Royals at War

by Dylan Howard

  Throughout the two-week tour, Meghan got up at 4 a.m. to do yoga and baked banana bread late at night. A week into the trip, Harry appeared at the opening of the Invictus Games, a sporting event where injured servicemen from around the world compete. The launch was usually one of his favorite commitments, and his past appearances had been exuberant. This year, he caused concern when he showed up looking drawn and tense, grinding his teeth and seeming bewildered and exhausted. The Australians whooped and cheered him, which seemed to bring a smile to his face, and pregnant Meghan, in yet another dramatic and costly outfit, clutched his arm.

  If the previous six months had shown signs of fundamental changes taking place within the new royal household, when the couple returned from Australia, there was a shock in store for everyone. The less than effusive welcome Meghan believed William and Kate had shown her was irritating and annoying her, according to a source. Things had to change. Having only lived a few weeks next door to his brother and his family, Harry now announced that he and Meghan would be moving out. They would move to Frogmore Cottage in Windsor, over twenty miles away on the outskirts of London. Meghan wanted to renovate the property—built in 1801 at the direction of Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III—to her specifications.

  “Windsor is a very special place for Their Royal Highnesses and they are grateful that their official residence will be on the estate,” Kensington Palace said in a statement.

  Yet at this moment, British tabloids had picked up on the simmering tensions with William and Kate—and knew that the decision to move to Frogmore was in fact a direct snub to the couple. Insiders claimed Meghan and Harry had been “forced to flee.”

  “The initial plan was for Harry and Meghan to move out of their cottage in the grounds of Kensington Palace and into one of the main apartments. But there was “too much tension between the brothers,” a source said. The regal writing was on the wall.

  “A BIT OF TENSION”

  By the end of 2017, Harry and William’s infamously tight bond was not so much suffering a “bit of tension,” but said to be “almost irretrievably broken,” according to Palace insiders. “William is used to being head of their joint household,” said a source, adding it was apparently he who suggested Meghan and Harry consider moving to Frogmore Cottage, rather than staying next door to the Cambridges at Kensington.

  “Harry didn’t think William was rolling out the red carpet for Meghan and told him so,” a source said of the brothers’ rift. “They had a bit of a fallout, which was only resolved when Prince Charles stepped in and asked William to make an effort.” But even with paternal intervention, the relationship between the two became frostier. One source insisted the problem was “only between the brothers,” yet another palace insider confided, “Meghan and Kate are just simply very different people.”

  At the same time, the third of Meghan’s close aides at the Palace quit. To lose one aide in upper Royal circles is notable, but to lose three within six months is alarming. Harry’s longtime private secretary, Ed Lane Fox, stepped down just before the wedding, after five years working alongside the Prince. It was rumored that Meghan distrusted his closeness to Harry and felt he wasn’t sufficiently on her team. He was replaced by Samantha Cohen, private secretary to both Harry and Meghan, who had been specially appointed by the Queen. She announced in turn that she would leave their service after the birth of the baby. Samantha—also known as “Samantha The Panther,” one of the most trusted advisors to the monarch—had worked with the Royal Family for seventeen years before six months at Meghan’s beck and call, when she decided to try other career options years.

  In The Times newspaper, a source close to Meghan said diplomatically: “Going forward, Meghan might need someone cut from a slightly different cloth to traditional courtiers, someone who is not a career civil servant or royal insider. Sam will be a huge loss.”

  Samantha’s departure came hot on the heels of the rapid resignation of Melissa Toubati, a personal assistant to Meghan, who abruptly quit after just six months on the job, thanks to what courtiers had jokingly referred to as “Hurricane Meghan.” It was the Duchess’ “particular brand of ‘up and at ’em West Coast energy” and routine of “getting up at 5 a.m. [and] bombarding aides with texts, and her eyebrow-raising fashion” that pushed the aide over the edge, a source explained. “Meghan put a lot of demands on her and it ended up with her in tears. Melissa is a total professional and fantastic at her job, but things came to a head and it was easier for them both to go their separate ways.”

