Finding Freedom

by Omid Scobie

  Whatever the reason for its timing, Harry was determined for the statement to make uncomfortable reading for many members of the press, including those in Africa with him. The prince said he was tired of playing the “game,” in which royals trade exclusives with the tabloids in exchange for some peace and privacy. He was also sick of the hypocrisy of the media outlets that glorified Meghan one day and tore her down the next.

  “The positive coverage of the past week from these same publications exposes the double standards of this specific press pack that has vilified her almost daily for the past nine months,” Harry wrote. “For these select media this is a game, and one that we have been unwilling to play from the start. I have been a silent witness to her private suffering for too long. To stand back and do nothing would be contrary to everything we believe in.”

  According to a friend, Harry wanted to protect his wife and family, but he also had ambitions to ring in a more honest and fair media. Princes and princesses weren’t the only ones who had been at the mercy of dishonest press practices. A phone-hacking scandal had rocked England in 2011, when it was revealed that employees of the News of the World tabloid and other British newspapers owned by media titan Rupert Murdoch listened to the private voicemails of celebrities, crime victims, and politicians. The illegal method of getting stories resulted in the shuttering of the 168-year-old News of the World and one of the most expensive investigations and trials in British legal history.

  “Harry feels that the mass-market tabloid press in the UK is a toxic part of British society that needs to be addressed,” the prince’s friend said.

  Despite the risk that she would be called to the stand, Meghan was determined to see the Mail on Sunday lawsuit filed. It came as little surprise that Thomas Markle later announced in the Mail on Sunday that he would be willing to testify against his own daughter. Legal documents later revealed that the newspaper planned to rely on evidence from Thomas, who felt he “had a weighty right to tell his version of what happened between himself and his daughter including the contents of the letter.”

  Meghan no longer recognized Thomas as the man who raised her. He went on to spend six days with filmmakers for a 90-minute documentary, Thomas Markle: My Story. “For what I’ve been through,” the 75-year-old said, “I should be rewarded.” Neither Harry nor Meghan watched the show, which attempted to paint a portrait of a man wronged by the Sussexes. “It is his own behavior that he is truly the victim of,” said a friend of the couple.

  Even before they announced their lawsuits, Harry and Meghan attempted to change the way they worked with the press. They questioned the firm hold the royal rota (the group of British newspaper journalists who decide which UK representative attends royal engagements on the understanding that they will share all material obtained) had on their coverage. “It makes no sense to me,” Meghan remarked when told by senior aides that letting US press receive the same access as the British-only newspaper rota was not an option despite her nationality. The same rule also froze out grassroots and international media interested in their charitable endeavors. The rule of giving exclusive access to the rota also meant that the couple was expected to share personal photos with British newspapers, four of which were tabloids, that they would have rather put on their own social media exclusively. They didn’t like having such little control over their personal content.

  “I’m tired of people covering engagements and then going off to write some rubbish about what someone is wearing,” Harry said to a friend.

  The only way they could truly change things was if the couple started to pay for their events themselves, rather than taking from the Sovereign Grant, the government- and taxpayer-provided purse that funded the royal family. “Sure, if money was no object,” Harry remarked. It was a catch-22. He and Meghan didn’t receive salaries, but as full-time working royals, they were unable to earn money.

  The couple wasn’t ready for such a drastic step as leaving the monarchy. Instead, they quietly decided to take whatever control was within their power, including using their new Instagram account to tighten up access to staple media fodder like pictures of their baby. They figured out a way to occasionally work around the royal rota by holding “private engagements” that differed from public ones. When Meghan only shared on Instagram and with one other outlet photos of her visit to London’s Luminary Bakery, a bakery that provides underserved women with jobs and training on social media, the other newspapers were furious. It was a small victory for the couple over “The Cartel,” as they had come to jokingly call them.

  Taking on the most powerful media organizations in the world was not without serious peril. “It’s a death wish,” a senior aide at Buckingham Palace said about Harry and Meghan’s war on the tabloids. “You just don’t take on the British press.” Harry had hoped his family would be willing to show support for their decision, but the silence was deafening. Though Charles privately respected his son’s decision, the Prince of Wales also depended on the press to back him when he one day became king.

  “Though this action may not be the safe one, it is the right one,” Harry said in his original statement announcing Meghan’s lawsuit. “Because my deepest fear is history repeating itself. I’ve seen what happens when someone I love is commoditized to the point that they are no longer treated or seen as a real person. I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.”

  His emotions were on full display on October 15 when Harry choked up while addressing the audience of the WellChild Awards. “Last year when my wife and I attended we knew we were expecting our first child—no one else did at the time, but we did,” he said at the awards ceremony hosted by the UK charity supporting children and young people with exceptional health needs. “I remember squeezing Meghan’s hand so tight during the awards, both of us thinking what it would be like to be parents one day, and more so, what it would be like to do everything we could to protect and help our child should they be born with immediate challenges or become unwell over time.”

