A month after the WE Day UK concert at Wembley Stadium, her amicable breakup with Harry was officially confirmed.
The year 2014 also marked Harry’s final year in the army. But being normal was still high on his wish list when he said during a trip to New Zealand that he felt he needed to earn a wage and mix with ordinary people before he became a “full-time” royal.
Placing his focus on activism and humanitarian causes, that year he founded the Invictus Games, his version of the Paralympics for wounded veterans, which had been inspired by the Warrior Games he had seen in Colorado. The word invictus is Latin for undefeated; and the name of the international multisport event takes its name from the title of an 1875 poem by William Ernest Henley. The final two of the lines of “Invictus” have become the motto of the Games:
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Henley was an amputee himself; and the poem reflects his personal adversity and his battle with illness.
The first Games took place in March 2014, right on Harry’s home turf in London. After that, a different city would host each subsequent Games, with foreign dignitaries from each participating country representing their respective teams as ambassadors, much like the Olympics.
The 2016 Invictus Games were hosted in Orlando, Florida. The Queen consented to film a cheeky promotion for her grandson’s pet charity with the ambassadors for the United States team. Surrounded by American servicemen and women, President and Mrs. Obama sent a video tweet to Harry. Her arms folded across her chest, the first lady says, “Hey, Prince Harry, remember when you told us to ‘bring it’ at the Invictus Games?” and the president adds, “Be careful what you wish for.” Their video is capped by a sneer from one soldier and a pantomimed “boom” mic drop from another.
Via the Kensington Palace Twitter account, Harry issued a reply with a winking emoji, saying, “Unfortunately for you, @FLOTUS and @POTUS, I wasn’t alone when you sent me that video.” Seated beside his granny on a sofa upholstered in a cheerful floral, as a fire crackles in the hearth, the prince shows her photos of a track race from the 2015 Games. The Queen is impressed. Harry receives a call on his mobile—the ringtone is “Hail to the Chief.” The caller is FLOTUS. After he answers the phone, the Obamas issue their challenge, as the Queen and Harry watch the video together. Then, coyly tilting her head toward her grandson, Her Majesty smiles sweetly and says, “Boom? Really? Please.”
Unable to suppress a grin, Harry turns to the camera in close-up, splays his fingers, and says, “Boom.”
A year later, by the time the 2017 Invictus Games opened in Toronto on September 23, Harry’s life was on its way to changing completely.
Boom. Really.
When Harry Met Meghan
In the summer of 2016, Meghan jetted to London for a holiday. She had just returned from an ambassadorial visit to Rwanda with the World Vision Clean Water Campaign.
It was in early July that she and Harry were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend. In their interview with the BBC’s Mishal Husain after the announcement of their engagement, the couple was coy about who had played Cupid. However, nothing ever remains a secret for too long. The royal matchmaker was Harry’s childhood friend Violet von Westenholz, the daughter of former Olympic skier Baron Piers von Westenholz, who is close to Prince Charles. Violet and Meghan—who by that time had been part of London’s social scene for a while—had crossed paths through Violet’s PR work with the Ralph Lauren fashion house. When Harry, who’d long been confiding his romantic woes to Violet, told her he was having trouble finding someone, the baron’s daughter replied that she might have the perfect girl for him!
According to Meghan, the only thing she had asked Ms. von Westenholz about the prince was “Is he nice?” because if he wasn’t “kind,” then she told her pal it wouldn’t make sense for her to meet him. Although Sonia Arkadani, mother of Meghan’s best friend at Immaculate Heart, recalled the girls’ desire to emulate Diana’s humanitarianism, during Meghan’s November 27, 2017, interview with the BBC, she insisted that—unlike so many American women—she had never been a royal watcher and didn’t know much about the royal family.
