Prince Harry and Meghan Not the Most 'Woke' Royals

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's royal exit has for years been viewed by some British newspapers through the lens of a culture war that frames them as "woke," while ignoring King Charles' own socially conscious history.

Piers Morgan has been among those to condemn the couple's "woke hypocrisy and constant whining," while the Daily Mail mocked Prince Harry for a "woke and whimsical" 2020 speech in which he said: "What if every single one of us was a raindrop?"

Prince William, according to Harry's book Spare, feared the Duke of Sussex was being "brainwashed" by therapy.

Meanwhile, friends of Harry told biographer Tom Quinn the prince hated "all that woke nonsense" before he met Meghan and "made jokes that we are no longer allowed to make," according to the book Gilded Youth.

However, if Meghan did lead Harry on a journey into a socially conscious political outlook, she may have simply been restoring the previous generation's interest in alternative philosophy.

Once upon a time it was Charles, not Harry, who was being mocked in the media for his socially conscious views, alternative perspective on life and relationship with psychoanalysis.

At the height of palace concern, Charles began a friendship which his top aide felt "had to be stopped" with a stranger who persistently phoned Buckingham Palace hoping to convert him to Buddhism, according to his authorized biography The Prince of Wales.

King Charles, Laurens van der Post and Carl Jung

King Charles has this week visited Kenya and it was on a past trip to the East African country in 1978 with South African philosopher Laurens van der Post that he was persuaded to embrace psychoanalyst Carl Jung.

Van der Post at one stage advised Charles to "withdraw from the world," canceling public engagements, to "contemplate the inner life of the soul."

The anecdote emerged in 1994 after Charles gave lengthy interviews and opened up his archive of letters to journalist Jonathan Dimbleby for his authorized biography.

"It was in the Aberdare Mountains, at the instigation of van der Post, that the Prince began systematically to record his dreams for the older man to interpret," according to Dimbleby's book, The Prince of Wales.

"Van der Post had been a friend and disciple of Carl Jung, and his influence permeated the vision which van der Post explored with the Prince.

"Jung was fascinated by the occult, by the mysteries of religion and by the search for value and meaning beyond the range of what was explicable in natural science."

However, this journey of discovery was to take the heir to the throne down an unexpected path and lead him into conflict with Christian "dogma," though he did not ever convert.

Jungian theory, however, led him to believe in a "consciousness detached from the world" to which Charles "was at first intermittently attracted and then, much later, drawn with a compulsion so strong that neither public skepticism nor mockery could divert him."

"In the late seventies," the biography read, "van der Post became infatuated by the idea that the Prince should withdraw from the world for a period, canceling his public engagements, to contemplate the inner life of the soul.

"Despite the lure of the proposition, the Prince did not hesitate to resist van der Post's blandishments, his sense of duty overriding his impulse.

"Nevertheless, his search for 'an inner world of truth' did not abate. For van der Post, the greatness of Jung lay in his concern, as he wrote to the Prince, to 'restore western man to his soul and recover his religious meaning.'

"Encouraged by his mentor, the Prince found himself increasingly at odds with those churchmen and theologians who seemed to him to have hijacked religious experience and imprisoned it in a doctrinal straitjacket for clerical disputation."

King Charles, Christianity and a Very Persistent Caller

This feeling of alienation took Charles on a journey through the "ancient religions of the East" and, while there may be much of value in those texts, the then prince chose a particularly bizarre mentor.

Charles was introduced to a book called The Path of the Masters, which focussed on Eastern "gurus" who were presented as "incarnations of the Supreme Being" in 1979, two years before he married Princess Diana.

"The book had been given to him by a young Indian woman who telephoned Buckingham Palace relentlessly until he finally accepted her call," the Charles biography read.

"She told him that her mission as a Buddhist was to convert him to an understanding of the role of the Masters.

"Instead of extricating himself the Prince was so intrigued that he arranged a meeting. At once, the two began a relationship that on both an emotional and a spiritual level swiftly became so intense as to send a frisson of alarm through the household.

"Evidently fearing that her hold over the Prince had become so powerful as to jeopardize his sense of perspective his new private secretary, Edward Adeane, confided to more than one of his close friends that, 'it's got to be stopped.'

"Soon afterwards, the relationship did indeed cease, but not before the Prince had been persuaded by her arguments in favor of vegetarianism and against the killing of animals to change his own habits accordingly."

Needless to say, Charles cannot have been fully signed up because he continued to enjoy fox hunting.

He did, however, continue to seek to push debates within the church away from dogma and towards a multi-faith approach, including in public speeches.

The current media framing that presents Charles' monarchy as the symbol of all that is traditional and Prince Harry and Meghan as woke activists may conveniently overlook just how far from the orthodox the king was in his younger years.

Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.

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