THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020 33
seen his brother married and his mother
eulogized in the Abbey, kept his head
down, mouth grimly set. They were fol-
lowed by close family members, in order
of rank: the Duke and Duchess of Cam-
bridge, who smiled, professional and
wholesome; and, with the Duchess of
Cornwall, the Prince of Wales, who en-
tered the Abbey with the soft-stepping
dutifulness of one fated to wait until old
age to do the job for which he was born.
The Queen, who has never missed a
Commonwealth Service in the long du-
ration of her reign, was the last to be
brought to the entrance. When the door
of her burgundy-colored Bentley was
opened and she climbed out, dressed in
a pale-blue suit and hat, I gasped. Noth-
ing prepares you for the sight of maj-
esty in the form of a very dignified, very
tiny, very old lady.
Television cameras stationed inside
the Abbey captured the royal brothers
settling awkwardly into their seats as
they awaited the Queen. The formerly
close bond between Harry and Wil-
liam has reportedly been tested by
Harry’s choice of what he called, in the
Africa-trip interview, a “different path.”
Camilla Tominey wrote a story in which
she revealed that the Telegraph’s “expert
lip reader” had studied the royal inter-
actions and concluded that Harry had
said to Meghan, “He literally said,
‘Hello, Harry,’ and that was it.” It would
have required an expert mind reader to
discern whether the Prince was refer-
ring to Prince William or to Boris John-
son, who was in the receiving line, or
to someone else entirely. After the ser-
vice, there would be more body lan-
guage to parse, but, rather than wait for
the royals to leave the Abbey, I went
across London, to pay my respects to
the first Duke of Sussex.
Prince Augustus Frederick was
offered the title of Duke of Sussex by
his father in November, 1801—not as
a recognition of his marriage to Lady
Augusta but as a reward for giving her
up. The couple had been forcibly es-
tranged for almost the entire course of
their marriage. “I adore you,” Augustus
wrote to Augusta, during one of their
separations. “I am sure I never shall be
happy till when we meet again.” Things
changed in the eighth year of the mar-
riage, when Augusta gave birth to a
baby girl, and the Duke came to be-
lieve—mistakenly—that he wasn’t the
father. “What has been so long wished
for is at last come to pass,” he wrote to
his brother, the Prince of Wales. “We
are to meet no more.”
Augustus gave up Augusta, but he
didn’t stop challenging the expectations
imposed on a prince. After Augusta’s
death in 1830, he married a second time,
again in contravention of the Royal Mar-
riages Act. (In for a penny with your fa-
ther’s face on it, in for a pound.) His
second wife was a widow, Lady Cecilia
Underwood, with whom he lived in dis-
creet contentment. Cecilia wasn’t per-
mitted to take the title of Duchess of
Sussex, but Queen Victoria, who as-
cended the throne in 1838, showed mercy,
as only a queen can, by giving her a
different title: Duchess of Inverness.
Augustus was the young queen’s favor-
ite uncle: he gave her away at her wed-
ding, to Prince Albert, in 1840. Augus-
tus was popular among the British
people, too, and when he died in 1843,
crowds lined the streets to pay their re-
spects. The London Times praised him
as “a Prince of the blood who had the
courage to break a stupid law.”
Augustus’s distaste for royal conven-
tions continued beyond the grave. He
was granted his request not to be buried
in St. George’s Chapel—where, almost
two centuries later, Harry and Meghan
began the tumultuous adventure of their
married life. Instead, Augustus was in-terred in a public cemetery, in Kensal
Green, in West London. Another of Vic-
toria’s uncles, King Leopold I of Bel-
gium, wrote to the Queen to express his
disapproval, arguing, “All Princes must
stick to their own caste.... I do not like
the affectation of the contrary.”
By the time I arrived in Kensal Green,
rain had begun to fall. The cemetery,
which was virtually deserted, is wedged
between a busy road and a pair of der-
elict gas holders. A potholed dirt path
was edged by neglected burial plots and
mausolea. No signs indicated the way
to the Duke’s grave, but close to the
Anglican chapel at the heart of the cem-
etery I found it: an unshowy granite
tomb. Lichen grew on the stone, and
the inscription was almost illegible. But
on one side of the tomb I could make
out “His Royal Highness Augustus Fred-
erick Duke of Sussex,” and on the other
the name of the Duchess of Inverness,
who had been buried beside him after
more than three decades of widowhood.
The place felt forlorn, especially after
the pomp and circumstance of the Com-
monwealth celebration. But simplicity
was what the Duke had wanted. He
had decided, in his own way, to carve
out a progressive new role within the
institution of the monarchy. He was, the
Illustrated London News approvingly re-
ported, “the first of a royal race who has
chosen to lay his bones in one of the
cemeteries of the people.” “Most people come up the other side of the mountain.”