For a couple of days I felt like an honorary royal myself, receiving blessings and condolences from complete strangers in New York about the death of the Queen. “What a great lady, I’m so sorry she has ‘passed’,” they would say in hushed tones upon hearing my British accent. The Empire State Building was lit up in purple and all over the city flags flew at half mast.
There was non-stop coverage on CNN and other cable news channels. The newspapers were just as fulsome, brimming with expert commentary from quotable Brits-in-exile such as Tina Brown. “I am told Her Majesty had made it quietly known she would die in Scotland and had increased the amount of time she spent there to better her chances,” the former Vanity Fair editor confided in the New York Times.
Astonishingly, Elizabeth II was on the throne for more than a quarter of the United States’s 245-year existence as a sovereign nation. She holds a special place in the hearts of Americans, who regard her as a revered symbol of a bygone age — one they are thoroughly glad to have ditched themselves, but to which they still feel the tug of familial attachment (even if that affection has yet to transfer to her heir, King Charles).
They recalled how the Star Spangled Banner was played at Buckingham Palace on 9/11 as well as the Queen’s words of comfort that “grief is the price we pay for love”. President Biden repeated her phrase on the 21st anniversary of the terrorist attacks last weekend. This week, however, people’s enthusiasm has been wilting under the weight of wall-to-wall coverage.
An hostilities will be suspended for the royal funeral, when Biden is due to turn up at Westminster Abbey in the armoured limo, the Beast (there was no chance he would ever hop on a bus) and have his first audience with Liz Truss. Out of respect for the Queen, their political differences will be set aside and friendship trumpeted, but the president might well reflect privately that he got 81 million votes compared to the 81,000 Tories who put the new PM in office.
Matters have reached the point where Americans are embarrassed about having overdone the royal fawning. After all, the US used to be a British colony until a bunch of rebels, furious about “no taxation without representation”, chucked chest-loads of tea overboard in Boston harbour and launched the American Revolution. And the US media is not taking kindly to being lectured about displaying more reverence towards the Crown.
When I was a school girl in the US, whenever the war of independence came up, some smart-alec classmate would invariably mime shooting me with a rifle — and I would stagger back, mock-wounded. I was reminded of the same impulse to take aim and fire during some of the US coverage of the Queen, which has veered from forelock-tugging deference to defiant, shrieking criticism.
At first it was just the liberal New York Times that was schizophrenic, running biting criticism of Her Majesty’s colonial past alongside reams of harmless guff, such as a page-filler on her friendship with a Californian cowboy whose horse-whispering technique had apparently moved the Queen Mother to tears.
First to offend British sensibilities was an article by Maya Jasanoff which declared, “The Queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.” Another piece on Wednesday snarked at the $6 million costs of the funeral which was a “hefty price tag” for British taxpayers to look after in a time of rampant inflation. Some Brits may have felt upset by these stories, but I wouldn’t be surprised if our commentariat merely pretended to reel at the insult, just as I had done at school (while secretly being pleased at all the attention). Surely among all the syrupy praise for the Queen, there was room for some spice? The Queen would likely not have been amused, though she would never have said so.
And I suspect that in the States, there will always be a preference for a Hollywood-ification of the royals — rather than any over-zealous serious analysis of what they have stood for in the past or continue to stand for in the present.
For Americans, the joy of a never-ending soap opera is why the Queen’s offspring continue to attract such interest. A bicycling monarchy would never do, in this respect.
Princess Diana was adored in the US, where people warmed to her rejection of the stiff contours of royal duty, just as their forebears rejected the crown’s yoke. For her sake the new Prince and Princess of Wales will always have their respect, even if it was “naughty” Harry who won their hearts as a young man.
Meghan is much more problematic. Was there a hint from her mentor, Oprah Winfrey, that it was time for the Duchess of Sussex to stop being peevish and mend fences with the Firm? “I think in all families — you know, my father passed recently, this summer — and when all families come together for a common ceremony, the ritual of… burying your dead, there’s an opportunity for peacemaking,” Winfrey said at the Toronto Film Festival.
The queen of daytime television knows all the best stories have a narrative arc and that interest in Meghan and Harry has waned since their jaw-dropping interview with her last year.
The truth is, once the initial shock at allegations of racism and ill-treatment in the royal family had subsided, the California-based couple began to sound like a broken record. My guess is Oprah won’t bother to interview them again unless they have a redemptive, kiss-and-make-up tale to share. You have to wonder: is this why Harry’s memoir might be delayed? Or will it give him time to air new grievances about the reported lack of an HRH for Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet and the stripping of his right to wear uniform – despite having seen more military action than the rest of them put together (with the exception of the disgraced Andrew, who served in the Falklands).
To Americans, Meghan and Harry are part of a psycho-drama best expressed by Christopher Hitchens, the atheist, republican British expat (who would be amused to learn he has been practically sanctified in the US since his death). The love of the British for the royals, Hitch claimed, “takes the macabre form of demanding a regular human sacrifice whereby unexceptional people are condemned to lead wholly artificial and strained existences, and then punished or humiliated when they crack up”.
But US sympathy for the couple is not unlimited, especially as they have been drawn into the culture wars over race, climate change and “wokeness” that are polarising America. Prince Andrew has the added humiliation of being a mere footnote to the outrage over Jeffrey Epstein’s behaviour. In the US people were at least as interested in the high-profile names rumoured to be in the paedophile’s little black book, such as Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, as they were in Epstein’s friendship with the Queen’s second son. However, Andrew will never be persona grata again after shelling out an estimated $12 million to Virginia Giuffre, a sex abuse victim, in order to escape the coils of US justice.
As for Charles, he genuinely baffles Americans. How could he have betrayed Diana? Why does he talk to plants and look so tortured? At best, he has been described in the media as “inscrutable” and “uneasy”, while The Cut, the publication that recently carried a cringe-worthy interview with Meghan, called him out in strong terms about his staff sackings and pen-gate. The pile-on has become almost laughable: in the New Yorker, an unintentionally comic interviewer kept prodding Sir Simon Schama, the liberal art historian and broadcaster, to say something mean about the queen and monarchy, without success.
“Her family doesn’t seem the happiest, let’s say,” the interviewer finally claimed. “Well Charles seems happy.” “...he sure does now, with Camilla,” Schama retorted.
Americans do not understand the King and his Queen Consort, the very unAmerican, non-plastic-surgeried Camilla. In time they will get over it. They always have.
