by Omid Scobie
Indeed, before the two stepped off the train, the Queen gifted Meghan with a delicate pair of pearl-and-diamond earrings.
Meghan, an avid learner studying all she could on royal protocol, was often seen carrying binders full of research so she didn’t put a foot wrong. She took her new role incredibly seriously. That day was different, though; she was getting a royal master class in training from the Queen herself.
“They had a very warm happy day out and introduction to royal life—because the Queen has so much knowledge to pass on and Meghan is a keen student,” a source close to Meghan shared.
The two spent the day about two hundred miles north of Buckingham Palace, opening a bridge, visiting an entertainment complex, and having lunch at the town hall with local politicians and other civic dignitaries.
Despite all her careful preparation, Meghan was unsure about how to proceed when she and the Queen had to get into Her Majesty’s Bentley. She politely asked the Queen, “What is your preference?”
“You go first,” the Queen answered.
“Oh, okay,” said Meghan, who tried her hardest to get everything right—which made her father’s public display on national TV in England all the more dispiriting.
Unfortunately, Thomas’s appearance on Good Morning Britain was just the start of a new media blitz.
In July, he talked to The Sun on a wide range of topics. He said he thought his daughter looked terrified during public engagements and that the clothes chosen for her were way too conservative. He also claimed that Meghan cut ties with him so completely he had no way of getting in touch with her—when she had held on to the same cell phone she had used to barrage him with texts ahead of the wedding. In fact, on June 10, three weeks after he had failed to attend her wedding because of his heart angioplasty, Thomas claimed to have texted his daughter. “My surgery was successful,” he wrote. “I will be on blood thinners and the diet for the rest of my life, but I will live. Just thought you might want to know.” No such text was sent.
Two days later, The Sun ran another interview with Thomas, who this time threatened that he might show up unannounced if he didn’t hear from Meghan. “I want to see my daughter. I’m thinking about it,” he said. “I don’t care whether she is pissed off at me.
“It’s sad that it’s got to this point,” he continued. “I’m sorry it’s come to this. Yes, some of it is my fault. But I’ve already made it clear that I’m paying for this for the rest of my life.”
Anyone else spreading falsehoods would have been easier to discredit. But this was Meghan’s father. Thomas had cut himself off from the Palace completely and was consulting only with Samantha by this point. Meanwhile, writers began penning editorials about the many ways in which the Palace had mismanaged the whole affair with the Markle family. Thomas put the Palace and Meghan in a no-win situation.
Unlike Harry, who often scoured the press and checked out some of the royal correspondents’ Twitter accounts, Meghan tried to avoid her press. Still, diligent communications staffers and friends contacted her when anything came out that was especially heated or litigious, so she was apprised of most of the hurtful commentary.
One of her closest friends said a heartbroken Meghan “wanted to repair the relationship.” Despite the many humiliations she had suffered, as summer came to a close, Meghan made one final effort to communicate with her father in the form of a five-page letter.
“Daddy, it is with a heavy heart that I write this, not understanding why you have chosen to take this path, turning a blind eye to the pain you’re causing,” she wrote. “Your actions have broken my heart into a million pieces, not simply because you have manufactured such unnecessary and unwarranted pain, but by making the choice to not tell the truth as you are puppeteered in this. Something I will never understand.”
Meghan pleaded with her father in writing: “If you love me, as you tell the press you do, please stop. Please allow us to live our lives in peace. Please stop lying, please stop creating so much pain, please stop exploiting my relationship with my husband.”
Thomas carried his daughter’s handwritten letter in its FedEx envelope in his briefcase for months, not sharing it with the media because it showed the many discrepancies in his tabloid revelations. He replied with his own four-page letter, in which he suggested a path forward, toward a reconciliation.
The best way they were going to get past everything, he wrote in a reply letter, would be to stage a photo op for the press where himself, Meghan, and Harry are together and happy.
Meghan couldn’t believe it. “I’m devastated,” she confessed to a friend. “My father’s clearly been fully corrupted.”
