Meghan Markle Has Landed the Biggest Blow to the British Since George Washington
Earlier this week Meghan Markle and her husband, Prince Harry, dealt the greatest blow to the British crown since George Washington. In fact, she may have implemented an even better plan of attack than he did. Washington lost more battles than he won, costing Americans a great deal of time, money, and lives—and he waged his war of independence on American soil. Meghan launched her surprise attack on British rule abroad without a single loss of life.
Frankly, I’m impressed, and I suspect Washington would be too. He loved an inside job. As I learned writing my Washington biography, You Never Forget Your First, he made up for his losses on the battlefield by embracing espionage and winning in the court of public opinion.
It was frustrating to see the connection go unnoticed in the hours after the announcement, when those in search of historical echoes focused on Prince Harry and his great-great-uncle Edward VIII, who famously abdicated the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, another American divorcée. But those throne watchers would do well to remember that Harry now ranks sixth in the line of succession—much farther from the seat of power than Edward was. Plus, the royal family rejected Simpson in 1936. Some of them seem to have since learned their lesson, publicly embracing Meghan in 2017. Prince Harry might have been just another royal stifled under the weight of his family’s expectations. But Meghan? She’s a revolutionary for the modern age.
A mixed-race American actress, Meghan was an unlikely candidate to instigate this unprecedented break with the royal family, just as Washington was once a reluctant rebel. At first, both tried hard to make it work with the royal family under rather unfavorable conditions, hoping their loyalty and obedience would lead to greater compromise and parity.
The duchess embraced her new country and met many of its expectations. Meghan—who majored in theater and international relations at Northwestern University—gave up her career, had a publicly televised wedding, and paraded her newborn baby in front of cameras when she probably wished she was still in her bathrobe. Perhaps in exchange she thought she could make a few stipulations of her own. But the Crown doesn’t bargain, and neither does the British press. They demand. “I never thought it would be easy,” Meghan said in the documentary Harry & Meghan: An African Journey, “but I thought it would be fair.”
Back in the 1700s, so did Washington. As a young man raised in colonial Virginia, he fought for the British military and became their most famous colonist, but that didn’t mean he was paid as much as the British-born soldiers or given the same rank. And yet he kept at it, believing that his superiors would surely see the error of their ways and recognize that colonists didn’t deserve to be second-class subjects. It never happened. Eventually a case of dysentery took him to Alexandria, Virginia, and a great match was made; Washington traded in the military for a rich bride and tried to live a relatively quiet life, but the British continued to thwart him at every turn. They often gave him “privileges” like elected office, land, and the ability to farm it, only to take them away. For a while he sent “humble and dutiful letters” to the Crown, but after a couple of decades Washington was done waiting for his pleas to be heard. He lasted a lot longer than Meghan—but he wasn’t a black woman living in Britain.
When the time came, the Crown was not prepared for the Declaration of Independence. Over two centuries later, this insubordination came as no less of a surprise—and this time via social media. In both instances the impulse was to “get a handle on” the crisis. In 1776 the Royal Navy sailed into to British New York with hundreds of ships to swiftly quell a rebellion of subjects, not to fight a war against a sovereign nation with a general of their very own. Parliament even offered Washington a pardon for his insolence but refused to call him by his military title. In 2020, Buckingham Palace didn’t even have to cross an ocean to issue a hastily crafted, infantilizing response to Wednesday’s Instagram announcement (which tasted a little undercooked itself): “Discussions with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are at an early stage. We understand their desire to take a different approach, but these are complicated issues that will take time to work through.”
The Crown, it seems, still believes it’s calling the shots. While we can’t know what the queen is thinking, she knows this break is a bad look. The survival of the monarchy—now 1,500 years strong—depends on the public paying for access, and for Meghan, that’s meant facing racist, unrelenting criticism. So she’s opting out of the institution as if it were just her husband’s family business because she believes she can find another way, even if she doesn’t know exactly what that way is just yet.
Americans tend to do that. We’re fairly self-righteous about our liberty and freedom. “You’ve got to thrive, you’ve got to feel happy,” Meghan said in Harry & Meghan. Washington was all for the pursuit of happiness, but when he waged his war, he did it on behalf of white men. Meghan has done him one better, claiming the right for herself—and claiming a prince as her bounty. All George Washington scored was their shared homeland, which is waiting for Meghan Markle—its most successful rebel to date—with open arms.
Historian Alexis Coe is the author of the forthcoming You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.
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