However, others also had a bead on Meghan that night: Harry’s SO14 Royalty Protection officers. Because royal girlfriends are not entitled to a protection officer, it seemed to be yet another hint that an engagement was imminent.
By this time, with the headline WILD ABOUT HARRY, Meghan was gracing the cover of Vanity Fair’s October issue, her freckles left untouched by the magazine’s airbrushers. Her interview with Sam Kashner, which she gave shortly before she departed with Harry for their August getaway in Botswana, was published on the inside pages. “I’m going where the Wi-Fi will be weak,” she told Kashner, without further elucidation. Meghan was quite open about her royal relationship, plainly admitting, “We’re a couple. We’re in love. I’m sure there will be a time when we will have to come forward and present ourselves and have stories to tell, but I hope what people will understand is that this is our time. This is for us. It’s part of what makes us special, that it’s just ours. But we’re happy. Personally, I love a great love story.”
The time to “come forward and present” themselves happened on Monday afternoon, September 25, 2017, when Harry and Meghan attended their first official public event together as a couple, sitting courtside at the Invictus Games wheelchair tennis match. Cameras captured them talking, laughing, touching, and holding hands. Their connection was undeniable; it was obvious from their body language, as well as the way they looked at each other, that they were very much, and very mutually, in love.
Kate Coyne, executive editor of People magazine, doesn’t view Meghan’s romance as a Cinderella story. Speaking of Meghan as the full package—an exceptionally accomplished, poised, compassionate woman—and of the smitten way Harry looks at her—with complete love and admiration in his eyes and his heart—Coyne considers Harry to be the lucky one. “He looks at her like he can’t believe he landed her. She didn’t land the prince. He landed Meghan Markle!”
To the sartorially uninitiated, during the wheelchair tennis match Meghan appeared to be wearing just a white blouse and ripped jeans, with a caramel-hued tote slung over her shoulder.
It wasn’t her outfit but the subtext that mattered. Since the dawn of time, powerful, influential women the world over, from Cleopatra to Marie Antoinette to Diana to Kate Middleton, have known that fashion is messaging. It wasn’t that Meghan’s ensemble screamed of conspicuous consumption. Her $185 white button-down shirt designed by her good friend Misha Nonoo is called The Husband Shirt. The $238 ripped jeans Meghan wore were made by the high-end denim brand Mother. And her $165 Italian leather Everlane purse is called the Day Market Tote. Although it’s entirely possible that Meghan never gave a second thought to what she pulled out of the closet that Monday, eagle-eyed fashionistas surmised that the relationship with Harry was definitely headed to the altar.
They were right, without knowing it. On the last night of the Invictus Games, Harry and Meghan, along with Doria, enjoyed the closing ceremonies from a skybox, cheering Bruce Springsteen, Kelly Clarkson, and the rest of the entertainers performing in the concert that capped off the weeklong competition.
Harry and Meghan had held hands repeatedly throughout their appearance at the Games, usually a no-no for royal couples. And during the closing ceremonies, long lenses captured a couple of chaste kisses. However, the Invictus Games are not technically an official royal engagement and Meghan was not there in any official capacity, so she was not behaving improperly in any way. But in general, members of the royal family tend to keep their hands to themselves. William and Kate remain quite palpably in love, and it’s clear when they sit together at a sporting event such as Wimbledon, that they are very much in tune with one another. Yet they still tend not to hold hands.
But in continuing to engage in public displays of affection, as well as fracturing or forgoing other royal protocols, Harry and Meghan have decided either to break with a tradition, not to care about the tradition, or to forge a new one of their own.
After the royal engagement was announced on November 27, 2017, it was revealed that during the Invictus Games, Harry had requested Doria’s permission to wed her daughter.
Thomas Markle Jr. says their father was aware of Meghan’s relationship with Prince Harry early on and kept their secret. He approves and gave the couple his blessing. Although the elder Mr. Markle has lived in relative seclusion since his retirement from the film and television industry and has always shunned the limelight, he has said that he would walk Meghan down the aisle, if she asked him to escort her.
