Why is a royal family split so much worse than any other?

Though set in a rather rarefied context, and driven to extremes, Harry and Meghan’s is a relatable kind of dilemma for most, if not all, couples

The absence of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex from the coronation and Prince Harry’s fleeting, almost cursory attendance, highlight a question that has been nagging away for some time now: why is a royal family split so much worse?

For sure, it’s something that won’t be the absolute focus of attention on Saturday 6 May. When the expected 100 million-strong global audience for the King’s coronation tune in or press the play button, what will they see and hear?

Elements of an ancient ceremony. A Ruritanian spectacle of past glories. Some fine classical and contemporary music. Modest signs of modernisation and reflections of a multicultural, multiracial nation and Commonwealth. The huge assemblage of crowned heads and world leaders. Some celebrities. A lot of ermine and precious stones. Magnificent gold coaches…

They will also see most of the House of Windsor, and be reminded that monarchy and marriage don’t always mix. The King, for example, is a divorcee and widower. The Queen was part of the reason his unhappy marriage to Diana failed, and she herself is divorced. The princess royal, now assuming an even more high-profile role in their duties, is divorced.

So is the disgraced Andrew; and even if he and his wife Sarah are now reconciled, the bitterness of the events that led to their breakup means she wasn’t welcome at this ceremonial. The children of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden remind us that the Queen’s sister lived longer as a divorcee than a wife. Who knows what other ructions are weakening the martial bonds of the others?

Prince Philip and Sophie Wessex show how someone can marry into the Windsors, make the necessary adjustments, survive and become one of the family. But Meghan, like Sarah Ferguson, say, or the Snowdons, was not so fortunate.

Meghan is doubly unfortunate because she’s estranged from her father and various half-siblings, as well as seemingly so uncomfortable with the British media and elements of the Palace that she can’t find herself in the same cathedral as them.

Was it always going to be thus? Was the exile of the Sussexes always inevitable? Obviously not, because the Princess of Wales, for example, has stuck with it through thick and thin, so to speak, and has found a way of dealing with press attention (welcome and otherwise).

Her predecessor as Princess of Wales, Diana, equally obviously couldn’t cope with the intrusions, and, in Harry’s view, those in effect ended up killing her. He couldn’t bear to see such a fate befall Meghan and their children, and has said as much.

We can take him at his word. As he and Meghan recounted in their interview with Oprah Winfrey, the Netflix documentary and again in Spare, their lives in Britain had grown intolerable, and had led to their mutual alienation from the Markles and the Windsors. At the moment, it is difficult to see how those relations can be rebuilt.

They certainly were not in the case of those earlier exiles, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. They too ended up with just themselves, isolated in a comfortable bubble. When the then-King Edward VIII decided that he could not undertake his duties in the way that he would wish without the woman he loved by his side, he famously gave up the throne, and became Duke of Windsor.

He fully expected, naively, that his family would want to meet and be friends with his fiancée and soon to be wife, Mrs Simpson, a recent divorcee herself, and that at least some of them might turn up at the wedding the following year.

None did. His brother, George VI, and he hardly spoke again, and he hardly had any dealings with their mother, Queen Mary. At the end of her life, after yet another snub, Edward complained in the most anguished terms to his wife about Queen Mary’s attitude to him: “My sadness was mixed with incredulity that any mother could have been so hard and cruel towards her eldest son for so many years and yet so demanding at the end without relenting a scrap. I’m afraid the fluids in her veins have always been as icy cold as they are now in death”.

That kind of coldness was also felt by Harry, Meghan, Diana and many others.

Though set in a rather rarefied context, and driven to extremes, Harry and Meghan’s is a relatable kind of dilemma for most, if not all, couples. Partners in relationships of all kinds are perennially faced with the conundrum that though they chose to live their lives together, they would not necessarily have chosen their in-laws to share the journey.

Managing those dynamics can be a challenge and, even if things are harmonious, there can be a drift away from parents and siblings. By the account in Spare, the way that Harry fell out with William was especially violent and painful, literally so, and plainly Harry found it ultimately impossible to forget what, in his view, Camilla had done to his mother, Diana.

The difference is that for the likes of Harry and Meghan, such family traumas end up being played out in the public domain, in front of 100 million strangers.