“HMS Prince of Wales ‘faces long spell in dry dock’ after breaking down,” a headline in the Telegraph read, on Tuesday. The Royal Navy’s three-billion-pound warship, which was launched five years ago, was scheduled to cross the Atlantic this week on its way to New York City, where it is slated to serve in late September as the site of the Atlantic Future Forum, a U.K.-orchestrated get-together of policy and military bigwigs. However, the ship’s would-be progress across the ocean was interrupted within moments of departure by the discovery of a mechanical error, causing its maiden voyage to the U.S. to be aborted off the Isle of Wight, which lies just two miles from the English mainland coast. “Rest assured, the Royal Navy continues to meet its commitments to deliver operations and to keep the U.K., our partners, and allies safe,” Rear Admiral Steve Moorhouse said, not reassuringly, in a video message recorded from the ship. Meanwhile, curious tourists were able to gaze upon the aircraft carrier’s impotent bulk across the waters, at least until it was towed ignominiously back to Portsmouth.
The manner in which the ship’s namesake, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, has taken the news of its abbreviated voyage is, naturally, unknown to the general public; but, as the Prince himself might put it, one can guess. Prince Charles has long displayed a bent for lugubrious irony, and he might ruefully recognize a resonance between the ship’s troubles and his own. Like the would-be pride of the Royal Navy, Charles has also been fated to linger close to port rather than taking to the high seas of kingship. As he approaches his seventy-fourth birthday in November, Charles is still waiting to fulfill his destiny. There exists “no formal constitutional role” for the heir to the throne, as the Royal Family’s Web site helpfully notes. In recent months and years, Charles has frequently served as his mother’s stand-in, without having officially been named Prince Regent—a role that would imply that the ninety-six-year-old Queen is incapacitated, which her carrying out of limited royal obligations indicates that she is not. In perhaps his most significant understudy role, Charles appeared at the State Opening of Parliament earlier this year, delivering the Queen’s Speech from a gilded throne in the House of Lords. The monarch herself was represented, emoji-like, by the Imperial State Crown, which perched upon a cushion on a side table.
The heir to the throne has reportedly been spending the dog days of summer in Scotland, as is traditional for members of the Royal Family, following the lead of the Queen, who retreats north to Balmoral, her fifty-thousand-acre estate in Aberdeenshire, at this time every year. Prince Charles has his own stately pile, Birkhall, within easy Range Rover distance, and has reportedly been visiting his mother daily when he’s been in residence. Other family members have checked in with Her Majesty, too. The Queen’s second son, Prince Andrew—who was relieved of his position as a working member of the Royal Family, in 2019, after the disastrous television interview in which he addressed his friendship with the late Jeffrey Epstein and his own inability to break a sweat—has apparently been in his mother’s Scottish orbit. So have Andrew’s daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, who, the Daily Express reported, paid a visit to their uncle Prince Charles to plead the case over tea and biscuits for their father’s rehabilitation. Charles has shown no indication of being willing to readmit his disreputable younger brother to the family lineup. Rather, Charles—and his son William, who is second in line to the throne—have long indicated a preference for a “slimmed-down” monarchy, with fewer uncles, aunts, cousins, and suchlike jostling for position on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, literally or metaphorically. (In “The Palace Papers,” Tina Brown’s rip-roaring account of the contemporary royals, she quotes a palace aide saying they’d heard that, during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, in 2012, “there were people literally restraining members of the family trying to get on the balcony.”)
Charles has substantially less control over the visibility of other close family members, however, as this week’s news from Montecito has made evident. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, granted an interview to New York magazine’s The Cut, in a well-placed promotional gambit for the release of her new podcast, “Archetypes,” the first fruit of a deal with Spotify that she and Prince Harry signed, in 2020, for a reported twenty-five million dollars. The writer, Allison P. Davis, was invited into the home Meghan shares with Harry and their two children, which she reports is “climate-controlled and high-ceilinged and sun-dappled and perfectly marshmallowy.” Despite that domestic radiance, relations between the American and British wings of the Windsor family remain frosty, or so the Duke and Duchess’s remarks suggest. During the interview, Prince Harry drops by, and matily complains about some plumbing woes. Speaking of the co-working space he shares with his wife, Harry goes on to say, “Most people that I know and many of my family, they aren’t able to work and live together,” with what Davis describes as “a vocal eye roll.” One ambiguously tendentious statement of Meghan’s about their experience as public figures—“Harry said to me, ‘I lost my dad in this process’ ”—was later illuminated by Omid Scobie, the Sussexes’ biographer and friend, as being a reference to Meghan’s estrangement from her own father, not to a rift between Harry and Charles. “The Prince of Wales loves both his sons,” a source close to the Prince nonetheless was obliged to tell the Daily Mail, with, no doubt, a vocal teeth-grit.
In an accompanying photo shoot, Meghan was pictured in closeup wearing a black turtleneck—a look that she has frequently favored, though one also reminiscent of that worn by her husband’s late mother, Princess Diana, when she was photographed for British Vogue by Patrick Demarchelier, in 1991. Wednesday marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Princess’s death, in a car crash in Paris, after having been pursued by tabloid reporters following a night out with Dodi Fayed, the Harrods heir she was dating. (The Princess’s demise, and her years in the public eye that preceded it, have recently been re-examined in the “The Princess,” a brilliantly executed documentary made up entirely of archival footage and audio, directed by Ed Perkins.) Harry and his brother William learned the news while on vacation in Scotland with their father and grandmother. A few days ago, Prince Harry told an audience at the Aspen Valley Polo Club, where he was appearing at a charity match, of the upcoming anniversary, “I want it to be a day filled with memories of her incredible work and love for the way that she did it. . . . a day to share the spirit of my mum with my family, with my children, who I wish could have met her.”
In The Cut’s interview, Davis is granted unprecedented access to one of those children: three-year-old Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, the elder child of Meghan and Harry. Witnessing Meghan doing a school pickup, Davis documents what may be the first on-the-record remarks of the Californian child who is seventh in line to the British throne. “Why are you afraid of heights like an airplane?” is among those remarks, as is Archie’s confession to having eaten one of the granola bars from the kits of bottled water and snacks that Meghan carries around in her vehicle to hand out to the needy. “They are teaching Archie that some people live in big houses, some in small, and some are in between homes,” Davis explains.
It is being reported that, while the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will be visiting Britain early in September to make public appearances on behalf of the charities they support, they are unlikely to pay a visit to the Queen at her very big house in Scotland, where she is expected to remain during their sojourn in the U.K. That said, the monarch will be busy: on September 6th, she is expected to receive the person whom she will appoint as Britain’s new Prime Minister—either the front-runner, Liz Truss, or the former Chancellor Rishi Sunak—whose election is imminently to be decided by the Conservative Party membership. For the first time ever, the ceremony, or what is sometimes known as the kissing of hands, will take place north of the border. Although the Queen could have delegated the responsibility to Prince Charles, she has chosen not to. And so, as the summer draws to a close and another round of royal responsibilities awaits the Prince of Wales, he remains, as it were, in dry dock—an incipiently elderly man with a maiden voyage yet to come. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