Harry and Meghan met for the first time in London’s Greek Street, at Soho House, an exclusive membership club for creatives, with locations around the globe. At the Soho House venues, guests can stay overnight, dine, dance, exercise, relax in the spas, and avail themselves of work space, in addition to enjoying nightly entertainment. With her Every House membership, Meghan has access to the London, Toronto, and Los Angeles venues, as well as other clubs located in the United States and around the world. A house rule prohibits photographs of guests inside any of the establishments.
And although stories have been published about Harry having told a friend over drinks as far back as 2014 that his “dream girl” was “Meghan Markle from Suits,” the prince told Ms. Husain that he had never seen the show and had not met Meghan before their blind date. It does boggle the mind, however, that Harry didn’t Google her after he learned that the two of them were being set up. At the very least, who wouldn’t want to know what his date looks like?
Harry said he was “beautifully surprised” when he first saw Meghan. Instantly smitten, he told himself, “Well, I’m really going to have to up my game, and sit down and make sure I’ve got good chat.”
Their first date was for drinks, but they ended up talking late into the night. Harry said he knew Meghan was “The One” from the moment he met her.
Meghan and Harry enjoyed two dates in quick succession. Then he reportedly barraged her with text messages, hoping to see more of her. Already the pair was eagerly planning a future together, even if it was just an immediate one.
If royalty experts were predicting that the right woman for Harry would be a combination of an aristocratic Sloane Ranger with an outdoorsy tomboy—a latter-day Tiggy Legge-Bourke, for example—then they couldn’t have been paying close attention. Charles was the one who married his nanny figure, Camilla Parker Bowles having a dead-on resemblance to Mabel Anderson, the woman who gave Charles the love he didn’t get from his mummy.
As for Harry, it’s often been said that men marry their mothers. And if that’s true of him, then from his first date with Meghan, this one was in the bag.
Maybe the stars were aligned. In 2015, during an interview on Canadian television in a lightning round of twenty questions, Meghan was asked, “William or Harry?” She stopped, splayed her hands, and gave the journalist a look as if it was the most ludicrous question she’d ever been asked, as if “Boxers or briefs?” would have been more logical. Finally she shrugged, laughed, and answered, “Harry.”
On August 4, 2016, Meghan’s thirty-fifth birthday, she posted on The Tig, “I feel so incredibly joyful right now, so grateful and content that all I could wish for is more of the same.” She gave a hint about what was to come by posting under the heading If I had one week to escape: “I’d go completely off the grid, which I intend to do next week with some friends, some cocktails, and the sound of the lapping sea.”
And some misdirection.
Just a few weeks after their fateful blind date, Harry persuaded Meghan to travel with him to Botswana. Five days in August camping together under the stars. No one but each other to talk to. No distractions, no paparazzi. In addition to Harry’s presence, this was the sort of holiday that Meghan preferred—the Anthony Bourdain–esque journey of discovery to a remote corner of the world, taking the road less traveled. There in a tent beneath the sky the couple really got to know each other.
It was a huge leap of faith for both of them to jet off “to the middle of nowhere,” in Harry’s words, after only two dates. But both he and Meghan had an opportunity to connect and bond and test a fledgling relationship in a way that they could not have in London or Toronto. They would either get along like mad or get on each other’s last nerve. What happened, of course, was that they were able to learn a lot about each other in a very short space of time.
The couple was keen to protect their privacy and preserve the fragile relationship that was blossoming, which might have been one of the reasons it survived the crucial first several months. Another reason is that Meghan and Harry are the right people for each other at the right time in their lives. In addition to their undeniable chemistry, Meghan is the first woman Harry became involved with who wants the same things he does. They both wish to change the world for the better and help young people, particularly those in developing nations, to enjoy better lives. They have both walked that walk and talked that talk for years, and both have had a platform that allows them to affect change as well. Together they can do even more, something they recognized from their first date.