  Bowing his head, Harry had to stop speaking for a few seconds to regain his composure. Amid applause from the crowd, he continued. “And now, as parents, being here and speaking to all of you pulls at my heart strings in a way I could have never understood until I had a child of my own.”

  Harry wanted to create a safer world for all children, including his own. For his son, that meant Archie growing up away from the particular kind of struggles the prince has had to face.

  The statement and lawsuits were just the beginning of the couple’s campaign. Jaws dropped around the world on October 20, when British network ITV aired a documentary of the Sussexes’ southern Africa travels where Harry and Meghan dropped a number of bombshells.

  “It’s not enough to just survive something, right? That’s not the point of life. You’ve got to thrive, you’ve got to feel happy. I really tried to adopt this sensibility of the British stiff upper lip, but I think that what that does internally is probably really damaging,” Meghan admitted on An African Journey. “I never thought this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair.”

  When the documentary host, ITV news anchor and friend of the couple Tom Bradby, asked Meghan how she was coping, she replied, “Thank you for asking because not many people have asked if I’m okay.”

  Palace aides took this comment as a dig at the family for not providing her enough support as a new member of the Firm.

  “And the answer is, would it be fair to say, not really okay?” Tom said. “That it’s really been a struggle?”

  “Yes,” Meghan replied.

  Harry also admitted during the special for the first time publicly that there was tension between him and his brother, William. “Part of this role, part of this job and this family being under the pressure it is under, inevitably stuff happens,” he said. “But look, we are brothers, we will always be brothers. We are certainly on different paths at the moment, but I will always be there for him, and, as I know, he
will always be there for me. We don’t see [each other] as much as we used to because we are so busy, but I love him dearly, and the majority of stuff is created out of nothing. As brothers, you have good days, you have bad days.”

  The day after the documentary aired, William’s thoughts were revealed by a palace courtier. Several outlets, including the BBC and The Sun, quoted a Kensington Palace aide stating that Prince William was “worried” about his brother. He felt the couple was “in a fragile place.”

  A source close to Harry later said, “It’s these games the couple were eager to get away from. Rather than reaching out to them, someone close to William briefed the press on his views about Harry’s mental health. He thought it was low to be sharing opinion like that so publicly.” A friend of the prince added, “Harry felt that William and the people around him were too concerned with press coverage.”

  Highly emotional and fiercely protective of his wife and son, Harry was drained by the unique circumstances of his family, which, as a source described, “doesn’t have the opportunity to operate as an actual family.” While politics are part of every family dynamic, they are at a whole other level for William, Harry, and the rest of the royals.

  “Every conversation, every issue, every personal disagreement, whatever it may be, involves staff,” the source said of the aides who invariably send and receive messages between the royal households. “It creates a really weird environment that actually doesn’t allow people to sort things out themselves.”

  No one could deny the fact that the couple was emotionally exhausted, whether they had brought it on themselves or were victims of a merciless machine. “They felt under pressure,” a source said. “They felt that they were alone.”

  With so much stress in their life, their sole source of joy was Archie. Growing “at the speed of light,” by the southern Africa tour, he had two teeth and was crawling. He loved being read to by his parents and particularly enjoyed the riddle-and-rhyme book Is Your Mama a Llama? by Deborah Guarino. Like many new parents, Meghan enjoyed taking him to classes, like the Happy Clappy music class in Windsor she brought Archie to by herself in October (her protection officers stood outside). All the moms, and two dads, in the room were wide-eyed as the Duchess of Sussex joined their circle with Archie, who went straight for a tambourine and, according to his mom, “loved it.”

  Archie was also their reason for wanting to start working on changing some of what they called “negative forces” in their lives. As the fall wore on and tensions with certain sections of the Palace grew, Harry and Meghan decided they needed to get out of the country for a while. Christmas was right around the corner, and spending it at Sandringham surrounded by members of the royal family did not sound like a holiday.

  The couple decided that for the second half of November and all of December they would base themselves in Canada. They considered going to the United States but felt a Commonwealth location was more appropriate at the time. There was ample precedent for royal family members skipping out on the traditional Sandringham festivities. In 2012 and 2016, the Cambridges celebrated with the Middletons at their home in Berkshire instead. In 2017, Zara and Mike Tindall passed the holidays with his side of the family in Australia. Still, the press eviscerated the Sussexes when they made the same choice.

  Battered and bruised from the tabloid attacks and lack of support from members of the royal family, Harry and Meghan headed for the $18 million Vancouver Island estate that pal Ben Mulroney helped secure for them through the music producer David Foster. Foster was close friends with the wealthy investor who had put the property up for sale and was willing to rent it to the royal couple for far below market value.

  Mille Fleurs—the Vancouver property in North Saanich, close to Victoria, British Columbia—with two private beaches on four acres of land, provided a tranquil landing for the shell-shocked couple. Doria’s visit for the Thanksgiving holiday was much welcomed. (Despite reports in the press that she had quit her job, she took only a brief vacation to spend with them.)

