by Dylan Howard
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent out his own personal greetings to Harry and Meghan. “Prince Harry, Meghan, and Archie, we’re all wishing you a quiet and blessed stay in Canada,” he tweeted. ‘You’re among friends, and always welcome here.”
A COSTLY WITHDRAWAL
The Firm knew that in 2020, something would have to give.
The situation with Harry and Meghan had become unsustainable and matters were at a boiling point. The ITV documentary, the ongoing internal discussions about their future roles, the desperation of the Queen and Charles to keep Harry happy and Meghan satisfied—all of this was on the top of everyone’s agendas, as the new year dawned.
So, it was nothing less than a body blow to the establishment, when, on the morning of January 8, 2020, Harry and Meghan’s @sussexroyal media channels issued a statement, without any prior warning or alert to the rest of the family:
After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution.
We intend to step back as “senior” members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support Her Majesty the Queen. We now plan to balance our time between the United Kingdom and North America, continuing to honor our duty to the Queen, the Commonwealth, and our patronages. This geographic balance will enable us to raise our son with an appreciation for the royal tradition into which he was born, while also providing our family with the space to focus on the next chapter, including the launch of our new charitable entity.
The statement, couched in bland Hollywood PR speak, caused shockwaves around the country—and the world. For all intents and purposes, this was Harry and Meghan quitting. Not since the abdication crisis of the early 1930s had a senior Royal willingly relinquished their role for the sake of love.
The immediate uproar in the media was akin to a hurricane of outrage and shock. As developments unfolded over the course of that gray January day, it became known that the news was as much a shock to Buckingham Palace as it was to everyone else. With that ingrained British sense of solidarity with the Queen and her family, there was a great deal of upset at the young couple’s decision and the astonishing snub to the monarchy. This was not the Harry—the loving, respectful, and kind soul—that his family knew.
Rushing out a statement, the Palace scrambled to respond to the news with clear shock and surprise. Officials admitted the Queen was “disappointed”—Royal speak for “hopping mad”—and other senior Royals were understood to be “hurt.”
One exasperated Palace insider told the Daily Mail: “People had bent over backwards for them. They were given the wedding they wanted, the house they wanted, the office they wanted, the money they wanted, the staff they wanted, the tours they wanted and had the backing of their family. What more did they want?”
Another royal source told us: “It’s deeply unfair to the Queen, who doesn’t deserve to be treated this way. It is a shoddy way to treat her. The family understands that they want to do something different and is perfectly willing to help them. People are just devastated.”
“I think it indicates a real strength of feeling in the palace—maybe not so much about what has been done but about how it has been done—and the lack of consultation I think will sting,” observed the BBC’s Royal reporter, Jonny Dymond. “This is clearly a major rift between Harry and Meghan on one part, and the rest of the Royal Family on the other.”
From positioning themselves as the messiah of the Royal Family, to throwing their toys out of their pram and running away when they got bored with it, the announcement made clear just how committed Meghan really was to the royal role she had held for just 20 months. The fun parts—getting to gallivant around the world in private jets, the fame, the HRH title, and the status—were cool. The less fun parts—not being able to say whatever she wanted whenever she wanted, having to open a dreary leisure center on wet Tuesday afternoons in front of hordes of little people, having to endure Uncle Andrew’s ghastly jokes and William and Kate’s constant, beady judging—not so much.
It had all apparently finally broken Harry. He had been making public statements about his ongoing struggles with his mental health and for months supporting excellent and much-needed initiatives designed to address mental health issues among young men such as himself. He wanted to reconcile his mother’s death and shining legacy with his own life and emerge as his own man, the strong, brave, and true Harry everyone knew lay beneath the troubled and often inarticulate exterior.
But instead, he had been caught between his family and the relentless ambition of his wife, alternately comforted and worried by her, loving her dearly while going against his better judgment. Despite his lifetime experience growing up royal, he had complained constantly about the press madness, ignoring that the overwhelming tone of the media’s reporting had been vividly pro-Meghan for about as long as possible, until stories of her demanding demeanor became so pervasive they were, to the tabloids, too hard to ignore.
He had avowed he would no more be “silent witness” to Meghan’s “private suffering,” adding for good measure that his “deepest fear is history repeating itself.”
Not for the first time, Harry’s words were carefully digested by friends, many of whom couldn’t recognize their old pal behind them at all. The uniform texture of all the statements that were now emanating from the couple’s own PR representatives and social media bore the indelible imprint of self-importance that had seemed foreign to Harry prior to Meghan.
This sour sense of entitled disdain for their family inspired some lively reactions in the media. Trisha Goddard, a British television presenter and actress best known for her morning talk show Trisha, didn’t mince words. “He’s, if I can use that term, he’s pussy-whipped. That’s the term [Americans] use.”
