THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020 27
rival by tweeting that the U.S. will not
pay for their security.)
According to royal experts, the
only approximate modern precursor
to Megxit—the term that was inevi-
tably coined for the Sussexes’ depar-
ture—was the abdication crisis of 1936.
Then, King Edward VIII stepped down
from the throne in order to marry the
twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, of Bal-
timore, Maryland; he became the Duke
of Windsor and retreated into a long
exile of decadent mooching, in France
and elsewhere. Constitutionally speak-
ing, there is no real parallel. A king’s ab-
dication reorders the unfolding of his-
tory: without Edward’s withdrawal, the
current queen, who is now in the sixty-
ninth year of her reign, might never
have ascended the throne. Harry’s retire-
ment from the family business does not
affect the succession. It has, however,
inspired a collective reckoning, for which
the British public has been especially
primed by three seasons of “ The Crown,”
in which the soul-crushing nature of
the institution has been amply depicted.
How bad must being an H.R.H. be in
order to make someone want to quit?
In the three months since the Sus-
sexes announced their intention to step
down—reportedly, before consulting the
Queen, Prince Charles, or Prince Wil-
liam—the British people, or at least their
representatives in the media, have been
reeling like a spouse blindsided by a part-
ner’s sudden announcement of irrecon-
cilable differences. The question of who,
or what, was to blame for the rupture
has yet to be conclusively answered. Were
Harry and Meghan millennial weaklings
retreating into self-care and self-pity, un-
willing to withstand the scrutiny of their
public life in exchange for the material
luxury of their private one? Were they
pampered hypocrites, lecturing others
about climate change while cheerfully
leaping aboard private jets belonging to
celebrity friends? Were they just bored,
or burned out? Were they fatally under-
mined by the royal establishment? Were
they too ambitious for their second-fid-
dle roles? Or were they, despite all their
privilege, victims—he the target of re-
lentless attention since birth, and she the
object of barely concealed racism?
Admittedly, these have not been Brit-
ain’s most pressing concerns in recent
months. Storms and floods battered the
nation for much of the winter, and the
instability and anxiety caused by the
coronavirus have loomed much larger
than the royal drama, especially in the
weeks since the Sussexes’ visit, during
which Britain has entered lockdown,
with hospitals on a war footing. Prince
Charles, the heir to the throne, is among
the tens of thousands who have tested
positive for covid-19, though his case
turned out to be a mild one. On April 5th,
the Queen, for only the fifth time in her
reign, delivered a special address to the
nation. Speaking from Windsor Castle,
where she has been in self-isolation, she
called on Britons to remain “united and
resolute,” and reassured her subjects that
“we will meet again.” That same eve-
ning, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minis-
ter, was admitted to the hospital with
persistent symptoms of covid-19; he
went on to spend three nights in inten-
sive care but was, according to Down-
ing Street, in the “early phase of his re-
covery” by week’s end.
Dickie Arbiter, a former press secre-
tary at Buckingham Palace, and now a
familiar royal commentator, told me, of
Harry and Meghan’s departure, “It is sad
for the Queen—at ninety-three, the last
thing she wants to see is her family dis-
appear into the sunset—and it is also a
letdown for the British people. But the
British people are stoic, and they get on
with it. And, if that’s what Harry and
Meghan want, good luck to them.” Yet,
even as much larger crises emerged, the
ongoing story of Harry and Meghan
was compelling to observe, in part be-
cause the constitutional insignificance
of their actions is counterbalanced by
the symbolic weight of those actions.
They were saying, in effect, that life
on a pedestal is not a life worth living—
especially when being regularly knocked
off that pedestal, sometimes for the
slightest sign of human fallibility, is an
essential part of the job. Harry’s appeal-
ing request for informality in Edin-
burgh was instantly hailed as proof of
his amiable nature; when he then made
the less populist gesture of travelling
first class, with an entourage, for the
train journey back to London, the press
reproached him for being snooty. The
Duke and Duchess are hardly the first
in the Royal Family to wonder whether
the benefits of their place at the top of
British society outweigh the scouringscrutiny that comes with it. Yet it is rare,
and captivating, when someone actu-
ally acts on such feelings.T
he royal dukedom of Sussex, which
the Queen granted her grandson
only hours before his wedding, is one of
the titles that the monarch has bestowed
on members of her family, to mark a spe-
cial occasion or a new phase of life. Prince
William, Harry’s older brother, and his
wife, the former Catherine Middleton,
were named the Duke and Duchess of
Cambridge at the time of their wedding,
in 2011. And last year, when the Queen’s
youngest son, Edward, the Earl of Wes-
sex, turned fifty-five, his mother gave
him an additional title: the Earl of For-
far, named for a Lowland town north of
the Scottish port of Dundee. The title
is for the Earl’s use while in Scotland—
the honorific equivalent of a sturdy, plaid-
lined mackintosh.
If Markle, who grew up middle class
in duke-free Los Angeles, Googled the
Sussex title before her wedding cere-
mony, she likely gleaned some insight
into the peculiar constraints of the in-
stitution she was marrying into. Prince
Harry is only the second Duke of Sus-
sex: the title had been extinct for a hun-
dred and seventy-five years before the
Palace polished it up for reuse. The first
Duke of Sussex was Prince Augustus
Frederick, a son of King George III;
and, like his great-great-great-great-
great-great-nephew Harry, he had a
wandering youth, a fiery desire to live
as he wished, and an inclination to balk
at the strictures of monarchy.
Augustus was born in 1773, a few
years before his father lost control of
the American colonies. Portraits re-
veal a good-looking young man with,
like Harry, strawberry-blond hair and a
ruddy complexion. Augustus had a sen-
sitive brow, voluptuous lips, and a ten-
dency to gain weight—later ceremonial
portraits depict him as plump, dressed
in tight white britches and velvet robes.
Markle, who spoke her mind politi-
cally before joining the Royal Family,
which frowns upon such things, might
have found much to like about Prince
Augustus. He was liberal-minded, and
in the later years of his life he supported
electoral reform and extending the fran-
chise beyond the gentry. Before meet-
ing Harry, Markle was a United Nations