Princess Michael—recently in trouble again, for wearing a racist blackamoor brooch to her first lunch with Meghan Markle—was famously scandal-prone. During the week Ella was graduating from Brown, her mother was on the cover of the New York Post under the headline ROYAL BIGOT. She had apparently told some noisy diners of color at Da Silvano, an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, to go back to the colonies. “I would never have said that,” she later confided to me. “I’m a historian. I know that America itself was a colony.” She feigned an odd mixture of injustice and contrition: “I daren’t even say I want my coffee black anymore. I say, ‘Without milk.’” I would have liked to believe her, but I had my doubts. It was not that her father had allegedly been an SS officer, albeit a reluctant one; royals and Nazis go together like blini and caviar. It was that everyone above a certain age in Britain is at least a tiny bit racist. The colonial past made it almost second nature for Britons born at the tail end of the Raj to treat roughly a quarter of the planet as subject peoples. I was one of the first natives of that former empire to be dating a member of the royal family, and soon Gary Lewis, a Maori builder and surfer, married Lady Davina Windsor, daughter of the Duke of Gloucester. Princess Michael, though generally free of British colonial prejudices, and beyond reproach when it came to me, nevertheless invited trouble out of what felt like a desire to shock: her pair of black sheep in Gloucestershire were named Venus and Serena. Most everybody thought she was “perfectly ghastly,” but I saw a nice side of Princess Michael. She could be funny, intelligent, generous, and she was a lot more industrious than the other royals—she wrote books and decorated houses! Her tragedy was she never understood that element of understatement that is so much the secret of survival for the royal family. “Well, Dickie,” the Queen is reported to have said when Lord Mountbatten, Earl of Burma and Prince Philip’s uncle, first spoke to her of Princess Michael as a prospective bride for Prince Michael, “she sounds a bit too grand for us.” And she was, now chiding people for calling her Marie Christine instead of “Your Royal Highness,” now tracing her lineage back to Charlemagne. Poor Princess Michael! She failed to acquire that one quality that is the supreme attribute of British royalty: coziness. Prince Michael was cozy; Prince Charles is cozy; the Queen, by all accounts, is a tea cozy. But Princess Michael was, fatally, about as cozy as a yellow jacket on speed. She was Marie Antoinette in a nation that finds bananas too exotic.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Princess Michael lately in the context of William’s and Harry’s conjugal choices. She was of the firm belief that it was a bad idea for royalty to marry commoners. “It’s all very well Ella marrying Mr. Taseer from India, or Pakistan,” she once said to me. “No one knows what to do with that. But the moment the girl down the road thinks she can be Princess, or Queen, it’s all over. The mystery is gone.”

And yet here we are. It seems the Windsors have gained new relevance precisely through a process of demystification. William and Harry have lived out the truth of Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Kate Middleton, the daughter of an air hostess, is future Queen, and now there is Meghan Markle—a divorcée and an actress of mixed race, both unthinkable for a family that routinely demanded the sacrifice of big love at the altar of respectability. Princess Margaret was made to break things off with Group Captain Peter Townsend, a divorcé; and when Edward VIII refused to give up American socialite Wallis Simpson—also a divorcée—he had to give up the throne. The Crown, the TV series, would not exist were it not for these sacrifices, and yet Prince Harry will marry Markle in May, and she will likely become H.R.H. Duchess of Sussex. Far from being ill-advised, the new face of the royal family appears to be a public-relations coup. In the post-Brexit malaise of modern Britain, the young royals are the one bright spot. As a member of the extended family said to me in confidence, “They’re young. They’re diverse. We’ve never really had anything like that, and they’re a great calling card when everything else is looking so gray.” He added, “Both those girls are a lot more professional than our politicians. They understand their place, and what they need to do to be legitimate.” (Not to mention cozy!)