“It is so painful for her because she was so dutiful. Giving him money. Trying to give him whatever help he needed,” a confidant said. “She will always feel devastated by what he’s done. Always, but at the same time, she has a lot of sympathy for him. Because he never went knocking on the press’s door. He was silent for almost two years. Then they just sort of whittled him down. Bombarding him every day. Moving in next door to his house. He couldn’t escape it. So now, it’s just like he’s so far gone.”
She didn’t reach out again. Instead, Meghan put up what her father described in one of the many interviews he gave following their written exchange as a “wall of silence.”
Later that year, Samantha tried to deliver a letter to Kensington Palace, requesting a face-to-face meeting with Meghan. Samantha, in London for another round of media interviews, shared the entire moment with a Splash News photographer, who had been tipped off about the unannounced visit. However, she dropped off the letter at the wrong security gate, instead taking it to the entrance of a private road that ran behind Kensington Palace. Nonetheless, Meghan told friends she was “weirded out” by her half sister’s behavior.
It wasn’t easy losing family members. Giving up on her relationship with her father—a man she once raved about in interviews, crediting him for her working knowledge of TV sets, her work ethic, and her appreciation for handwritten thank-you notes—was a hard sacrifice to make for her new life, no matter how wonderful.
And, by all measures, it was pretty wonderful. A few months after the drama with her father, George Clooney arranged for Harry and Meghan to fly from London to Lake Como on his own private jet. In the early evening of August 16, the newlyweds arrived into Milan’s airport, and from there were driven in an unmarked motorcade to George and Amal’s Villa Oleandra.
The Clooneys, who had been staying at their twenty-five-room mansion for the past month, had already hosted a series of high-profile friends, including Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber and Stella McCartney and her husband. The previous summer, David and Victoria Beckham visited with their children.
Located in the village of Laglio, the retreat George purchased in 2002 had an outdoor theater, a swimming pool, and a garage to house the movie star’s five vintage motorbikes. It also included a tennis court, a full gym, huge bathrooms, and a “pizza parlor” complete with pizza oven. The ornately carved ceilings in each room were a talking point alone.
During the three-day visit, a source said, “Meghan and Amal spent a lot of time relaxing by the pool and playing with the twins while George and Harry checked out George’s motorbike collection. Harry took one of them out with one of his protection officers. George recently had an accident, so he wasn’t back on his bike yet.”
The duke and duchess weren’t the only guests that weekend. Eugenie and her fiancé, Jack Brooksbank, were already at the villa when Harry and Meghan arrived, their visits overlapping briefly. To maximize security, the group stayed in every night, well fed by rotating chefs. On the final night of Harry and Meghan’s stay, George hired the chef from Il Gatto Nero, one of his favorite local restaurants, to prepare an Italian feast for fifteen. The party, including neighbors and their houseguests, dined at long trestle tables in the landscaped gardens. As live music echoed over the estate, guests enjoyed the gathering until the early hours.
Harry and George had been friends long before the prince met Meghan. After connecting at a charity event, the two men discovered that despite their age difference, they had a lot in common, including their love of motorbikes. George had collections of bikes in Lake Como, LA, and Sonning.
On at least two occasions, George and Amal hosted Harry and Meghan in Sonning, which was about an hour from the Great Tew Estate the royals rented in Oxfordshire. Harry and Meghan brought their dogs with them to the house, where the Clooneys loved to take friends out by the lake. There, they had a secluded decked area and inside was a lounge decorated with traditional club wood paneling, heavy drapes, dark velvets, plush chairs, and a bar.
Back in Oxfordshire, Harry and Meghan fell into new routines as a married couple. Sipping coffee or tea together in the kitchen every morning became a ritual. Then they took turns making breakfast from the organic seasonal produce they ordered from nearby Daylesford Farm or the groceries they had delivered by Waitrose.