In October 2016, Meghan blogged on “How to Be Both,” about having a foot in two worlds: show business and humanitarian work. “To me it’s less of a question of how can you do this, and more a question of how can you not? While my life shifts from refugee camps to red carpets I choose them both because these worlds can in fact coexist. And for me, they must.” In a way, and who can say whether it even entered her mind at the time, being a member of the British royal family embraces the same paradigm. They are expected to be on all the time, and their public role as patrons of various charitable trusts, nonprofits, and foundations is very much a philanthropic one.
As royalty historian and author David Starkey phrases it, “actors, like royals, are performers. They wear funny clothes and are always on stage.” And as Meghan herself has noted, as an actor she says other people’s words for a living, imbuing them with nuance and subtext in order to flesh out the character she is portraying.
With regard to having a foot in two worlds, Meghan’s mother once told her, “Flower, you were just born that way.” Although Meghan’s comment referred to the duality of the glamour of Hollywood, which is so predicated on wealth and indulgence, and her often gritty humanitarian work, she has also always had a foot in the worlds of both white and black America. She was born that way too, and has struggled against and fought back against being depicted as either/or instead of both.
News of the royal romance finally broke that month. The Sunday Express reported in October 2016 that Harry was “besotted” with Meghan and “happier than he’s been in years.” Less than a fortnight after the first British headlines, a royal correspondent admitted to Harry’s biographer Duncan Larcombe, “We know more about Meghan after two weeks than we found out about Cressy [Bonas] in four years.”
But the pair had managed to pull off a remarkable feat in this era of Twitter and 24-7 news cycles, keeping their relationship a delicious secret for nearly half a year, which allowed it time to grow organically, rather than under the media klieg lights.
Another two weeks after that, a Google search of the couple’s names would yield six million hits—not all of them kind. The trolls—as well as some of the Fleet Street tabloids—were having a field day, trashing Meghan for being American and a divorcée, and for not being lily white. How dare someone from the royal family marry someone like her? The idiom blue blood, a translation of the Spanish phrase sangre azul, refers to the archaic notion that royalty and titled aristocrats, as opposed to the darker skinned Moors, were supposed to be so pale that one could see their blue veins pulsing beneath their skin.
Inspired by the falsehoods printed in the British tabloids, the Internet trolls crawled out of the woodwork to disparage Meghan’s mother Doria, whom of course they had never met. The Daily Mail tagged Meghan as “(Almost) Straight Outta Compton,” insisting she lived in the “gang scarred neighborhood of Crenshaw, home to the deadly street gang, the Crips.” And the Daily Star Online announced that Harry could be marrying into “gangster royalty” because Meghan hailed from a “crime-ridden Los Angeles neighborhood.” Clearly none of them knew that View Park–Windsor Hills, which has been recently listed on the National Register of Historic Places and where the median home price is $771,000, has been nicknamed the “Black Beverly Hills.” To them, all black people and black neighborhoods were dangerous, criminal, and meant to be avoided at all costs. Perhaps because Meghan is an American actress and not an English aristocrat like Cressy Bonas, the gloves were taken off and she was treated as past royal mistresses were—as a social climber from an unsavory profession. But the added element of racism reduced the commentary to a new nadir.
In America, anyone and everyone who knew Meghan was tracked down, from friends and former classmates to neighbors and exes. Some were offered cash to spill their secrets. Even Meghan’s half sister Samantha, confined to a wheelchair since 2008 as a result of MS, penned a tell-all, referring to Meghan as “Princess Pushy.” Ironically, one of the Windsors has already been tagged with that sobriquet; it’s the nickname most frequently given to the Queen’s cousin by marriage, Princess Michael of Kent. Born in what is now the Czech Republic, Princess Michael is one of the Windsors’ least liked and most controversial family members. Her father was allegedly a member of the Nazi Party, and on more than one occasion she has made tabloid headlines for her racist remarks.
As the details of Meghan’s private life were being ground into an unrecognizable hash, she reportedly invited Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Mirror, to sit down for a drink. Perhaps, being a media-savvy woman, Meghan was attempting to gain control of her own narrative and take back her power before it was entirely wrested from her by a flock of vultures, voracious for headlines and clickbait, heedless of the truth.