Not that she saw the Prince as an unwitting victim. “I think a lot of the push would have come from Harry,” she added. “In fact, I wonder if he didn’t choose a bride from another country because it gave him an out, because it gave him some security.”
Feminist and intellectual Germaine Greer had seen this writing on the wall even before Harry and Meghan’s nuptials. In 2018, she told 60 Minutes Australia, “I think the pressure to escape from the firm is crushing. I think she’ll bolt. I hope, in a way, that she’ll bolt, but maybe she’ll take Harry with her.”
After her prediction became a reality, she said in a follow-up interview: “That’s possibly why Harry fell for her. He was looking for a way out.”
Hugo Vickers, a royal biographer, likened Harry and Meghan’s circumstances to those faced by Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson: “If they’re not careful to end up as sort of slightly tarnished celebrities. If you set up an alternative court, it’s not going to work. It’s very sad actually.”
“It’s almost as though nothing matters to this couple apart from their own immediate happiness and gratification,” wrote the Daily Mail’s Sarah Vine. “It’s as though they are incapable of seeing beyond their own little bubble of privilege. It has often been speculated as to whether they might end up walking away from Britain. But the timing of this announcement could hardly be more insensitive, or more indicative of how little either seems to understand the true nature of their roles as royals.”
London’s Daily Mirror, on the opposite end of the political spectrum, for once was in accord with its right-wing counterpart. “Harry has selfishly turned his back on the institution the Queen has fought to modernize and secure for him and his children. The Sussexes strutted back from their extended holiday gushing about how keen they were to get back to work. Well, good riddance. I for one have had a bellyful of Harry’s eco-warrior hypocrisy.” Not to be gagged, Thomas Markle weighed in from Rosarita, Mexico, still seeming blithely unaware of how big a part his actions had been in motivating the couple’s news.
“I’ll just simply say I’m disappointed,” he said.
At this suggestion, the monarch decided enough was enough. For some time now, according to aides, she had been privately wondering who exactly the head of the Royal Family was and, as such, who should be making key decisions and shaping the course of the monarchy. After a great deal of thought and deliberation, she had concluded it was in fact still her, not Meghan—or for that matter, anyone else in the family. So, the pushback from the top began to muster, with senior courtiers, advisors, and the family gathering around their boss. It was crisis time.
Immediately, questions were aired. The pair had said they intended to become financially independent. But that would present challenges. As Andrew, Edward, and Sarah Ferguson had all found, to varying degrees, no senior member of the Royals had been able to successfully and ethically survive outside the family, without running into sticky constitutional conflicts over how they made their money and what proportion of their income and lifestyle would still be covered by the taxpayer.
“The level of deceit has been staggering and everyone from the top of the royal household to the bottom feels like they have been stabbed in the back,” one source said.
“It’s a masterclass in wanting to have your cake and eat it,” another royal insider raged. “Even their own staff cautioned against them making this public until they actually sat down and discussed it with the family properly. But they are in this weird bubble and have this strange siege mentality. They feel like it’s them against the world and are painting a very unfair picture of how this is a family that supposedly doesn’t understand or support them, which is complete and utter rubbish.”
One insider mused: “The family is perfectly willing to help them but this was a discussion better had discreetly and quietly. Why on earth they have put it out in the public domain is a decision only they can justify. They have no idea where they are going to live, have no idea how they are going to make their money. The feeling is one of deep disappointment that they have chosen to do this unilaterally and without prior warning or consultation.”
The anger and shock soon mutated into a very profound sadness, and no one was more sorrowful than the man who had been beside Harry every step of the way since birth, his brother, his closest ally and most loving friend, William.
“I’ve put my arm around my brother all our lives and I can’t do that, we’re separate entities,” William was quoted as telling a friend. “I’m sad about that. All we can do, and all I can do, is try and support them and hope that the time comes when we’re all singing from the same page.”
It’s not surprising that William would “want everyone to play on the same team,” as he went on to say. After all, his wife is particularly affected by Megxit. As it so happened, Harry and Meghan made their bombshell announcement just a day before Kate’s thirty-eighth birthday. If we’re to believe Meghan’s sister, Samantha, the timing wasn’t a coincidence. “Sad she would do that on Kate’s birthday,” she told the Daily Star. “I believe she was jealous of beautiful Kate. She could never compare—Kate is iconic! Perfect Queen material and lovely as a family member, especially as a mother.”
Since Harry and Meghan’s departure from the Royal Family, Kate and William have had to take on extra work. An insider said: “Meghan leaving the fold has put a tremendous amount of pressure on Kate’s shoulders. Although she is willing to do the heavy lifting and take on extra work in their absence, Kate does feel that she was doing an awful lot already. Kate has found herself trying to do it all—console her husband, look after her children, take on more work, and try to smooth things over.”
“She’s been absolutely put under pressure with it all,” the insider concluded, “but has been putting a brave face on as always.”