  Finally, in an unprecedented move, Kate had to step in to tell off Meghan over her strict attitude toward her own staff members. They had been receiving the full force of the Californian despite not even technically working for her. “That’s unacceptable,” Kate is said to have warned Meghan. “They’re my staff and I speak to them.” Tensions were rising.

  “Meghan can be difficult. She has very high standards and is used to working in a Hollywood environment,” a royal insider explained to The Sun. “However, there’s a different degree of respect in the royal household and Kate has always been very careful about how she has acted around staff.”

  Another source within the Palace revealed, more succinctly: “Her and Kate fell out when she lashed out at Kate’s staff.” On the Sussexes’ move to Frogmore and the allocation of Palace staff to the new household, the source said: “Staff would be lying if they said they didn’t hope they end up with Kate and William because Harry and Meghan have developed a reputation of being demanding, temperamental—and, at times, rude.”

  The speculation over the move prompted renewed analysis of the brothers’ close relationship and how their marriages had changed their internal dynamic. “Harry knows he will always be in William’s shadow and for many years he has felt like a bit of a spare wheel, dragging along behind his brother and then later, Kate,” a diplomatic friend revealed. “Now he has a life of his own and a family of his own. It is perfectly natural to want to be more independent.”

  While Harry tried to keep on top of all the internal disputes with the family, Meghan’s high-profile charity causes were at the top of her agenda. Immediately after the marriage, she dived in, naming various charities that would henceforth benefit from her patronage. A Palace insider claimed: “It was all too rushed, without proper research.”

  Her first priority was supporting the victims of the recent Grenfell Tower fire in London, the tragic disaster that saw a housing block go up in flames, leaving seventy dead, with many victims from ethnic minorities and disadvantaged backgrounds. The government’s own response to the calamity was deemed too little, too late. In contrast, the Queen’s genuine concerns and sadness for the victims of the tragedy had been widely applauded in the media; she was praised for her low-key visits to the site. Meghan made numerous visits to the community kitchen that had been set up on site and eventually produced Together: Our Community Cookbook in September 2018. The book was well-intentioned, but it somehow forgot to include a single recipe of British origin, something that wasn’t unnoticed by Kensington Palace staff.

  Another chosen charity was Smart Works, which used quality second-hand clothes and coaching to help women from low-income backgrounds attend job interviews. All was well until Meghan showed up for a public meeting with clients of the charity in a £6,000 outfit. The calamity caused more than a few winces in the press, but the media was still in love with Meghan, and the matter barely caused a ripple.

  With swelling public support, Harry and Meghan were on their way to Frogmore Cottage with their first-born on the way, and life on the surface was perfect.

  Meghan had also promised Harry he would emerge in his own right, his own man, away from William’s overbearing judgment and constant advising, recalled a source. Just because their mother had married in haste and repented in leisure, that didn’t mean that he and Meghan were facing the same fate. And why did William have to keep voicing his “concerns”—couldn’t they see how happy he was?
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  “DEEPLY HELD DIFFERENCES”

  Frogmore Cottage, Harry and Meghan’s new house, was beautiful. There was no denying its legacy: from Queen Charlotte, the history books have noted that theologian Henry James Sr. lived with his family at the cottage in the 1840s. After their tenure, Abdul Karim, personal secretary to Queen Victoria, moved in, with his wife and father in 1897, before the exiled Russian Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna stayed there in the 1920s. At the start of the twenty-first century, the cottage was broken up into five separate units for Windsor estate workers.

  The Duke and Duchess of Sussex could renovate the garden cottage how they liked. This would make Meghan happy—and that, in succession, made Harry happy, too. Things had gotten off to a bit of a shaky start, with the Palace staff acting hoity-toity around Meghan—“but that was just because they didn’t get her,” said a source. She was, after all, a bona fide television star who “had so much to impart and so much love to give,” said one Meghan pal. But a royal aide had hinted that Meghan was the royal equivalent of Yoko Ono, the wife of John Lennon blamed for breaking up the Beatles. Here the Sussexes’ closest aides were comparing Meghan to an ambitious, foreign-born older woman who was accused of exploiting a needy, confused, world-famous young man and breaking him off from his friends? It all sounded too familiar.

