Fifteen months ago, Prince Harry said he could not “see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the U.K.”
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex had fled to America amid a seemingly irreparable royal rift, a vicious media environment and a British public that was angry about their criticism of the monarchy. Harry told the BBC that it was “really quite sad that I won’t be able to show my children my homeland.”
Now, he will. In a move that appears to have caught even King Charles III by surprise, Harry and Meghan are planning to settle back in Britain in the coming weeks. Their children, Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5, will enroll in school here. Royal watchers said the family would live in private accommodations outside London.
The question that quite a few people in Britain are asking is: What changed? The answer, royal observers say, may hinge in part on Harry’s longing to give his children the kind of upbringing that he remembers fondly — minus the public attention and press scrutiny that he has repeatedly denounced.
In 2023, Harry described Britain as “central to the heritage of my children and a place I want them to feel at home as much as where they live at the moment in the U.S.” in a statement read out by his lawyer during a court hearing over security for his family.
“They want their children to grow up as British citizens as much as Americans,” said Ed Owens, the author of “After Elizabeth: Can the Monarchy Save Itself?” and a fellow at the Royal Historical Society. “They want their children to imbibe the tradition, culture, history, heritage of their father’s country.”
“Of course,” he added quickly, “there are other factors at play here.”
The most significant of those may be the chance to further repair Harry’s relationship with his father, who was diagnosed with cancer in February 2024. Buckingham Palace has said that Charles is responding well to treatment, but in the BBC interview last year, Harry said, “I don’t know how much longer my father has.”
The BBC interview was the latest turn in a remarkably public war of words waged from across the Atlantic by Harry and Meghan over the last six years. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, a book called “Spare” and a six-part Netflix documentary, Harry unloaded on the monarchy in ways that no former member of the royal family had dared to do.
That created the kind of split that some families rarely come back from.
In 2025, Harry met with his father for tea at the king’s London residence, in what appeared to be the first step toward healing their rift. And last month, the frostiness between father and son appeared to thaw a bit more when Harry and Meghan brought their children on a trip to Britain. The family met privately with Charles and Queen Camilla at Highgrove House, a royal residence outside London, though a person familiar with the meeting said the possibility of a permanent move back to Britain did not come up then.
If the possibility of spending more time with the king was one motivation for the upcoming move, it seems unlikely that a similar rapprochement is in the works with Harry’s brother, William, the Prince of Wales. William is said to be furious about Harry’s decision to write a tell-all book. In the BBC interview, Harry conceded that “some members of my family will never forgive me.”
Catherine Mayer, the author of “Divide and Rule: Royal Women and Their Battles,” said that, based on his public silence and unwillingness to even meet with Harry, it appeared that William was “not ready to repair things, that he doesn’t have that level of trust necessary to do so.”
She added: “Both William and Harry have to be carrying the trauma from their childhood and that will complicate their reactions to anything.”
There is also the issue of the family’s security. Harry has said for years that he could not return to Britain until the government restored the police protection they withdrew when he stopped being a working member of the royal family.
Harry lost a legal challenge to that decision earlier this year. Asked about the issue on Thursday, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said that the question about the proper level of security for Harry and Meghan was a “private matter” for their family.
Mr. Owens contrasted Harry’s decision to move back with the history of Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson. “They never managed to reconcile with the wider British royal family,” he said. “They died sort of embittered and alone and estranged from the family and living abroad.”
And then there is the British media.
Harry all but declared war on the country’s tabloid journalists over the past decade, accusing them of a media feeding frenzy at his family’s expense. He won court cases against the publishers of The Daily Mirror and The Sun for phone hacking and the use of private investigators. More recently, his claims of bugging and wiretapping by The Daily Mail were dismissed by the court.
Now that those cases are settled, it remains to be seen how Harry and Meghan will be treated by their critics in the media.
Royal observers said on Thursday that they expect the family to try to keep low profiles, in part by likely choosing a place to live well outside London and far from the tabloids based there.
But that may be difficult to do in practice, given the ways Harry and Meghan have chosen to finance their lifestyle, which include high-profile charities, the Netflix deal and other public activities.
Ms. Mayer noted that most of their work was “fairly high-profile,” adding: “I don’t think that you’re going to see them disappearing.”
Either way, the family’s return to Britain is certain to be noticed by the public, who remain polarized about Harry and Meghan.
Recent surveys have shown that the broader public views both of them negatively, especially in comparison to Harry’s brother and his wife, Kate. But the couple remains popular with Britain’s younger generations.
“In that respect, some of the positivity that might come out of this move could rub off on the monarchy as well,” Mr. Owens said, “at a time when it continues to struggle to connect with young people.”
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