Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(61)
Though Meghan’s half sister may not have agreed, no one was going to rain on this parade.
The enthusiastic crowd enjoyed another sideshow with the arrival of former president Barack Obama along with former vice president Joe Biden and his wife, Jill. The former world leaders were mobbed by cheering spectators as word spread of their arrival. Harry and his American guests looked totally relaxed as they cracked jokes and posed for selfies with members of the crowd.
During his whistle-stop visit to the city, former president Obama joined Harry at a city center hotel, where a suite of rooms had been rigged up into a makeshift radio studio. The prince conducted a twenty-minute interview with the former president about life after the White House, and their relaxed chat became the centerpiece of Harry’s debut as a guest presenter on BBC Radio Four’s Today program in late December.
As the games came to an end, Harry told the cheering crowd, “You have delivered the biggest Invictus Games yet, with the most incredible atmosphere, making our competitors feel like the stars they are.”
At the closing ceremony, Harry gave Meghan a kiss on the cheek as they watched Kelly Clarkson, Bryan Adams, and legendary rocker Bruce Springsteen play the games out. Standing beside them in the VIP enclosure was Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, who had flown from Los Angeles to see her daughter and, it was now universally assumed, to inspect her future son-in-law.
It was time to dust off the morning suit.
12
Tea with Her Majesty
It was the most important audition of her life. No rehearsal, no script, no second takes. This was live and improvised. When she was driven through the gates of Buckingham Palace on an overcast, drizzly Thursday in October in a black Ford Galaxy with darkened windows, she was about to give the performance of her career. Even though she has often said that she is not a woman who gets nervous, she could be forgiven for being a tad dry mouthed. She was about to meet the Queen for afternoon tea. Gulp. Of course, she had Prince Harry by her side, holding her hand, telling her it would be fine, just be yourself. Still, it was tea with the Queen of England.
There was a touch of cloak and dagger about the affair, which did little to quell the nerves. The Ford Galaxy nosed in so close to the sovereign’s entrance that Harry, Meghan, and their Scotland Yard bodyguard were able to slip inside unnoticed.
They were then escorted along the seeming miles of red carpet to the queen’s private sitting room, which overlooks the palace gardens by Constitution Hill. So discreetly did they arrive and depart that even senior palace servants were unaware of their visit until a few days later.
If truth be told, Meghan had quietly anticipated this moment. A few months before, she had taken a secret excursion to Rose Tree Cottage, a little slice of England nestled in Pasadena in the suburbs of Los Angeles. It sells a plethora of British goodies, but the centerpiece of owner Edmund Fry’s emporium is the serving of afternoon tea. Meghan has visited several times, not only to buy English gifts but to take afternoon tea. Perhaps there had been just a little rehearsing, after all.
In a city dominated by coffee and to-go cups, Rose Tree Cottage brings a soup?on of English refinement. It is where Meghan learned to crook her finger as she sipped her Earl Grey from her cup and saucer, necessary skills to remember after she dropped a curtsy to her future mother-in-law. However, the offering of thinly sliced sandwiches of cucumber and egg mayonnaise, the selection of small scones and cakes, and Her Majesty’s own Queen Mary blend of tea, with the option of coffee for the American visitor, tell only part of the story.
Afternoon tea is a chance for the Queen to catch up on the Upstairs gossip from her ladies-in-waiting, the Downstairs chatter from her senior servants, and to see members of her family. In times past, Princess Diana—when she hadn’t brought the boys with her, which was often—used these informal occasions to tackle the Queen over her eldest son’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. As she sipped her tea, the princess was looking for sympathy—vainly, as it turned out. The topic was much too emotionally unsavory for her regal mother-in-law, so the matter was dropped.
Though the encounter with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry was much less fraught, there was still an air of tension about the occasion. This was perhaps inevitable. As the fifth in line to the throne, the prince had to obtain his grandmother’s formal permission to marry. It was by no means a foregone conclusion. She could say no. She’d done it before. Then what?
For centuries the royal houses of Europe have been defined by bloodline and breeding. In Queen Victoria’s day, English princes and princesses could only marry their German counterparts. That changed during World War One, when in 1917 George V not only changed the family name to Windsor but allowed his offspring to marry English aristocrats. Down the decades, even this edict has been considerably diluted.
For the most part, the queen’s brood have married commoners, though not divorced commoners. An Olympic horseman, an equerry, a photographer, the daughter of the royal polo manager, and a public relations executive have all joined the royal family without a title between them. Only Lady Diana Spencer was from a traditionally aristocratic family—and look where that got them. The House of Windsor has been sustained by commoners, not by bluebloods. In fact, the same could be said of most of the royal houses of Europe. Meghan’s divorce was no longer a concern, as it had been for the previous American to marry a royal, and neither was her biracial heritage.