  But so what if a few haters and stick-in-the-mud old traditionalists didn’t like the way they did things—what was it Meghan had said in an old blog post? “Be the change you want to see in the world.” That, of course, was a repost of one of the more famous quotes from Mahatma Gandhi, an Indian lawyer, anticolonial nationalist, and political ethicist. Meghan had no vehicle presence to preach—at least not now. But she and Harry had talked about relaunching their personal online branding presence imminently, and it would then only be a case of when, not if, Meghan could get back to inspiring and sharing her learnings and journeys with their millions of fans worldwide.

  ***

  Harry and Meghan also underwent a few more teething problems as they settled into Frogmore. Two more staffers had quit, bringing the total to a remarkable five since the wedding. The latest casualties: an assistant to the personal assistant, Amy Pickerill, and Meghan’s senior female protection officer from Scotland Yard. The latter was said to be exasperated because Meghan had ignored advice about venturing into risky crowd situations and had ended up needing to be yanked out of a chaotic scrum. The Sunday Times claimed wanting to be seen as “one of the people” presented challenges to her protection team, “unlike someone who has grown up in the Royal Family and has been used to having close protection from an early age, it can be quite constraining.” In October 2018, the protection officer was with the couple on a Pacific tour when she was forced to rush the Duchess out of a solo visit to a market in Fiji, cutting it short because of the crowds and sweltering conditions.

  There were also considerable rumblings over Meghan’s appearance. In the early days of Meghan’s pregnancy, insiders told the Mail on Sunday that Meghan had earned a stern telling-off for her shorter hemlines above the knee, constant shout-outs to non-British designers, and her fashionista fondness for black, which royals traditionally only don when they are in mourning.

  “Meghan was being told she needed to start dressing less like a Hollywood star and more like a Royal,” recounted a well-placed insider from within the fashion team. This was after Meghan made the controversial decision not to wear a hat during her first official appearance with the Queen back in August … despite being told to.

  It’s also believed, according to one source I spoke with, that Meghan’s rotating door of Hollywood friends such as Serena Williams, Idris Elba, and George and Amal Clooney were also raising eyebrows with some of the more traditional members of the family who preferred to mix with fellow aristocrats with less pizzazz.

  The dramas and alarms, the nerves and tensions, the tears and tiaras—all reached boiling point in December 2018, when Kate was seen visiting the Queen for a discreet conversation. It’s rumored that Kate was seeking advice from her grandmother-in-law, a long and staunch ally of hers, over how to deal with the unpredictable and troublesome new Duchess. Despite the Queen’s extraordinary efforts to get along with Meghan, she too knew something had to give. According to an aide, she recalled when her youngest son Edward’s new wife, Sophie, Countess of Wessex, married into the family in 1999 and had a somewhat bumpy entry to the clan. But then, with goodwill on all sides and ensuring she was in regular contact with the monarch, Sophie went on to build an “incredibly close” relationship with the Queen and remains one of her favorites.

  Following Kate’s meeting, the Queen was keen to lend Meghan her support, Palace sources said. “Her Majesty has seen it all and could offer the duchess some helpful advice at the moment,” one source said, adding: “[Meghan] would do well to nurture that relationship and pop over for the occasional cup of tea with the Queen. That is what Sophie Wessex has quietly done so well. She will go over for a chat or take the children to watch some TV with her. She has built up that relationship, now they are incredibly close and discuss everything. Meghan doesn’t need an invitation—this is a family, after all.”

  A few days later, Kate was overheard bringing up the latest Royal pregnancy at an engagement at Leeds University. Asked if she was excited about the new baby, she enthusiastically cried: “Yeah, absolutely!” “It’s such a special time to have little kiddies,” she added.

  Traditionally, each step of a senior Royal pregnancy is logged and noted by an adoring press and excited public. A baby who will be in line to the throne is still a big deal, no matter how far down the line of succession. People want to know—and are always told—where the baby will be born, who the medical team overseeing the birth will be, how the mother is preparing herself, and who the godparents will be. It’s been a cherished part of the public’s relationship with the Royals for decades, and is important for the family, as it makes the population feel invested in the Royal tot, to welcome it to the national family and celebrate it suitably.

