soldiers, and, in the case of Meghan’s great-grandfather the giant Isaac “Ike” Markle, a fireman for the Pennsylvania Railroad company. Ike’s son Gordon Arnold, Meghan’s grandfather, started his own filling station business, worked in the shoe industry, and wound up in an administrative position for the post office in the small town of Newport. In March 1941, just months before the US entered the Second World War, he married Doris Mary Rita Sanders, who hailed from New Hampshire.
It is the lineage of Meghan’s grandmother that can be traced directly to the Scottish royals and more. Through her ancestor Roger Shaw, Meghan’s trickle of blue blood was ultimately transported to America. The son of a wine merchant and shipper in the City of London, Shaw sailed from Plymouth in the west of England to Massachusetts around 1637.
Like many other young men, Roger Shaw saw America as the land of promise and opportunity. Thanks to his father’s influence, the authorities gave him license “to sell wine, and any sorts of hard liquor, to Christians and Indians, as his judgement deemed, on just and urgent occasions, and not otherwise.” In time he became a substantial landowner, a farmer, and an acknowledged pillar of the community.
It was his family, who originated from Yorkshire in the north of England, who are the critical link to royalty. Locally, they were well-respected landowners, and it was the marriage in 1490 of one of the clan, James Shaw, to Christina Bruce, the heiress daughter of Sir David Bruce, 6th Baron of Clackmannan, a direct descendant of Robert the Bruce, that sealed the royal connection.
Going back down the generations, Meghan’s grandmother Doris can also boast another interesting connection to royalty, this time through her ancestor Mary Bird, who appeared in the household records for Windsor Castle in 1856 and probably worked as a maid. There is some satisfaction here in that like some latter-day Cinderella, Mary’s descendant will marry her own prince.