Well, Megxit is over. The Queen has settled with them, so it’s out the door with the Windsor-Markles. A reader who wishes to be known as “an American in Blighty” sends in this fascinating observation about Megxit. It’s not like anything I’ve read anywhere else:

I’m no fan of Meghan and not really a huge fan of anyone in the Royal family aside from the Queen and Prince Philip. I admire their dedication to service and the country and the “stickability” they’ve shown despite the many downsides of life as a Royal. But no one could have prepared Meghan for what she was really doing when she joined the Royals. It’s not the protocol, the media scrutiny, the “this “or the “that” which are all a mainstay of a Royal’s life. I’m sure Meghan could have conquered all of that with the usual American “can do” approach to life. Hey — she probably was a cheerleader in high school and can feign enthusiasm with the best of them. So I doubt she felt challenged by the pomp and circumstance.

But there was one important thing that Meghan could never have been made to understand before she joined the Merry Band. She won’t even quite understand or be able to articulate it now—and I doubt it even occurred to the Royals to help her understand what I’m about to say.

The fact is that Meghan didn’t just join the Royal Family — she joined a small military unit. Of course she knew and could see with her own eyes the military people surrounding her — her own husband, in fact. But does she even really know that her life became — and remains—governed by — military regimentation, and order and process?

Why would she? She’s never been in the Army or the “Forces”. She didn’t attend a British public school and join the CCF (Combined Cadet Corps—and believe me the CCF isn’t the beloved “Jr. ROTC” that some Americans may be familiar with); she wasn’t at a British Uni where the OTC (Officer Training Corps) bar was the best booze deal in town and the best place to hook up with a young officer cadet. She doesn’t even have any experience with the US Military to help her to understand military life in the UK. Whether she knows it or not, Meghan is in the military for all intents and purposes! Her every move is facilitated by military style planning and planners using military processes (even if euphemistically renamed) and everyone around her is serving or has served (including all of her closest in-laws!).

Despite this defense of Meghan — she was doomed from the start I believe — I still believe that she has been rotten to her father who, through no fault of his own, has been thrust into the tabloids and the banal world of celebrity without warning. I don’t respect her because of this. Most American celebs (most Americans for that matter) have “cousins in the closet” — weird and no-count relatives are ubiquitous in the US and don’t merit a mention in the US tabloids for the most part. I assume that Meghan’s paltry “Suits” involvement didn’t trigger scrutiny of her wider family way back pre-Harry? I don’t fault Thomas Markle for having (innocently?) tried to set the record straight in 2017 before his daughter married. His invitation to the tabloids for a photo shoot to demonstrate that he was a normal Joe and not the hermit and misanthrope the press made him out to be — was sadly endearing.

And then, to add insult to injury, poor Harry had the timidity in a 2017 interview to say that Meghan had fit right in to the ol’ Royal family at Christmas — he thought she’d “finally found the family she never had….” How very thoughtless and insulting to her real family. Little did he really seem to know what was to come later on this front…

If I’m not a Meghan fan, I suppose I am a Thomas Markle fan. You’ve got to admire his giving the finger to “respectability” and to those who believe they possess it. As for the current lawsuit, I don’t think the Brits “get” People agazine. It is the poorer yet seriously aspirational cousin to the delightful “Hello!” magazine that is the mainstay of UK hair salons. That Meghan chose People to air her dirty laundry — to make her case against her Dad and to have her friends do it for her — is pretty low behaviour for a Royal.

It was a genuine American celeb approach to family contretemps, and it smacks of daytime TV slap downs (what was that show that always results in an onstage fisticuffs?). Her resort to using a People magazine hand grenade is really regrettable. And it has been Thomas Markle’s response to Meghan’s People “thrust” that has brought about the current unseemly lawsuit. Thomas chose to counter Meghan’s aspersions of his character by giving the press a copy of Meghan’s 2017 letter to him. His hand was forced — in order demonstrate his good faith and to counter the celeb trash talking circuit his best choice was to publish Meghan’s letter. Oh woe is he.