Although Meghan was very close to her father when she was a little girl, by the time she was a teenager, that bond had fractured. In 2017, Ninaki Priddy, who had been one of Meghan’s closest childhood friends, posted a video that she made in 1999 of eighteen-year-old Meghan. At the time it was possibly meant to serve as an amateur screen test in case Meghan ever needed footage of herself on camera. The video depicts Meghan at home in her typically teenage messy room. The bed is unmade. Family snapshots are tacked everywhere. A large brown-and-white stuffed bunny sits on one of the shelves, all of which are crammed with books and knickknacks. A Magic 8-Ball sits on her desk.
On the video, Meghan apologizes for the state of her bedroom, explaining to the viewer that she’s “getting ready to move [to college].”
Cut to Meghan driving around Los Angeles in her car (Classy Girl—her Immaculate Heart yearbook tag—is written on the license plate holder, a gift from an ex-boyfriend) as she gives an impromptu tour of downtown Hollywood and Beverly Hills, noting the irony that at the Budget car rental location in Beverly Hills, one can rent a Mercedes or a BMW.
Then it’s off to an audition for a Shakira music video. Meghan tells Ninaki that if she were to book the gig as an on-camera dancer, she’d get six hundred dollars for two days’ work; but even if they selected her for background work, the job would pay two hundred dollars. To an eighteen-year-old living with her mother, who was often struggling to make ends meet, it seemed like a lot of money at the time.
After the audition, Meghan told Ninaki that it was tiring having to dance wildly for several minutes, although it was great to run into a girl she knew from doing a Tori Amos video together. With all the whatever-ism of an eighteen-year-old, Meghan didn’t appear stressed out about whether or not she booked the job. But she was also about to head off to college at Northwestern; so the Shakira audition would not have changed the trajectory of her life.
As they drove home, Meghan casually remarked that she and Ninaki are “about four minutes from my dad’s house.” And as she continued to narrate her day in the life to her friend’s video camera, Meghan added, “From my dad’s house you can see the Hollywood Sign—but we’re not gonna go there because we’re not on the best of terms.”
No further explanation was given for their estrangement, but at some point Meghan and her father appear to have reconciled. On Father’s Day in 2016, Meghan posted a baby photo of herself with her dad to her Instagram feed, with the caption “Happy Father’s Day, daddy. I’m still your buckaroo, and to this day your hugs are still the very best in the whole wide world . . . Thanks for my work ethic, my love of Busby Berkeley films and club sandwiches, for teaching me the importance of handwritten thank-you notes and for giving me that signature Markle nose. I love you xo—Bean.”
Although Thomas Markle still maintains a very modest pied-à-terre in Los Angeles, he currently lives in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, among other American expats. He earned an excellent salary as a Hollywood lighting designer and director of photography, but his retirement years have not been kind. He was compelled to file for bankruptcy in 2016, allegedly due to a business deal that went sour. According to Thomas Markle Jr., his son from his first marriage, their father never had another serious relationship with a woman after he and Doria were divorced.
As of November 2017, Harry had spoken with Meghan’s father a few times, but the men had yet to meet in person.
However, there was only one relative on either side whose blessing was legally required. A re
sidual of the Royal Marriages Act 1772 remains in effect; and as such, Harry needed the monarch’s consent to wed Meghan Markle. This act was repealed on March 26, 2015, to apply only to the first six people in the line of succession. As Harry was fifth in line toward the end of 2017 when he requested his grandmother’s permission to marry Meghan, the act still applied to him. George III never could have imagined that 245 years after he acquired a legal remedy to prevent his sons from marrying actresses, that one of his descendants would seek the sovereign’s approval to do just that.
