in royal residences. (When the Prince
was a young man, his mother, Queen
Charlotte, acquired Frogmore House,
where, more than two centuries later,
Harry and Meghan held their post-wed-
ding party, with Idris Elba serving as
d.j.) When Augustus was in his teens,
he expressed interest in joining the Royal
Navy or the Church of England, but
his father never gave him permission to
pursue either path—or any other pro-
fession. According to his biographer,
Mollie Gillen, Augustus spent his youth
travelling around Europe, falling prey
to “the uncertainty and boredom” of a
life with “no goal to aim for.”
Augustus wasn’t even free to marry
without his father’s approval, thanks to
the Royal Marriages Act, passed by Par-
liament in 1772, which stipulated that
members of the Royal Family needed
the monarch’s consent before they could
wed—a legislative response to the fact
that some of George III’s brothers had
married women who were considered
unsuitable to be queen, because they were
widowed, illegitimate, or both. (The stip-
ulation persists, in a modified form: in
order for Harry to remain in the line of
succession, he was legally obliged to seek
the Queen’s approval for his marriage,
though Markle’s status as a divorcée was
no longer a deal-breaker.) Augustus felt
the law’s force when, at the age of twenty,
he secretly married Lady Augusta Mur-ray, a noblewoman ten years his senior,
in a ceremony held in Rome.
Apparently, Augustus expected his
father to grant approval retroactively. He
told Augusta, “We shall live very snug,
very quietly, en ton bourgeois; and surely
this is the noblest title we can possess.”
The King, however, was incensed, and
thwarted the marriage, at times foiling
the couple’s efforts even to live in the
same country. Augustus appealed to the
Archbishop of Canterbury, Britain’s se-
nior cleric, asking for his help in secur-
ing permission to live abroad with Au-
gusta, with the understanding that any
children born to the couple would not
be considered royal. The Archbishop
said no, reminding Augustus that, “wher-
ever you go, or wherever you reside, you
can never divest yourself of the charac-
ter of a British Prince.”I
t’s not yet clear how thoroughly Harry
and Meghan wish to divest them-
selves of royalty. Despite Harry’s request
for first-name informality, he hasn’t given
up his title of prince, or asked to step
out of the line of succession. And though
the couple have agreed to pay back the
public money—reportedly, about three
million dollars—that was spent on ren-
ovating Frogmore Cottage, the Wind-
sor Park residence that the Queen be-
stowed on them, they have shown no
sign that they will give up her other wed-
ding gift: the royal dukedom of Sussex.
In January, they launched a glossy Sus-
sex Royal Web site, intended to serve as
“a source of factual information regard-
ing the workstreams of the Duke and
Duchess of Sussex.” Their Sussex Royal
Instagram account has 11.3 million fol-
lowers—four million more than that of
the Royal Family. At the end of March,
the couple indicated that they would
suspend their social-media accounts and
their Web site, pending a redesign that
will omit the word “Royal.” But their
brand seems robust enough to survive.
Earlier this month, they revealed an in-
tention to launch a charitable entity,
Archewell, whose name was derived
from arche, the ancient Greek for “source”;
the word was also the inspiration for
their son’s name.
Harry and Meghan’s exit has drawn
attention once again to the question of
what, exactly, the extended Royal Fam-
ily is for. Prince Charles has expressed aadvocate for women, and campaigned
for gender equality. Augustus was a royal
patron of several charities, including the
Jews’ Hospital, in London’s East End.
He claimed that his philanthropic work
had made him more aware than other
aristocrats of the lives of ordinary Brit-
ish people. “I have every respect for the
nobility of the country,” he once said, in
the House of Lords. “But... education
ennobles more than anything else.”
In terms of education, Markle out-
strips her husband, having graduated
from Northwestern University before
becoming a television actress. Harry
achieved undistinguished exam results
at Eton, Britain’s most élite private
school, and instead of attending college
he joined the Army for ten years, where
he rose to the rank of captain. Prince
Augustus was, by contrast, a nerd; he
attended the University of Göttingen,
in Germany, and eventually amassed a
large library of valuable books and man-
uscripts at his apartments, in Kensing-
ton Palace. He owned a collection of
sixteenth-century Hebrew Bibles, and
studied them with a tutor.
As the ninth child and sixth son of
George III, Augustus, like Harry, was
never in much danger of succeeding
to the throne, and felt burdened by
the limitations of being a mere prince.
Granted, these were cushy limitations:
Augustus grew up attended by servants