So imagine the trial by fire that constitutes being born decidedly not royal and then joining the family down the road.
Meghan Markle is still in the infancy of her royalty, having just married Prince Harry on May 19, less than two years after they first met on a blind date. While her public life for the foreseeable future will be a blur of appearances, protocol and calculated style decisions, she and Harry have managed to carve out time for themselves, stealing away to an as-yet undisclosed place in East Africa for a honeymoon and joining forces to combat the mental exhaustion that’s been plaguing them from the Markle side of the family tree.
Wait, what?
“Dad, I don’t come to your job and judge you!”
Add to that Meghan’s half-sister, Samantha Markle, who painted an unsparing portrait of her sister before the wedding—enough to merit an on-air dressing-down from Piers Morgan while he was interviewing her—and just chimed in on Twitter this week to insist the new Duchess of Sussex quit ignoring their father.
“Act like a humanitarian act like a woman! If our father dies I’m holding you responsible, Meg! @KensingtonRoyal,” Samantha tweeted, per the Daily Mail‘s screengrabs.
OK, then.
And she can’t be pleased. Nor can Meghan for that matter.
DailyMail.com, meanwhile, is wondering whether Thomas even had a heart attack, but was instead trying to save face after it came out days before the wedding that he had posed for staged paparazzi shots.
“He had to come up with a good enough reason not to attend her wedding and avoid any further embarrassment after those staged photos went public,” claimed a source close to Meghan.
Thomas, an Emmy-winning lighting director who had been living a previously quiet life in Mexico, said he had a stent fitted at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center in San Diego, Calif. Before the wedding, the royals were chided (in the media, that is) by etiquette experts who felt it wasn’t right of them to not send a family representative to see Markle in person.
Worrying about what your dad might say next certainly isn’t any way to spend your newlywed days.
But Meghan, a former commoner, can at least rest a little easier knowing that her still-commoner relatives aren’t the first regular people to prove a thorn in the royals’ side. For starters, a lot of things qualify as an affront in their book, so if it wasn’t this, it was going to be something else.
Just ask Kate Middleton and her sister.
With her sister’s college romance really working out, Pippa too became a household name. Her style, her affinity for sport and charity runs, and her dating life were prime subjects for the parsing—and she wisely struck while the iron was hot. In 2012 she released a book, Celebrate: A Year of Festivities for Family and Friends. Her byline started appearing in the likes of Vanity Fair and Spectator and she had her own column, “Sport and Social,” in the Telegraph for about nine months.
She was even rumored in 2012 to be mulling a regular gig as a Today correspondent, after doing a reporting piece on assignment in America, but the NBC morning show said no such offer had been made. “She is of course welcome as a guest on Today any time,” a show rep told E! News.
“It was felt by William in particular that she needed some guidance and support,” a friend of Pippa’s told the Mail on Sunday in 2016. The reining-in reportedly even included no longer being the face of her parents’ party-supply business, Party Pieces.
Another source said that at one point all sorts of offers in fitness, nutrition, sports and other opportunities in Pippa’s wheelhouse were coming in, but “when it got down to signing off on any of the deals and doing any business, a line was drawn. Pippa would always say no. She was the one driving it all and then it got to a point where she backed out and nothing would happen.
“Some of us assumed it was the Palace and I think at times it was quite frustrating for Pippa, because there was never any progression when she wanted things to move forward.”
Meanwhile, the toning down of Pippa’s public profile was said to have been inspired by the desire to not have a repeat of what William’s Aunt Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, got up to after her divorce from Prince Andrew. Her various post-split business endeavors, including becoming a longtime spokeswoman for Weight Watchers and in 2009 appearing on the real estate reality show The Duchess on the Estate, certainly upped her celebrity profile but served as a source of annoyance for The Firm, aka the royal family. (All of this being in addition to the tabloid-friendly toe-licking scandal.)
Ferguson getting caught on tape in 2010 negotiating a 500,000-pound fee from a reporter in exchange for access to her ex-husband is said to have cost her an invitation to Will and Kate’s wedding the following year. Of course, as the mother of Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, who’s getting married in October, the original Fergie has never been too far from the fold, and Prince Harry made sure that she was on the guest list to witness his I-dos in May.