They also did their fair share of hosting themselves. In early July, Serena, in town to play Wimbledon, and her husband, Alexis Ohanian, stopped by for a little time in the countryside. Some days later, Meghan, along with Kate, went to watch the tennis champ play against Angelique Kerber in the Women’s Final. Although now a duchess alongside Kate, who has been a royal patron of Wimbledon since 2016, when she took over from the Queen, Meghan still dropped into the VIP area to hug Serena and her mother, Oracene Price. “Meghan is an amazing woman and a great friend of the family,” Oracene said. “We’re very proud of everything she has achieved.”
The unseasonably warm fall of 2018 meant they could enjoy the garden patio almost up until the start of their official sixteen-day royal tour of Australia, Fiji, Tonga, and New Zealand. This wasn’t Harry and Meghan’s first official overseas tour, which had been a two-day trip in July to Dublin. Short and not too far from England, they made sure that the private jet they chartered to travel to Ireland got them home in time to watch the second half of the Croatia vs. England soccer match from the comfort of their Oxfordshire living room.
There was another big difference between the two tours. This time Meghan was pregnant—and the couple were thrilled, since they had wanted to start a family right away.
On October 15, the day before Harry and Meghan were set to fly to Australia, the Palace took the small group of press gathered in Sydney for a pre-tour briefing completely by surprise. The reporters thought they were going to get the typical logistical information they needed to cover the tour—times and places the bus would be leaving, etc. Instead, huddled around an iPhone 6 sitting atop a teacup and saucer in a makeshift low-fi loudspeaker, they received very big news from the couple’s communications secretary, Jason: “The Duke and Duchess are expecting a baby . . . We’ll be sending out a statement in about 15 minutes.”
Meghan, expecting in the spring of 2019, was just under twelve weeks pregnant when the tour began. But a Palace aide said Harry and Meghan were comfortable with the decision to announce the news early to avoid an entire trip of speculation around whether Meghan was pregnant. “She was already showing, and hiding it would not have been possible,” the aide said. “The rumors would have dominated the coverage and taken away from the entire purpose of the tour. Meghan didn’t want that.”
(The timing of the announcement might have worked with the tour, but it conflicted with another happy royal event: Princess Eugenie’s wedding. Family members had found out about the pregnancy just days prior, at the wedding of Harry’s closest cousin. It did not go down particularly well with Eugenie, who a source said told friends she felt the couple should have waited to share the news.)
Being pregnant didn’t slow Meghan down at all—not even as she faced fourteen flights and seventy-six engagements over the next sixteen days. The first stop was Sydney, where the couple landed with their custom blue luggage bearing their names and matching Rimowa carry-on cases, containing toiletry bags, spare clothes, notes, and other essentials that an assistant made sure was on each flight. Also in tow was a ten-person entourage, including their private secretary and chief of staff, Samantha Cohen; private secretaries Amy Pickerill and Heather Wong; senior Buckingham Palace aide Marnie Gaffney; and hairstylist George Northwood.
In Sydney to take on engagements and host the fourth Invictus Games, Harry and Meghan managed to sneak out for an evening off with Jessica and Ben Mulroney, the latter of whom was covering the Games for Canada’s CTV network. A real estate billionaire loaned them his home for an intimate and completely secret evening with a five-course meal prepared by a private chef.
The couple arrived to Beatlemania-size crowds wherever they went. Local press claimed they had the “magic touch” when their small Royal Australian Air Force plane touched down in Dubbo, one of the biggest farming states in New South Wales, which had been severely affected by the country’s worst drought in over half a century. As they walked out onto the tarmac, dark clouds rolled in and the heavens opened, soaking the bone-dry terrain with more rain in one day than it had had the past six months. It was an answered prayer for the 38,943 locals whose farming community has seriously suffered from failing crops. Almost half the population celebrated the miraculous change in weather at a picnic with the royal couple. Everyone, including Harry and Meghan, was soaking wet but utterly thrilled. While royals pulling in big crowds is no new feat, there was something different about the Sussexes’ oceanic visit. Young people who never had interest in the British monarchy had suddenly become engaged with the royals. Teenage girls and boys, many of them Indigenous Australians, spoke about how they saw Meghan as a symbol of female empowerment or a face that represented them in a way other members of the royal family hadn’t before. “It’s cool to think there are young girls who look at the Duchess of Sussex and think, ‘Hey, she kind of looks like me,’ ” said Sherry-Rose Bih, an African Australian social enterprise entrepreneur who spent time chatting with the duchess at a reception for young leaders in Melbourne.
