If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get The Royalist in your inbox every Sunday.
On Tuesday, Prince Charles, in his role as president of the Royal Shakespeare Company, visited a costume workshop in Stratford-upon-Avon before taking in the National Automotive Innovation Center and then on to the Nicholas Chamberlaine almshouses in the market town of Bedworth. The last stop of the worthy, workaday royal was the Veterans’ Contact Point in Nuneaton.
It was a busy day in the provinces for Prince Charles, but to read the newspapers, you wouldn’t know it. Not a word of his various engagements appeared in the national press.
ADVERTISEMENT
Prince Harry, meanwhile, went out for a sandwich and the pictures flashed across the globe.
By coincidence, perhaps, on Tuesday evening word started to leak out that a decision had been made on the vexed issue of Harry and Meghan’s wish to use the name Sussex Royal as a catch-all brand for their commercial endeavors; it would not be permitted, as anyone who has followed the royal story for any length of time could have predicted.
The three things may appear, prima facie, not to be linked. In fact, they are intimately connected. Harry and Meghan were supposed to bring glitz and glamour to the inestimable dullness of day-to-day royal life, but, having decided to sprinkle their fairy dust only on themselves and their own projects, the royal family would be quite happy if Harry grew a massive beard and spent the rest of his days chopping wood and playing Xbox on Vancouver Island while his wife took a 50-year vow of silence.
That’s clearly not going to happen, so the Firm has moved ruthlessly to protect itself, much as any sensible company would if a star employee walked out the door and announced their intention to set up a markedly similar rival operation. The royals are doing all they can to claw back from Meghan and Harry the dignities and prestige they bestowed on them, and one way of doing that is to prevent them from deliberately associating the word “royal” with themselves ever again.
There is no doubt that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle made a serious error of judgment when they poured all their energies into branding themselves Sussex Royal. If they did indeed know they were planning to step away from the Firm that owns that name by giving up their frontline royal duties, they should have seen this coming.
The monarchy doesn’t even allow full-time working royals to trade off their royal names for profit, so the idea that as ex-royals (or even ones operating under the half-in, half-out model they optimistically outlined on their bombshell website, sussexroyal.com) Harry and Meghan would be permitted to do so was an extraordinarily naïve assumption.
“They were badly advised by the people around them, who may be skilled in the way of American foundations but understand nothing about the intricate workings of the royal family,” says one source. “Why should the Queen allow them to walk away and still call themselves royals? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s yet another consequence of Harry’s impulsive decision-making.”
The British branding expert, crisis manager, and royal analyst Mark Borkowski told The Daily Beast: “They never saw this coming. It was hubristic of them [to assume they could continue to use the name Sussex royal].”
That doesn’t mean, however, that the ban on using Sussex Royal is going to upset the freight train of their ambition, says Borkowski.
“Clearly, they wanted to be known as Sussex Royal, which had the gloss of the royal family, but globally, people know them as Meghan and Harry, so this is not something that is going to be hard to recover from, or take very long.
“They’ve got the wind behind them. Everyone wants to know what they are doing.”
Borkowski also says that their decision to give their first public talk to a JP Morgan-sponsored gathering shows their priorities. He argues that the focus on how much they got paid (reported to be $1 million) is a distraction and unlikely to be their core reason for launching their new lives to this particular group: “I think that was a very smart move, to hang out with investment bankers and be in the room with the money. These powerful men and women are the people who can get them the money they need to carry through their dreams.”
The author Penny Junor, who is also Harry’s (unofficial) biographer, has a similar take on the situation, telling The Daily Beast: “This is no big deal, really. Harry and Meghan and their whole situation is so well-known, all over the world, that they don’t really need the Sussex Royal attachment. Everyone knows that he is the Queen’s grandson, so for the foreseeable future, I don’t think it’s an issue. Maybe in 10 or 20 years down the line, but not now.”
The writer Christopher Andersen, author of The New York Times bestseller Diana’s Boys, told The Daily Beast: “Frankly, you have to blame the palace and the Queen to some extent for not making it abundantly clear to Harry and Meghan from the outset that it would be impossible to in essence privatize a chunk of the monarchy with their Sussex Royal brand. Of course other royals, most notably Prince Charles with the Duchy of Cornwall, have profited handsomely from their royal status. But in exchange they were willing to toe the line and do the hard work that that comes with being a senior royal representing the crown.
“It’s one thing for Harry to abruptly pick up and walk away, essentially ambushing his own grandmother in the process. But add to that a rather brazen attempt to capitalize on this venerated, thousand-year-old institution known as the British monarchy, and it’s perfectly understandable that the Queen is responding to the Sussexes’ branding plans with a wag of the royal finger.”