In October 2017, shortly after it was announced that Meghan would not be returning to the cast of Suits, she made her first visit to Buckingham Palace to take tea with Her Majesty. It was, Meghan said, “an incredible experience” to get to know the Queen “through [Harry’s] lens—not just through his honor and respect for her as the monarch, but the love that he has for her as his grandmother. All of those layers have been so important for me. So when I met her, I had such a deep understanding; and of course, an incredible respect for being able to have that time with her. And she’s an incredible woman.”
Evidently the canine members of the royal family enthusiastically approved of Meghan from the start. “The corgis took to her straightaway,” Harry enthused. “For the last thirty-three years I’ve been barked at. This one walks in: absolutely nothing.”
Meghan chuckled. “They were just laying on my feet during tea.”
“Wagging their tails,” Harry added, wagging his right hand for emphasis.
Meghan and Harry display an ease in each other’s presence that combines the flush of new love with the complete sense of trust often displayed by couples who have been together for a long time. They hold hands, will give each other a reassuring touch on the back, and make frequent eye contact, sharing a gaze that brims with love. It’s more than smitten; there’s depth behind it.
One of the ways that Meghan has shown that she’s also got Harry’s back has been her encouragement and support of his speaking publicly about his decision to seek the professional counseling that would enable him to finally process his mother’s death.
Harry and William had never been permitted the opportunity to fully and properly mourn their mum. Their duty is to serve the institution of the monarchy and to be resilient for the sake of their subjects, the rationale being that if the members of the royal family are seen to be in puddles of tears, the populace might lose its famous British will to Keep Calm and Carry On. As Harry had mentioned ten years after his mother’s passing, with her face all over the media, it was impossible to move forward in a healthy way. It’s no wonder that a twelve-year-old boy lost his footing, with his father focused on Camilla and hired protection officers serving in loco parentis. Because Harry was expected to stuff his grief, his wildness and his drug and alcohol use as a minor, even his slugging of paparazzi, who represented her “murderers”—although he wasn’t aware of it at the time—were his unhealthy and ultimately self-destructive methods of coping with the daily pain.
In October 2017, Harry joined William and Catherine to partner with the nonprofit organization Heads Together, working to help eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health. In April, Harry had disclosed to The Telegraph that he was twenty-eight years old when he made the decision to speak to a mental health professional. Harry had “shut down all his emotions” after his mother died, spending nearly twenty years of hell “trying not to think about” her death, “followed by two years of chaos.”
He’d granted a rare interview that month with Bryony Gordon for her podcast Mad World. Although he admitted to being a bit nervous at first, Harry spent thirty minutes candidly discussing this dark period of his life, in the hope that his ability to get to a better place emotionally and psychologically after professional counseling would destigmatize the issue of mental health and inspire others to seek help. He even described taking up boxing as a healthier outlet for working out his aggression. “And that really saved me, because being able to punch someone who was wearing pads was certainly easier.”
Losing his mother had a “serious effect” on Harry’s personal and professional life. Being so much in the public eye, he was often on the verge of a nervous breakdown, “when all sorts of grief and sorts of lies and misconceptions and everything are coming to you from every angle.” For years he suffered a fight-or-flight reaction during public engagements. Harry had perennially stuck his head in the sand, refusing to think about his mother, “because why would that help? I thought, ‘It’s only going to make you sad. It’s not going to bring her back.’ ”
Harry admitted that it took William and others who were close to him, including Meghan, whose name he did not reveal during the interview, to tell him, “Look, you really need to deal with this. It is not normal to think that nothing has affected you.”
The sense of relief Harry felt after unburdening himself and finally being able to speak honestly about his feelings was a revelation. After undergoing therapy he finally felt able to put the “blood, sweat, and tears” into making a difference for others. The angry young man had learned to mourn his mother in a way that was no longer self-destructive.
Working with Heads Together, Harry aims to normalize the conversation so that anyone, male or female, can sit down with someone else over a cup of coffee and just admit to that person, “I’ve had a sh*tty day; can I just tell you about it?” Speaking to American journalist Robin Roberts on ABC Television’s Nightline, Harry said, “Everybody needs a hug every now and then, and it just so happens I’ve been told over and over again that I’m very good with hugs, which is great, good at giving them—fantastic.” Because after people let it all out, they can just walk away and be in a much better place emotionally.