I still think Meghan deserves a defence, however. I believe it is hard for many Brits to fully understand and almost unimaginable to all Americans that the Royal Family is not just Royal, it is, in equal measure, a military unit. The Royal family is more defined by its military nature than its Royal nature. Every primary member of the family has served including the Queen. They are all still “serving” — and sacrificing — as Megxit continues. Everything they do, every step they make, every breath they take is literally aligned with a military plan, planned by serving and formerly serving military who look after almost every aspect of the Royals’ lives.

This is not a bad thing — in fact it is out of necessity that the Royals operate on a military format. The Queen is the head of the Armed Forces, and the Royal Family could not do what it does at the scale and with the breadth and detail of involvement unless and with the necessary security it requires but for its management as/like a military unit.

Imagine this—Meghan may have read everything there is to read about royalty, British history, the “military”, protocol; she may have taken classes on etiquette and she seemed to wear just the right hats and the correct British designers (and looked fabulous doing so). But there is nothing and no one who could prepare her for what she actually joined—not the Royal Family—but a highly organised and spotlessly run small military unit. Take a large measure of Army, add a huge dram of Royal Navy (the senior service) mix in a smattering of Royal Air Force; stir in the Combined Cadet Corps and jigger of Sandhurst just for fun; shake it all up with a few operational tours in the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and there you have it—the Royal Household. The Queen, Prince Philip, Princess Anne, Prince Charles, etc, have all served or are serving currently as “Colonels of the Regiment” (Army) or in similar positions in all of the military branches.

They are surrounded by retired and serving military who run their diaries, their meetings, their security and so on and so forth. They are, out of necessity, tradition, temperament, selflessness, and sense of duty a well-oiled military (dare I add “fighting”) machine. The Queen is the Commander in Chief. They have managed themselves and been managed like this for years—and know nothing else.

The loser in all of this mess will be, of course, Harry. While Meghan will now be free from the banality of military regimentation imposed on a civilian life, Harry will miss this tether—its certainty and its familiarity. It is his operating system. He is the one who will find life in Canada or the US, or wherever—absolutely shambolic. What is normal and merely slightly disorganised to everyone else will seem like utter chaos to poor ol’ Harry. He will not find the order and certainty and discipline that have been a staple of his entire life. He will go through withdrawal.

He might not even realise what is bothering at him at first as he slips away from HMS Royal Family. There won’t be the familiar operations plan and someone always, yes always, looking at the contingency plans—the “branches and sequels” of what might happen if Plan A goes awry (and Plan A always goes off-piste). This has been the software running in the background of Harry’s life. And not just in the background—he is himself TRAINED to operate and rely upon a military planning format. His life and the lives of those serving with him were dependent on this shared training and understanding. The only difference is that those he’s served with were/are able to escape the regimentation when they left military life. This military order and regimentation is simply NOT the way Americans (or civilians from any walk of life for that matter) operate. Meghan probably couldn’t stomach the unceasing regimentation (sometime for regimentation’s sake!).

When Meghan came on the scene, she didn’t have a chance. Who can blame her for getting passive-aggressive on the Royals? What any normal American or civilian would simply regard as a slight change of plan (“I’m cold today…don’t think I’ll go out for a run after all!”) results, in this military setting, into serious “second and third order consequences”. That is to say, in a life where everything is planned (including via those pesky little “branches and sequels” mentioned earlier) there are no simple “normal” changes of plan. The smallest seemingly inconsequential change messes A LOT of people about. And I doubt Meghan’s into doing that to anyone. Once Meghan realised just how much planning and time everything takes, even something as simple as a little “run,” and how much pain one small change causes–you can’t blame her if she came to feel more and more constrained.

And she didn’t even have the benefit of knowing just what the military planning and processes surrounding her really demanded, or why. She’s not a trained military officer, and the banality of some of it must have been incredibly weird. Surreal. But that sort of life is so much a part of the day-to-day existence that the Royals thrive in that it must not be transparent to them that it is death to everyone else. They can’t see themselves and it must be impossible for them to realise that no one else operates in this fashion (aside from an actual military HQ). And they can’t even escape or retire—that’s their penance. But oops…there it is! Now Harry has done so. And Meghan?

Meghan has now left the Army that she didn’t even know she was joining. I think they should give her a bloody medal for doing her two-plus years and let her go in peace!

Interesting. Now that they are no longer Royals, I wonder if people will be as interested in the Windsor-Markles. They will be at first, because they’re such a curiosity. But over time, will the glamour fade?