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The British royal family’s Great Meghan Markle experiment lasted a full 20 months, from her marriage to Prince Harry in May 2018 to January 2020, when the couple gave up royal duties before moving to Montecito.
What happened in between depends on which story you believe in. Fans of Meghan, now the Duchess of Sussex, are blaming the palace – more specifically, Harry’s older brother William and his wife Catherine, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge – for Sussex’s apostasy. In their narrative, the royal family had no idea how to deal with Meghan, a beautiful, multiracial American actress whose popularity dangerously eclipsed hers.
To the Cambridge partisans, Markle was a wrecking ball disguised as a smiley face emoji, impatient to bend one of history’s seediest institutions to their iron will.
In her new book, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil, Tina Brown, former editor of New York and British magazines Tatler and author of the must-see 2007 story of Princess Diana, says: “The Diana Chronicles,” stands squarely to the side of House Cambridge.
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Focusing primarily on the Windsor women, The Palace Papers is an episodic examination of the royal family’s difficulties since the death of Diana in 1997. Using a combination of pre-existing press accounts and Brown’s own reporting, it’s haughty and gossip . and addictively readable, despite a slow-paced first half spent rethinking the well-worn history of the Diana years. Much like the royal family itself, things get more interesting when Meghan shows up.
When Meghan met Harry, she was co-starring on the USA Network show Suits. At 34, she was aging out of leading roles, and her often transparent ambitions had far exceeded her comprehension. “Meghan was always so close,” Brown writes, “but never quite there.”
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Founded by a mutual friend, she and Harry had a lot in common, according to Brown; a troubled childhood, a penchant for nurturing grievances, and what a palace official described to Brown as “a mutual ‘drama addiction’.” ” Markle was sixth on the call list for a basic cable show, something Harry, who was pushed further down the ladder with each new Cambridge baby, could sympathize with, Brown writes: He was also sixth on the call list.
In Brown’s narrative, Prince Harry was mentally fragile, still traumatized by his mother’s death and prone to angry, childlike outbursts. His growing obsession with Meghan alarmed and confused William, once Harry’s closest ally, and her father, the Prince of Wales.
The couple found themselves increasingly besieged, beset by a merciless press corps and equally unsympathetic palace courts. Part of the divide was cultural. They “had someone in Meghan who didn’t have the context to understand the institution,” a former palace insider tells Brown. “And in the palace you had an institution that had no context to understand Meghan.”
The couple, who made up for in charisma what they lacked in confidence, brought out the worst in each other, Brown writes. “The Sussexes nurtured mutual distrust of everyone else,” she notes, “and Harry’s wife was just as fiercely combative as he was.”
In The Palace Papers, as in life, Markle was constantly measured against her sister-in-law. The future queen, who Brown dubs “Kate the Relatable,” has incredibly shiny hair and a Mona Lisa face, though her cheerful public emptiness doesn’t necessarily suggest untold depths.
Raised in the quaint village of Bucklebury, Middleton springs from what Brown tenderly describes as “a sublime heritage,” which basically means her mother, Carole, was a stewardess. Kate met William at university, married him 10 years later and spent the intervening decade in limbo under the watchful eye of Carole, Bucklebury’s Kris Jenner.
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The life of a Windsor is one of those dreary constraints — endlessly boring public appearances, somber vacations in drafty castles — even Brown can’t figure out why Kate would want it. After years together, William humiliatingly broke up with her on the phone once before finally realizing that her quiet forbearance and devotion to duty made her a natural for a life spent opening Tescos in Wales. They married in 2011.
Meghan had bigger ambitions: she longed to be the Windsors’ answer to Angelina Jolie. She wanted to give speeches at the United Nations and beam warmly at refugee children at photo ops. “The Palace Papers” portrays her as dramatic and theatrical, so brusque with employees that some of them accuse her of bullying, while Kate is easygoing and kind to employees. Meghan likes expensive clothes, Brown argues in one of the book’s more dodgy moments, while cost-conscious Kate recycles outfits.
The Palace Papers is both a forensic autopsy and a story. Brown spares no one: The Queen is portrayed as conflict-averse and increasingly distant. Prince Andrew, still her favorite child despite his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and numerous allegations of financial and sexual impropriety, is described as stubborn, bossy and mean to his ex-wife Fergie, who may be the only person who still likes him.
The unfortunate Prince Charles is “the male version of Calamity Jane”, each press cycle being eclipsed by his more glamorous children. Only Charles’ second wife, Camilla, who Brown portrays as equine and unflappable, escapes royal vivisection.
Brown uses a scalpel on most royals but takes a sledgehammer to Meghan, whose wry enthusiasm (she was known to spontaneously hug the guards outside Kensington Palace, Brown reports) is seen as un-British. It takes a while for the public to get mad at her, but at Sandringham’s first Christmas, it’s clear that Brown is fed up with Meghan.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact Markle’s race had on her treatment by the British press (“Harry’s Girl Is (Fast) Straight Outta Compton” was an early headline) and by the royal family, narrow-minded colonialists with few people of color in the community staff . Any fight, even an imaginary one, between English rose Kate and multiracial divorcee Meghan would never be a fair fight, but Brown’s near beatification of the Cambridges can seem like a bit much. Even Meghan’s father, who has a thriving side business betraying his daughter on the tabloids, is doing better than her.
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Still, The Palace Papers is still the most important book of the Markle interregnum, though admittedly it’s not a standout group. Brown’s royal powers of observation remain exquisite. Her narration of the first couple in Sussex/Cambridge is one of the book’s greatest joys and a miniature explanation of everything that went wrong afterward.
At a Royal Foundation event, led by her clumsier sister-in-law Meghan, a staunch public speaker, “hogg[ed]’ in the limelight, writes Brown. She even walked off the script with an impassioned, attention-grabbing speech about women’s empowerment, “as Harry looked on in awe and his brother and Kate stood by in blank irritation.”
The Fab Four, the royal family’s version of a supergroup, arrived with the palace’s highest hopes, but it was “an awkward dynamic,” Brown writes. “It was later decided that the Fab Four would not play on stage as a band again.”
Allison Stewart writes about pop culture, music and politics for the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. She is working on a book about the history of the space program.
In the House of Windsor – the truth and the turmoil
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