While Harry is quick to say that his mental health issues stemmed from the inability to process his grief, and not from PTSD after returning from Afghanistan, he did work with the army’s personnel recovery unit; and the experience of listening to wounded servicemen and servicewomen discussing their own psychological and emotional traumas ended up becoming a catalyst in his own understanding of the importance of opening up.
“I know there is huge merit in talking about your issues and the only thing about keeping it quiet is that it’s only ever going to make it worse. Not just for you but for everybody else around you as well, because you become a problem. I, through a lot of my twenties, was a problem, and I didn’t know how to deal with it.”
What Harry discovered as he began seeking counseling was that “once you start talking about it, you realize you’re part of quite a big club. I can’t encourage people enough to have this conversation because you will be surprised, firstly, how much support you get, and secondly, how many people literally are longing for you to come out.”
A dam had burst. Harry also spoke to Newsweek about his journey toward mental health. “My search began when I was in my mid-twenties. I needed to fix the mistakes I was making. . . . I didn’t want to be in the position I was in, but eventually I pulled my head out of the sand, started listening to people and decided to use my role for good.”
Harry Hitches His Wagon to a Star
As soon as she wrapped her final season of Suits, Meghan left Toronto and moved in permanently with Harry. Before she met the prince, the two loves of her life were without a doubt her rescue dogs Bogart and Guy, who made numerous guest appearances on her Instagram feed. Guy made the trip across the pond, but Bogart was reportedly too old to fly safely across the Atlantic. It was a sad parting for both of them but the beginning of a beautiful friendship in Bogart’s new forever home with dear friends of Meghan’s in Southern California.
Having begun her Toronto life in the student district, after Suits took off, Meghan had rented a two-story home with a front porch and a backyard on Yarmouth Road in the Seaton Village neighborhood, where the average home price is over a million dollars. She made the decor as Southern Californian as she could by exposing the hardwood floors and letting in as much light as possible in
order to avoid becoming homesick during those cold Canadian winters. Harry visited Meghan here as often as his schedule permitted. After she moved to London, the owners put the Seaton Village house on the market for just under $1.4 million.
Meghan also began scouting properties in London so that her family would have a pied-à-terre when they came to visit. She and Harry reside on the Kensington Palace grounds in the 1,324-square foot Nottingham Cottage. It’s the smallest separate residence on the seventeenth-century estate, but its charm factor can’t be beat. William and Kate lived there when they were first married. At that time, Harry resided in Kensington Palace’s Apartment 4B, a little grace and favor unit that had only one bedroom, one bath, a sitting room, and a kitchen.
In 2016, following extensive renovations, the Cambridges and their children moved into the twenty-one-room Apartment 1A in Kensington Palace, making it their permanent residence in 2017; and Harry took over “Nott Cott.”
A Realtor would describe the cottage as “cozy and private.” In an old photo taken by a previous tenant of Apartment 1A, the late Princess Margaret’s husband Lord Snowdon, the rosebushes are so lush and abundant that they nearly threaten to envelop the home’s first story. Surrounded by a white picket fence, the brick cottage features two bedrooms, a pair of reception rooms, and only one bathroom, but it has a small yard where Meghan’s rescue beagle, Guy, can romp to his little heart’s content.
Like much of the Kensington Palace grounds, Nottingham Cottage claims a historic lineage. It was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, better known for loftier edifices, including St. Paul’s Cathedral. Naturally, Nott Cott doesn’t boast the soaring interiors of St. Paul’s. Evidently, when Prince William, who is six-three, lived there, he had to duck to avoid hitting his head as he entered. Another previous tenant of Nott Cott was Harry’s aunt, Diana’s sister Lady Jane Fellowes, who was married to Her Majesty’s former secretary Robert Fellowes.
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