Fergie and Andrew joined the ranks of the happily uncoupled and remained close friends over the years, which meant the prince wanted her around the family business (of existing and going places, that is) more than your average ex-husband. The duchess continued to visit the queen’s Balmoral estate, for example, and on a trip there in 2005, a friend of Fergie’s told the Daily Express, Philip “avoided her like the plague. I don’t think they spoke a single word all week.”
In 2015, also according to the Express, Philip and the queen had just arrived at the annual Royal Ascot when they met Prince Andrew and his ex-wife coming out of a restaurant in the Royal Enclosure. Andrew bowed toward his parents and, as Sarah curtsied, witnesses said that Elizabeth smiled and waved and Philip couldn’t even muster a grin for his former daughter-in-law.
In the summer of 1992, Philip wrote Diana letters, the princess’ friend Rosa Monckton—who said she was privy to the correspondence—explained to the Telegraph in 2007. “I was struck by how kind and compassionate and understanding he was of her circumstances,” Monckton said.
He also affectionately signed them “Pa,” the Telegraph reported.
None of which is to say that Philip was happy with all of Diana’s post-split decisions, such as her eye-opening 1995 interview with Martin Bashir for the BBC’s Panorama, in which she discussed Charles’ affair with Camilla Parker Bowles and admitted to her own infidelity.
The queen’s storied reaction, or public lack thereof, to Diana’s death was not mitigated by the late princess’ family, who let it be known just how shabbily they felt the royals had treated Diana in the final years of her life.
The Guardian called Spencer “a far more gifted moment-seizer than the Windsors have ever produced.”
For the record, however, the former Lady Diana Spencer was not really considered a commoner, but rather was a member of British nobility, before becoming a royal by marrying Charles in 1981.
The future Duchess Camilla of Cornwall, however, most certainly was a commoner. And despite all the attention understandably paid to the fallout of Diana and Charles’ unprecedentedly messy broken marriage, it’s not as though the queen was in love with Camilla, whose former husband Andrew Parker Bowles had previously dated the queen’s daughter and Charles’ sister, Princess Anne. (Camilla’s maternal great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, was also a mistress of King Edward VII, the queen’s great-grandfather, from 1898 until 1910.)
“You didn’t want a past that hung about,” said Patricia, a first cousin to Prince Philip.
Maybe not, but by the time Camilla and Charles finally married in 2005, everybody had a past.
“They have come through, and I’m very proud and wish them well,” the Queen said at the wedding reception she hosted for them at Waterloo Chamber, according to Prince Charles. “My son is home and dry with the woman he loves.”
After Diana died, Bower wrote, the Queen and her mother, the Queen Mother (who was also named Elizabeth) openly disapproved of Charles and Camilla’s relationship, which in turn prompted Charles to try and maintain a low profile with the love of his life—which subsequently frustrated Camilla.
According to Bower, when Charles finally asked his mother for at least her approval for him to live with Camilla, the queen refused and referred to the divorcée as “that wicked woman.” At the same time, Charles’ mother and grandmother were very kind to Camilla’s ex-husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, and had no problem receiving him at the various royal residences and other events.
It actually wasn’t until the Queen Mother died, in 2002, that Queen Elizabeth II came around. Somewhat.
“The best thing about the royal family is that they’re so lovely,” Mike Tindall, husband of Princess Anne’s daughter, Zara Tindall, told ITV’s Good Morning Britainbefore Meghan and Harry’s wedding.
While the former professional rugby player and known appreciator of a good time would seem to be a prime candidate for getting under the queen’s skin, Zara’s grandmother doesn’t seem to mind that he’s quite the talker—mainly about himself and Zara, of course, as spilling family secrets would be another story altogether. But still, it appears as though Anne’s decision to not give her children royal titles really paid off down the road when it came to not attracting as much ire from the monarchy.
Going by his own experience, Tindall expressed confidence that Prince Harry’s future wife would do just fine on her big day, and beyond.
Her dad and sister have made for a less than fairy-tale beginning, but rest assured, Duchess Meghan, there’s nothing more royal than commoner intrigue.
Source: News Agencies