Within nine days of the first story about their royal romance hitting the newsstands and the Internet, Harry had seen enough slurs and untruths being propagated about Meghan and her mother to last a hundred lifetimes.
Livid, he took an unprecedented step for a member of the royal family. On December 8, 2016, on Harry’s behalf, and at his behest, Kensington Palace issued a 279-word statement to the press to back off!
. . . the past week has seen a line crossed. His girlfriend, Meghan Markle, has been subject to a wave of abuse and harassment. Some of this has been very public—the smear on the front page of a national newspaper; the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments. Some of it has been hidden from the public—the nightly legal battles to keep defamatory stories out of papers; her mother having to struggle past photographers in order to get to her front door; the attempts of reporters and photographers to gain illegal entry to her home and the calls to police that followed; the substantial bribes offered by papers to her ex-boyfriend; the bombardment of nearly every friend, co-worker, and loved one in her life.
Prince Harry is worried about Ms. Markle’s safety and is deeply disappointed that he has not been able to protect her. It is not right that a few months into a relationship with him Ms. Markle should be subjected to such a storm. He knows commentators will say this is “the price she has to pay” and that “this is all part of the game.” He strongly disagrees. This is not a game—it is her life and his. . . .
Meghan admitted that she was hit so hard with so many mistruths that she made the decision not to read any of the media coverage. She found the ugliness and racism in the press “disheartening, and a shame that’s the climate. But at the end of the day I’m proud of who I am and where I come from.” After making the deliberate choice to disregard “all that noise,” Meghan told the BBC that “when you take all those extra layers away . . . it just makes it easier to focus on being a couple.”
Harry had the right to protect the woman he loves—for her safety—and to demand a halt on the insults against her because of the color of her skin. Any reasonable person can separate those requests from asking the press not to do its job, which was how some of the media reacted to Harry’s statement. It is never the press’s job to defame by printing racial and sexist slurs and innuendo. Harry was merely asking Fleet Street not to be liars and stalkers.
The reaction was telling. In addition to feigning high dudgeon, some editors got their knickers in a twist a
t Harry’s temerity. One called it a declaration of war, an action Harry might someday regret. If that was this editor’s view, he might wish to reflect upon the tragic events of the night of August 30, 1997, when Harry’s mother was literally chased to her death for the sake of a story.
Other editors, including Gordon Raynor of the Daily Telegraph, were convinced that Harry would never have issued such a statement if Meghan hadn’t been The One. Raynor declared: “The prince is fully aware that in issuing such a defence of his new girlfriend and a plea to give her some space ‘before any further damage is done’—he is confirming just how serious their relationship is.”
This was disingenuous. Never before had Harry been involved, seriously or otherwise, with a biracial American divorcée who also happens to be a professional actress three years his senior. And that was what the media was peering at under their collective microscopes.
Harry’s plea failed to stop the presses. The royal romance sold papers and provided clickbait, regardless of whether the reportage was true or whether the anonymous Internet trolls combing the articles insulted both of them in the vilest terms. In England, when something as absurdly innocuous (and frankly, attractive) as being a ginger sets one up for abuse, Meghan’s heritage was a gold mine for haters.
The racist slurs, both online and in the tabloid press, were a harsh reality check. Although Harry tried to warn Meghan about the magnitude of the attention she would receive after their relationship was made public, the couple was both surprised by and unprepared for the level of ugliness and prejudice. Harry was born into a life where one is in the public eye nearly every day, but Meghan would be choosing it. Even her status as a professional actress had thus far come nowhere near the level of scrutiny she would be enduring if she married Harry. And it would be this way for the rest of her life.
Meghan admitted that at the outset of her relationship, her parents and close friends were concerned about her. Yet they had also never seen her so happy. After Doria and her friends were finally able to meet Meghan’s new boyfriend, it became obvious to them that the negative media onslaught was a temporary setback the couple would ultimately be able to transcend.
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