I enjoy celebrity gossip as much as the next person. At first, the story of Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, was a charming one: two people from very different worlds finding each other and forging a path forward. I enjoyed the sweet notes of their courtship and commitment to each other. And I understood that, however much we wanted to frame their relationship as a fairy tale, it would not be one, at least not one of the more sanitized versions.
For a time, though, we did imagine a remarkable change in the largely obdurate institution of the monarchy. Their relationship made the monarchy seem more accessible, more connected to the real world beyond the high walls of Buckingham Palace. Meghan and Harry’s wedding ceremony, which included a gospel choir as well as the black bishop Michael Bruce Curry offering a sermon about the power of love, gave the impression that a shift, however subtle, was on the horizon. In his sermon, Bishop Curry referenced Martin Luther King Jr., and how, with love, we can “make of this old world a new world.”
I’m sure the couple thought that’s exactly what they were doing.
As endearing as Meghan and Harry’s story was, reality was never far behind. The biggest crisis, of course, was that a woman of color was infiltrating the royal family and, more important, the royal bloodline, however diluted it may be at this point. What should have been merely fraught, but manageable, quickly became untenable.
There was nothing Meghan could do that would have ever been good enough and, as she has detailed in the years since, the pressures from within and outside the royal family had a detrimental effect on her mental health. It’s kind of miraculous that their relationship has, to this point, endured.
And now, they have announced their imminent return to the U.K. I’m sure there are a lot of reasons prompting such a seemingly unexpected move, including, according to conflicting accounts, the potential for Meghan to return to her acting career. She’s a talented performer, so this move could be a homecoming for both of them.
But given their past, what does a future in England hold for them?
In January 2020, 20 months after their wedding, Harry and Meghan announced that they would no longer serve as senior royals, but would take on less demanding positions as they split their time between the U.S. and the U.K. They were seeking a break, not a formal rupture, from the demands of royalty. Alas. A mere 10 days later, Queen Elizabeth II made a statement that the couple would no longer be His or Her Royal Highness and they wouldn’t be working for the family business in any capacity. It was kind of astonishing to see how quickly the royal family clarified their opinion of the Sussexes’ decision.
Relations between Harry and his family only worsened and, amid this deep public rift, they came to the states, eventually making their home in Montecito, Calif. They were trying, perhaps, to rewrite their fairy tale and figure out their place in their radically changed world. They occasionally took international trips that would, in other circumstances, be official overseas visits. The royal family moved on with their lives, leaking to the press versions of their side of the story. Charles became king and William took his father’s long-inhabited role of next in line.
The story was dramatic and enthralling and imbued with so much loss — of position, of family, of self — in service of a once-in-a-lifetime love. For the most part, people don’t voluntarily step away from power and privilege.
The Sussexes set about the business of raising their young family. They also settled some scores in a rather scorched-earth set of moves. There was “Harry & Meghan,” a Netflix documentary series that offered viewers a very curated look at their lives. It was all very bland, not particularly revealing, but somehow watchable. The couple also sat down with Oprah Winfrey, a consummate interviewer, and bared, if not all, then quite a lot.
In that 2021 prime-time special, they both detailed the blatant racism, double standards and naked indifference, even cruelty, of the royal family. As Meghan, in particular, shared her story, you couldn’t help but wonder how she withstood it all. Theirs was a compelling performance, a closing argument in the matter of what precipitated such a drastic move toward respite and reinvention.
In 2023, Harry published “Spare,” a lengthy memoir about growing up as the boy who always knew he would never be king. The prose was utilitarian and occasionally funny. Early in the memoir, he has a line about Prince William’s “alarming baldness, more advanced than my own,” that makes me laugh every time I think of it. But mostly, Harry’s was a hollow story of knowing your place in life and being unduly constrained by it.
In their new fairy tale, the Sussexes launched, with varying degrees of success, business endeavors and media partnerships. They tried to demonstrate that they could not only survive but thrive without the support of the royal family. Prior to marriage, Meghan made her own way in the world. She did it once and she could do it again. Harry, on the other hand, had never known a civilian life where he truly had to prove himself, where he wasn’t lavishly celebrated by birthright.
Little came of Harry’s attempts at media work. Most of the podcast ideas he proposed, for instance, were silly at best, and nothing happened with his one good idea — a series about fatherhood. Harry and Meghan must have both hoped that distance and time would help him find his footing, but the most successful endeavors he had stateside were all connected to the very thing he was trying to escape, his royal lineage. He had to learn that when people aren’t by custom expected to like or pretend to like you, you have to bring something substantive to the table, and when you don’t, the opportunities disappear. Making of this old world a new world remained elusive.
There was also the challenge of public opinion, which was mixed. In some corners, Harry and Meghan were lauded for fighting for gilded independence (because Harry holds an amount of privilege from which he can never truly escape). Others said they were abandoning the royal family, being selfish, especially when the palace announced more than two years ago that King Charles had cancer. A lot of people blamed Meghan for being too much of a diva, too difficult to work with, too American and, of course, too Black.
No matter what you think about Harry and Meghan, race is the proverbial elephant in the room. The British monarchy has long been littered with deeply flawed people: Henry VIII married women who caught his eye — two of whom he later beheaded — and killed political advisers and adversaries; before abdicating the throne, Edward VIII sought to marry a divorcée who shared his sympathy for Adolf Hitler; Charles, of course, treated Diana terribly. Prince Andrew is alleged to be a sexual predator and was friends with the prolific sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, even after Mr. Epstein was convicted in 2010.
This is the power of bigotry — the monarchy has tolerated a breathtaking range of despicable behavior from assorted royals, but what they could not abide is a Black woman. People can attribute all of this royal family tension to ego or pettiness or a would-be king asserting his will over the never-will-be king, but that won’t change the painful reality that the king wears the heavy crown of racism and most of those in the current line of succession will, too.
Given this state of affairs, it was quite surprising when news broke that Harry, Meghan and their two children are returning to live in the U.K. They know better, this time around, about what to expect and how to navigate it.But they also have to, once more, figure out who they are, without the position or the power to which they were once adjacent.
They will have to endure the notoriously cruel British press that has hounded them incessantly. They will have to figure out if they can, finally, make a home for themselves, one where they are welcomed and embraced without having to contort themselves into the shape the monarchy prefers. They will have to see if their relationship can continue to endure.
In this next chapter of their not quite fairy tale, the Sussexes are caught between two complicated worlds, neither of which is particularly hospitable to their unique circumstances. In the New Yorker essay “Letter From a Region in My Mind,” James Baldwin asks, “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Baldwin asks that question in a very different context, but I suspect it is nonetheless one Harry and Meghan have been trying to answer for years.
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