Meghan and Harry - The Dying Swans

I’ve never taken too much of an interest in the doings of the Royal Family, so I don’t have a lot of emotion invested in their defaults and defections. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time tweeting either praise or criticism of Meghan and Harry for dropping out of the continuous round of royal duties. And yet, and yet – I do sort of regret their decision. In the British Royal Family, the world has one last long view back down a colonnaded succession. The British Royals are the last Royal Family that can capture the imagination and make a stand for life-long duty to tradition.

I wish Meghan and Harry had watched the movie The Swan before making their decision. It’s an almost lost gem of a movie. Grace Kelly found the perfect, prescient role for herself there. She plays a Princess in a branch of a royal family that was side-lined by Napoleon. The Crown Prince is scheduled to pay a visit to her family’s manor house, reputedly in search of a suitable wife. This has sent her mother into a flurry of preparation and hope that a union might be secured for her daughter and that the family might thereby be restored center-stage to the Court.

When the Prince arrives though, in the form of Alec Guinness, he is a distinct disappointment. He is rather dismissive, almost rude. He seems to take no interest in Grace Kelly whatsoever. He makes himself scarce about the house, generally registering his presence only when he needs to be waited on.

When it seems he’s not going to court Grace Kelly, her mother hatches a plan to spark his interest. She advances Louis Jourdan, Grace Kelly’s handsome tutor, as a likely love-interest for her daughter in order to make the Crown Prince jealous. The plan backfires though. Grace Kelly sincerely falls in love with her tutor and plans to elope with him, even in the face of Guinness’ rather back-handed proposal after all. This decision sends her mother into a tizzy of despair and entreaty. The audience is bound to side with the eloping young couple at this point. But even as a child, watching the movie for the first time, I didn’t feel drawn to root for that commoner conclusion. I felt something rarer should prevail.

And indeed, it likely does. As Kelly is all packed and ready to take flight, Guinness approaches her with a sadder, restraining wisdom. He proves himself to be a much better man than we took him for in this unexpected turn. His speech to her then stands out for me as one of the most moving moments in movie history. He likens her to a swan – a creature who floats beautifully out on the water. But he reminds her that if that swan should choose to wade out on land, it becomes a mere goose, waddling along in a gaggle. So it is the lot of that swan to never make its home on solid ground. It is the swan’s lot to maintain a commitment to that more distant beauty, out on the water, essentially silent and alone – through to the end.

This is a memorable rendering of Ferenc Molnar’s play and it confirmed me as a monarchist. Again, I don’t mean that in the sense that I take an interest in what the Royals wear for their weddings or in the details of their peccadilloes. I certainly wouldn’t collect Royal Wedding plates or scan People magazine for tidbits of gossip. But that movie, that speech, made the final case for there being somewhere, always, at least one last persistence of duty to tradition.

When Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII stepped out of the procession – they most decidedly became mere geese. After that one stirring moment of abdication, their lives became dull and devoid. Well, they probably were essentially geese all along. But if they had maintained the mantle of royalty, they would have had the stirring bearing of authority that comes with kingdom. They would have meant something, to onlookers and to the world. They would have meant history. As it was, they dwindled through shallow, listless lives, making the scene, going to the casinos in Monaco, appearing as prize catches at socialites’ parties.

The Prince of Wales became Governor of the Bahamas for a while, but really didn’t do much of anything. In a late interview done with the couple when they were older and the Prince of Wales was ill (available on YouTube), this sense of wasted lives becomes apparent. When the interviewer asked the Prince why he never took a job, he implied he’d thought about it. But for some reason, he said, “I never did. I don’t know why, but I never did…” and he trailed off in regret.

Jerry Seinfeld more cruelly summarized the couple’s later life in one of the episodes of Seinfeld. When the gang briefly discusses Wallis, the Prince, and the abdication, Jerry finishes them off by pronouncing them, “Euro-trash.” I hope that’s not the kind of vacuity that Meghan’s and Harry’s lives become.

There’s a quote from another play that rings back to me now and that seems as if it also might have informed Meghan’s and Harry’ decision. It’s spoken in Act V, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Henry V. After Henry’s stunning “We few, we happy few” victory at Agincourt, Shakespeare changes the mood to what’s generally rendered as a comic scene set in the French Court. It’s already taken for granted that Henry will now take Katherine, the French Princess, as his wife. It’s his right as the victor to consolidate the English and French royal houses in this way. But Henry wants to make a more personal proposal, not as a matter of form, but as a matter of the heart. Much of the scene centers on Katherine’s humorous attempts to speak English and on Henry’s attempts at a few French phrases.

But in one outstanding presentation of the play, Richard Burton rolls the proposal to a more serious, sonorous bidding. After having listed both his good and bad points as just a man, he concludes, “If you would have such a man, take me. Take me and get a soldier. Take a soldier and get a king.”

It’s entrained as one inevitability that must be honored. And so one feels it should perhaps have been when Meghan accepted Harry’s proposal. The world doesn’t need another cute Yuppie couple dabbling in charity and then drifting among the coffee shops and boutiques of some upscale Canadian neighborhood. The world needs those last, lonely swans who in their remote beauty seem not to be flesh and blood at all but who have assumed a lifelong commitment to being symbols – symbols of tradition, Country, and Majesty.