Even the Most Picture-Perfect Royals Are Flawed and Fallibly Blighted Like All Humans

I have been keeping this gossipy news story captioned “King Charles III BANNED Prince Harry’s Alleged ‘Real Dad’ from Meghan Markle Wedding: Sources” (Radar Online 1/7/23) not because I suppose the least bit that it genuinely has any significant or worthwhile value. Not really, but for the same kind of light-hearted and ticklish amusement that ordinary humans like yours truly get from the heavily and, perhaps, even epically flawed lives of the societally super-elevated and the filthy rich and powerful, especially those belonging to groups that have made their very presence and existence a considerable burden to the rest of society.

The irony here, paradoxically, though, if, indeed, there were any such awkward expression, is the glaringly inescapable fact of this author’s being a fanatical royalist or an impenitent monarchist himself. But, of course, my kind of royal or monarchical heritage pales far in significance when compared to the kind of global burden that the present British monarchy, the Windsors, have become to the rest of their humankind. The English-speaking world, that is, for the most part. At heart, though, we are, each and every one of us, fundamentally human and ordinary within the boundless expanse of the cosmos.

We all witnessed quite a bit of the super-ordinariness of the key players of the British monarchy, unarguably the most significant establishment of its kind in our time, at least in terms of reach and influence, even if not necessarily in wealth and splendor. For these days, it well appears that the monarchical flush and influence of wealth or affluence may very well have seismically shifted in traditional location to the once-upon-a-time arid and existentially sterile Arabian-Gulf countries or fiefdoms, that is, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the so-called Emirates, that is, the United Arab Emirates, of which the globally celebrated City-State of Dubai has become metaphorically and/or metonymically representative.

At any rate, in the afore-referenced story, we learn to our amusement, very likely and for most of us, that during the planning of their 2018 epochal wedding festivities, that Prince Harry and the then Ms. Meghan Markle had been expressly forbidden from inviting Major (Retd) James Hewitt, the widely rumored sometime lover of a then-estranged Princess Diana, to this historic event. For the Prince of Sussex, as Prince Harry is also widely and officially known, the presence of Major Hewitt would have literally symbolized the proverbial icing on the cake, being that Prince Harry had come to almost “fetishistically” envisage his late mother’s sometime beau or paramour to have meant so much to the globally celebrated and, some of her admirers would even say, beatified and canonized or even sanctified Princess of Wales.

Now, what all this means or, rather, is meant to mean or imply to the rest of us is that in the gaping absence of his mother at his quite momentous wedding ceremony, major Hewitt had come to represent a sort of androgynous mother-figure to the main man of the event. The “Banning” of Major Hewitt from Prince Harry’s Wedding celebration must have been envisaged to be the second “accidental death” of Princess Diana, a BBC-World Service discussion of whose charitable activities pertaining to landmines in the killing fields of Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere around the globe this writer had the rare privilege of participating in sometime in 2005. I suppose it was during the 10-Anniversary Celebration or Commemoration of this pet Diana Project, as it were.

You see, I felt personally and, perhaps, even emotionally related to Princess Diana partly because we were both born in the same year. I just happen to be only a few months older. Which is also why sometimes, I have tended to envisage both Princes William and Harry as my own sons, though my own two sons, Kwame III, and Yaw Sintim-Aboagye, just turned 17 and 15 respectively. I also remember the lavish celebration around the Diana Wedding that took place in Ghana, one of the erstwhile favorite colonial “possessions” of Imperial Britain. At least many of us take pride in this rather most bizarre relationship with the United Kingdom of Great Britain, as Mr. John Bull’s land is officially known.

I suppose what makes this James Hewitt Prohibition or Imperial Disinvitation or Disinvite, in contemporary American parlance, from the Harry and Meghan Markle Wedding is the conflict that it well appears to have generated. The Royal Heat, that is. And to be certain, both Father and Son had equally valid reasons for either inviting or disinviting the late princess’ ex-beau to the event, this once-in-a-lifetime event, at least as far as the traditional culture of many major monarchies are concerned. Ultimately, though, I am inclined to believe that the then-Prince Charles, presently King Charlies, III, had the more circumstantially compelling reason for barring or banning Major Hewitt from the Harry and Meghan Markle Wedding, if also because the allegedly striking resemblance between Prince Harry and his widely rumored biological father would, almost definitely, have caused needless distraction, although the British tabloids would have had a field day escalating an already controversial and seismically aggravated problem.

But, of course, it would not have mattered much to these media carrions whose line of work is to unsettle the famous, rich and powerful with the sole and overriding objective of raking in millions of pounds sterling, if not billions and gazillions of the same. The good news here, though, is that none of the royals have been reported to be demanding a DNA paternity verification, though matters are not made any more pleasant or placid, when we are also informed that at least one royal author by the name of Mr. Nicholas Davies has publicly opined that Princess Diana, herself, was never certain who Prince Harry’s real or biological father was. As well, when Prince Harry writes in his latest book, “Spare,” that his officially recognized father has been fond of making such sadistic jokes – those are Harry’s own words, by the way – as “Who knows if I’m really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I’m even your real father?”

In all this, perhaps, it is the now-King Charles, III, the man who could at least theoretically have controlled or behaviorally determined the circumstances of Harry’s birth, who ought to be apportioned the bulk of the blame.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
March 18, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]