  Unsurprisingly, things were to be different in the case of Baby Sussex. But as the country and the world celebrated the couple’s happy news, no one could have predicted how different things would be in just a few months.

  As the couple hunkered down for Meghan’s pregnancy Frogmore Cottage was undergoing a breakneck three-million-pound renovation.

  The cottage, nestled on the picturesque grounds of the Windsor Estate, is also home to the Mausoleum, the royal cemetery, where Victoria is buried with Prince Albert. Ironically, it’s also where Harry’s great-great uncle, the abdicated King Edward VIII, is buried with his wife and Meghan’s spiritual forebear, Wallis Simpson. All of them were keeping a ghostly eye on proceedings and “no doubt, would have had plenty to say about it all,” joked one royal aide. (Like Harry, King Edward VIII dramatically abandoned his birthright—giving up the Crown for the woman he loved.) Just like Edward and Wallis Simpson, the catalyst for the scandal here was an ambitious, controversial American woman. In 1931, then known as the Prince of Wales, Edward met and fell in love with American socialite Wallis Simpson. After George V’s death, the prince became King Edward VIII. However, because his marriage to Simpson, an American divorcée, was forbidden, Edward abdicated the throne after ruling for less than a year.

  Plans for Frogmore submitted to the local council showed that the Sussexes installed, among other things, an “eco-boiler”; a yoga studio with a custom-built spring floor; a nursery with nontoxic, vegan, organic paint; and a studio for Meghan’s mother, Doria, when she came to visit her new grandchild. The new residence would also soak up approximately five million pounds a year on security for the couple and their baby. (For their part, in court papers, Meghan and Harry described the reporting on their renovations of Frogmore Cottage as “made up,” “false,” and “misleading.”)

  Harry and Meghan also defended their decision to split from William and Kate by saying they were moving for the sake of their unborn ch
ild.

  “The Cambridges have their garden in the back, which is nice, but there is no real other space for children to play in,” said one source. “Frogmore, which is inside the Windsor security zone [where the main house is only open to the public for a couple of days a year] is secluded, peaceful, tranquil and, most importantly, private. No one will see them coming or going.”

  There would, of course, be a trade-off: Harry and Meghan were now twenty-five miles out of London, so official engagements would require some travel.

  “Frogmore is just lovely,” reiterated the insider. “It will be a beautiful place for the Sussexes to bring up their child. Harry and Meghan are incredibly happy and deservedly so.”

  In December, Meghan’s grueling lifestyle and endless haranguing (as she saw it) by the media boiled over.

  That month, a royal insider told these authors that Meghan was “fed-up” with the rumors and her inability to “stand up for herself” on social media. Since The Tig, her lifestyle blog, had gone offline, Meghan had not had a forum to share her daily thoughts, whims, and opinions. The pressure of not being able to tell everyone what she was feeling at any given moment was getting to her.

  “It’s just been frustrating and stressful to have no voice,” the source said, at the time.

  “She’s always relied on her own voice to stand up for others, and for herself. So not being able to say anything is a debilitating feeling. She’s always been so independent, her entire life, and that’s all been taken away from her. She’s always been able to clap back on social media and now she can’t.” The Royals were taken aback—Kate especially was said to be severely unimpressed.

  The Royals, as it happened, were all keen on social media, with even the Queen having her own Twitter account (although it was unlikely she was up until 4 a.m. at night getting involved in online spats). The Palace appreciated the role of social media in forging and maintaining relationships across its numerous channels and the ability to smoothly churn out family news, feel-good items of gossip, pictures, and approved messages in line with prearranged guidelines. What was considered off-limits were spontaneous, off-message, opinionated tweets and posts that bypassed the Palace’s well-oiled press machine. Meghan’s pre-Harry opinions on issues relating to feminism, global politics, and climate change were so vigorously expressed that she found it more or less intolerable to be silenced.