After Australia, Harry and Meghan were off to Fiji and Tonga, two stops that raised concerns over exposure to Zika, which can cause serious birth defects if a pregnant woman is exposed to the virus. Although the two countries were labeled by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control as “areas with risk of Zika infection,” and so not recommended for pregnant women to visit, Harry and Meghan were adamant in not altering the tour schedule.
Having sought out medical advice before they left England, Meghan adhered to the precautions recommended by health professionals. She wore long-sleeved, light-colored clothing, which made it harder for mosquitoes to bite, and every time she stepped outside, she was “drenched” in DEET, according to an aide. Both Harry and Meghan had their own personal hand sanitizer pumps and DEET repellent lotion bottles in the seat pockets of their car. In Tonga, health authorities sprayed chemicals twice in the area two days before the couple made their appearance.
If Meghan was concerned about Zika, she didn’t show it. In front of hundreds of students and faculty at Fiji’s University of the South Pacific, she confidently delivered an impassioned speech on the necessity of universal education—one of three formal addresses she delivered on tour, which was more than any other royal consort. Meghan wrote the entire three-minute speech herself, which helped to explain why she hardly needed to refer to her printout, which was covered in handwritten notes.
Meghan proved herself a formidable force in the royal family, appearing unfazed by the overwhelming number of engagements, hysterical crowds on walkabouts, and major jet lag she said took her over a week to conquer. In fact, she put her sleepless nights at Admiralty House in Sydney to good use. Before visiting Dubbo, she baked banana bread with her own recipe, which featured chocolate chips and ginger, and brought it to a home visit to a local farming family with a box of Fortnum & Mason “Royal Blend” tea (her personal favorite). “My mom always taught me if you go to someone’s house you always bring something,” she said on arrival. The Australi
an media quickly dubbed the Duchess of Sussex “Queen of Hearts.”
Harry also did more than his fair share to challenge the perception of the once-stuffy British establishment. Shirts unbuttoned, ties banished (he brought only two for the entire four-country tour), and candidness when it came to speaking about his own struggles made him a relatable royal family member. The tour also showed just how seriously he was taking his April 2018 appointment as Commonwealth Youth Ambassador, with a heavy focus on empowering young people from all walks of life. This theme drove the tour from start to end.
During their last stop in New Zealand, Meghan continued to show enthusiasm and energy. At a meeting with mental health advocates at a beachside café in Wellington, Harry had a candid discussion with teenagers dealing with mental health struggles about his own history. Meanwhile, Meghan tackled an area she was expert in: social media. More specifically she talked about the negative side of online life for young people. “You see beautiful photos on social media and you don’t know whether she’s born with it or maybe it’s a filter,” Meghan said. “Your sense of self-worth becomes really skewed when it’s all based on likes.”
Harry backed up his wife by adding, “Issues stemming from social media and gaming are a major problem for young people in the UK—and globally.” But perhaps thinking of his own impending fatherhood, he advised that they shouldn’t be too quick to blame parents for kids’ problems. “Fingers are often pointed at the parents,” he said, “but that’s not always fair, as they, too, need to be educated about these things.”
Up until the very last minutes of the tour, Meghan was indefatigable. Whether writing her own speeches, seeing that the leftover pastries from an event were brought out to share with children from a local school waiting outside the venue to meet the royal couple, or ditching Palace aides and security to walk the last stretch of Rotorua’s Whakarewarewa Forest alone with Harry so he could take pictures of her against the redwood trees, Meghan proved that her pregnancy didn’t change her strong work ethic.
