In an unprecedented move in November 2016, the Communications Secretary of Prince Harry released a statement condemning ‘the racial undertones of comment pieces’ and the ‘outright sexism and racism’ of social media comments regarding the Prince's relationship with selfidentified biracial American Meghan Markle (Knauf 2017). Headlines like the one above, drawn from The Telegraph (Watson 2016), are indicative of these evidently ‘racial undertones’. Once the engagement was officially announced in November 2017, coverage continued in a similar vein: the bride's former life as an actor on the legal drama Suits (2011–) became widely entangled with discussions of race and racism, and the state of the monarchy in the UK.

Markle is not the first divorced American to marry into the British royal family, of course. In 1936, Edward VIII abdicated to marry socialite and divorcée Wallis Simpson, who received a markedly cold reception (Pigeon 2015). Eighty years on, divorce does not hold the same scandalous import. However, the British royal family still carries significance as a point of cultural affirmation regarding the connections between family, marriage and the nation (Turner 2012), as my analysis of the media coverage of Markle and Prince Harry's relationship in what follows evidences. Furthermore, I posit, this royal romance becomes a ‘special relationship’ that has to carry the weight of even more consequence, emerging as it does in a period marked by the rise of nationalist politics in both the US and the UK. The British monarchy still captivates the British public, especially around occasions such as weddings and funerals. Indeed, events such as the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the public mourning that followed can be considered ‘as a performance of the nation and a vehicle for the production of a national public sphere’ (Shome 2001: 324). I argue that Prince Harry's engagement to Meghan Markle was of similar significance, if not magnitude. Markle and Prince Harry are ‘arguably the most high-profile interracial relationship of the West’ (Asava 2017: 1). The British monarchy, however, has long been thought of as inherently white, and is connected to how ‘we’, the public (as this notion is predominantly constructed by the media), imagine the nation.