The Queen decides. She elevates. She exiles. The rest of them? “They are high-born scaffolding,” Tina Brown writes in “The Palace Papers,” her latest chronicle of the unhappy House of Windsor.
It’s an unspeakable existence: brain-melting privilege with the agency of a root vegetable. In the summer of 1997, a few weeks beforedied, the Labour politician Peter Mandelson went to see Prince Charles and his lover, Camilla Parker Bowles, at Highgrove, Charles’s eighteenth-century mansion in Gloucestershire. Charles showed Mandelson around his beloved garden in a light rain and complained about his portrayal in the media, Brown reports. Mandelson advised the prince to cheer up.
What carnage it has been for the rest of them. “The stultifying sameness of it all,” Brown writes. The problem of bored, disaffected royal highnesses—stretching over generations—has never been as bad as it is now. Until Elizabeth was ten, she was the daughter of a spare herself. Prince Albert, who became George VI on the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII, in 1936, had prepared himself for a sedate life of high-born pleasures: hunting, shooting, flying the odd airplane.
Next on the block were the Queen’s four children—the youngest of whom, Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, is fifty-eight years old. Sweet and underpowered, Edward’s claim to fame is running a TV-production company that managed to upend the palace’s plan to protect Prince William’s privacy at university by turning up at St. Andrew’s with a camera crew. The leader of the royal boomers is Charles. The Queen missed his second and third Christmases and his third birthday.
Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, went the other way. In Brown’s telling, Harry fell in love with Meghan Markle very fast, amazed by her dynamism and poise, and then watched, in fury and wonder, as she was brought low by the same forces that made him sweat before he even left the house. “At the core of the difficulties was determining whether the Sussexes were celebrity royals or royal celebrities,” Brown writes. “Two very different states of being.
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