Clearly, the Firm was learning, in the harshest of ways, that there is no i in team—and not in Meghan, either.
PART TWO
THE MAKING OF MEGHAN
Just as black and white, when mixed, make grey, in many ways that’s what it did to my self-identity: it created a murky area of who I was, a haze around how people connected with me…. So you make a choice: continue living your life feeling muddled in this abyss of self-misunderstanding, or you find your identity—independent of it.
—MEGHAN MARKLE
Sometime in the first half of the eighteenth century, an adventurous Methodist from the Cornish village of Falmouth, on the Southwest coast of the United Kingdom, set sail to make his fortune in the New World. Upon arriving, William Ragland moved between Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, where he finally settled in Jonesboro. He managed a cotton plantation, run by a cohort of slaves of African origin, who labored, rain and shine, through endless backbreaking days, picking cotton and enriching their owners. The mid-1800s was boomtime in cotton exports, with the South producing over one million tons of cotton annually, mainly exported to British textile mills. Cotton demanded intensive manpower, and so by the time the Civil War began, there were an estimated three million slaves in the South alone.
One of the slaves working on Ragland’s cotton plantation was Richard “Dick” Ragland, who was born in 1830, taking, as was customary, his owner’s surname. In 1848, Richard and his wife, Mary, produced a son, Stephen, who lived long enough to see the ending of slavery and emancipation by President Abraham Lincoln when he defeated the Confederates in June 1865. Now a free man, Stephen married the superbly named Mattie Turnipseed, and they became parents to a baby daughter, Claudie, on February 20, 1885, in Jonesboro, Georgia.
But any hopes former slaves and their children had held that postemancipation life was about to get better were quickly dashed as it became clear that racial discrimination, hatred, and prejudice remained firmly a way of life in the South, due to the fearsome “Jim Crow Laws,” segregation, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and lynching. Black children weren’t allowed to be educated with whites, and there were two heavily enforced lanes in public places such as stores, diners, and so on. Slavery might have been abolished, but apartheid, a South African policy of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race, took its place, and life that had been hard on the black population stayed hard and looked unlikely to change anytime soon. Meanwhile, post-Civil War America was booming in the North, as cities flourished. A new industrial era brought thousands of country dwellers into the expanding metropolises, abandoning the dead-end drudgery of the cotton fields for work in the new factories, offices, and service industries. By the time Claudie married fellow Georgian Jeremiah Ragland in 1905, the pair was faced with a choice—start afresh in the city and give their own children the best opportunities possible, or endure a lifetime of backbreaking, following literally in their parents footsteps as sharecroppers.
Jeremiah and Claudie moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1910. Jeremiah became a tailor, ultimately founding a successful business, while Claudie worked at one of those new-fangled department stores that were mushrooming up across the United States, catering to a newly affluent, urban white middle class. While it was better than tilling someone else’s soil for upward of twelve hours a day, life wasn’t easy. The best a young black person could hope for was a job as a maid, janitor, tailor, or factory hand.
Yet Claudie and Jeremiah were sure of one thing: their kids were not going to be menial workers, if they could help it. They were going to college and they were going to make something of themselves. A colossal ambition for a young black family to hold in 1910s Tennes
see, but then Claudie and Jeremiah knew they had to think big or fail.
That fierce determination and burning desire to succeed paid off. Two of their five children, sisters Dora and Lillie, blazed through their “Blacks Only” schools and achieved what would have been unthinkable just a generation previously: they went to college. By 1930, Dora was the first member of the family to be a professional, when she qualified as a teacher. Her sister Lillie studied at the University of California and became director of an estate agency and was ultimately featured in the Who’s Who Among African Americans.
While not reaching the heights his sisters attained, Dora and Lillie’s elder brother Steve had also found a job, pressing clothes in a Chattanooga cleaners. He had married Lois Russell, the daughter of a hotel porter, and together, the pair moved to Los Angeles to seek their fortunes. In 1930, their son Alvin was born. He was a bright kid, known for the characteristic Ragland work ethic. After his schooling, he went to work for his Aunt Lillie’s realtor business before marrying and moving out to Los Angeles.
In fact, Alvin Ragland married twice. His first wife, nurse Jeanette Arnold, bore him a daughter named Doria Loyce, in September 1956. Doria and her parents moved to Los Angeles shortly after her birth, along with innumerable families, seeking a new life on the Pacific coast, where mile after mile of housing tracts were being quickly constructed, new suburbs created and a new era of bright prosperity predicted. However, shortly after the family arrived, Alvin left Jeanette. He served a brief stint in the military and opened his own antiques business called ’Twas New, starting out huckstering at local flea markets and steadily expanding, until he had a fine business and a collection of rare automobiles. Yet, although he was in regular contact with his daughter, he was an absentee father, rarely getting involved to any serious degree with her life during her childhood and teenage years.