  Through December, their days were spent mostly enjoying quiet family time with just the three of them. They took long walks outside with both of their dogs (which traveled over with the couple). Though they had a housekeeper and a nanny, the couple did most of the cooking, making great use of the pizza oven in the mansion’s kitchen. On a couple of occasions, Harry and Meghan had a date night at the Deep Cove Chalet restaurant. While many of the area’s wealthiest residents are known to fly in by helicopter, Harry and Meghan turned up at the five-star restaurant on foot. Otherwise, they barely left the compound.

  Away from the courtiers and all things royal, they could think for themselves. They went over the events that had unfolded since the wedding and talked about how and if they could possibly create a situation that would make for a better future. That future also included an even greater focus on their humanitarian work.

  “I don’t need to have that movie moment where we get out of a car and wave to a hundred photographers before going into a building,” Harry told a friend about some of the frustrations of his current role. “It should just be about the work happening inside. Let’s focus on what really matters.”

  Before leaving the UK, Harry had spoken a handful of times with his grandmother and father and a number of key aides about the urgent need to change things for him and his wife within the Palace structure. He felt at once used for their popularity, hounded by the press because of the public’s fascination with this new breed of royal couple, and disparaged back within the institution’s walls for being too sensitive and outspoken. He and Meghan didn’t want to completely walk away from the monarchy; rather, they wanted to find a happy place within it.

  In fact, they they hoped to use part of their time away to put the finishing touches on the Sussex Royal Foundation to launch in 2020, which, like the Royal Foundation, would serve as an umbrella organization for all their charitable interests. That included setting up a website, SussexRoyal.com, to launch the foundation. They had hired a team outside the Palace to keep their plans confidential. Meghan worked with Made by Article, the same Toronto-based design company that successfully produced her shuttered lifestyle blog The Tig, as well as a small group at Sunshine Sachs, her original PR team before becoming a royal.

  They took some time out for visits by friends like actress Janina Gavankar, a longtime friend of Meghan’s who, meeting Archie for the first time, took a picture of him and his parents that wound up becoming the Sussex Christmas card photo. Isabel May also spent a little time in Mille Fleurs, where the conversation often turned to questions about the couple’s future, since both Harry and Meghan trusted the PR executive’s honest opinion.

  As the weeks went by, the couple realized they couldn’t go back to the way things had been at home before they left. As hard as the decision was to make, they had come to a conclusion: Harry and Meghan were going to step back from their roles as senior royals—and cut themselves off from access to the Sovereign Grant. Making a living on their own to support their philanthropic endeavours was a daunting but exciting prospect. Harry and Meghan were used to big projects and big impact; Harry turned the first Invictus Games around in less than a year, and Meghan’s projects had all broken records. Now, they were ready to do even more of that, at their own pace. By essentially moving away from their current working model, it would also allow them to live part-time in North America, far away from the British tabloids and the negativity within the institution. That made the challenge worthwhile.

  Despite the change, they still wanted to carry out their duties for the Queen. That was the one thing that they did not want to end—not just because of Harry’s love and respect for his grandmother, but also because Meghan felt she had given up so much to take her life down a path of service to the monarchy. She didn’t quit when she signed up for a task. Then at ninety-three years old, the Queen needed the support of younger family members to maximize her legacy, and the couple wanted to proudly represent that by c
arrying out works for the monarchy in the UK and across the Commonwealth. They hoped that family members such as Prince Michael of Kent—who had formally represented the Queen on occasions abroad and carried out thousands of royal engagements in the past decade, but didn’t receive any parliamentary allowances in return for being able to earn his own living as chairman of his own consultancy company—provided a precedent for combining private work with duty.

  They knew there would be hurdles, such as discussions over the security that was currently provided by the Metropolitan Police for “internationally protected people.” But they were confident enough that before Christmas, Harry emailed his grandmother and father to say that he and Meghan had come to the decision to change the way they worked—to step back and spend more time abroad. He didn’t get into much more detail than that, worried that the news might leak via a member of staff. The rest, he said, they would discuss in person.

  With both family members informed, Charles’s private office was requested to schedule a time for the two to meet the Queen, who was based at Sandringham for the holiday season, as soon as the Sussexes returned to the UK on January 6. Their trip to London was going to be short, but Harry was keen ensure that by the time they returned to Canada at the end of the week, their new chapter had been secured.

  Harry was right to be worried about leaks. Certain details from the email soon ended up in the hands of a tabloid reporter who began inquiring at the end of the year about the couple’s plans to spend more time in Canada. But that was the least of his worries. Despite repeated follow-ups with his father’s office, he was unable to secure time with the Queen. The monarch, he was told, would not be available until January 29. “He felt like he was being blocked,” a source close to the prince said.