#royalsatwar

Alexis Slifer, a presenter on the Canadian show Talko, claimed to have seen a video said to be secretly recorded by a courtier in which Meghan raged about the fact that any children she and Harry would have would be “only” bestowed a Lordship: “Meghan was going off about Prince William and Duchess Kate’s children. They’re being given His and Her Royal Highness titles while Meghan and Harry’s children are only going to be Lords. People think that she’s having a meltdown because the only reason she married Harry in the first place was to get those titles.”

In September 2019, for example, Meghan and Harry declined an invitation to visit Queen Elizabeth at Balmoral, the monarch’s summer home in Scotland. Instead, the Duchess traveled solo to New York City to watch her best friend, Serena Williams, play tennis—a move that many viewed as disrespectful to the Queen. Meghan’s choice to leave her infant son behind also ruffled royal feathers. “I would have thought twice about leaving my firstborn at home at the tender age of just four months in order to fly 3,500 miles to watch Serena Williams play in the US Open final,” sniped the Daily Mail’s Sarah Vine, who called Meghan’s actions “insensitive” and suggested that the young Royal get her priorities straight. “Serena is no relation. The Queen, by contrast, is baby Archie’s great-grandmother—not to mention being in her ninety-fourth year.”

The Royals’ unease may have also been prompted by Meghan’s claiming that she wasn’t especially familiar with the family before meeting Harry. Which was baffling, to say the least. “Because I’m from the States,” she claimed to the BBC. “You don’t grow up with the same understanding of the Royal Family—and so while I now understand very clearly there’s a global interest there, I didn’t know much about him.” But according to Ninaki Priddy, Meghan had been obsessed with the Royals from childhood. “It’s like she has been planning this all her life,” commented Priddy. “She gets exactly what she wants and Harry has fallen for her. Even when she was with Trevor, she told me she wanted to go and stay in London for at least a month … I wasn’t shocked or even surprised to hear about Prince Harry.”

But it was William’s quiet words of caution and carefulness that ignited Harry’s fury. “William just wanted to stress that becoming part of the Royal Family is a massive undertaking and the pressure and scrutiny is unrelenting,” said a source close to the brothers. “Was Meghan the right one?” Harry didn’t take well to William’s words of caution, following his first meeting with Meghan at the end of 2016. Once she’d left, William reportedly warned Harry that they didn’t know her intentions and her background. In response, according to a Palace insider, Harry “went mental” and accused his brother of trying to finish their relationship before it had started. Harry’s rage was compounded when, allegedly, other senior Royals expressed their concerns to him, despite their superficially friendly reactions to Meghan.

To that end, she arranged to fulfill one of her girlhood dreams, and in September, she graced the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. It is doubtful whether Suits actress Meghan Markle would have achieved this rare honor, but royal princess-in-waiting Meghan was going to grab the chance, all the same. It was extraordinary, and a sign of things to come. Usually, prospective royal brides were silent ahead of their marriages, demure, dutiful, and discreet. Even rebels like Di or Sarah Ferguson wouldn’t have imagined preempting the accepted protocol of things by spilling all in a revealing interview before their engagement had even been announced. But here was Meghan, doing just

A Palace insider admitted that “Harry received a very stern call from his father about this. It was unbecoming, he felt this was the wrong thing for Meghan to do. Charles started to suspect that Harry couldn’t control his fiancée. It started to dawn on him that she was someone who would put up a fight when it came to royal protocols. He also started to realize that despite what Harry was telling him, he was secretly enjoying this. Harry was reveling in the upset he was causing and—as he always had—been the rebellious one, who can’t be controlled.”

This referencing the photo Meghan took for Vanity Fair that they felt was very unRoyal see (16)

“It was three, maybe four, weeks later that I managed to persuade her to come join me in Botswana and we camped out with each other, under the stars,” Harry recalled. “She came and joined me for five days out there, which was absolutely fantastic. Then we were really by ourselves, which was crucial to me to make sure that we had a chance to get to know each other.” For her part, Meghan admitted, “For both of us it was a very authentic and organic way to get to know each other.” If you’re going to fall in love, you might as well fall in love under African skies, in the luxury of a posh campsite in Botswana. They stayed in a tent in what Harry described as “the middle of nowhere.”