Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have recalled how after a royal event, the Duchess of Sussex was the one featured on the front page of a newspaper instead of other members of the royal family - including Queen Elizabeth II.
In the fourth episode of his Netflix docuseries Harry and Meghan, the Duke of Sussex opened up about his and his wife’s rise in popularity back in 2018 when they were both still senior royals.
Harry cited an incident where their fame in the UK appeared to skyrocket after he and Meghan attended the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance in London.
“The first time that the penny dropped for her, M [Meghan] and I had spent the night in a room in Buckingham Palace,” he said. “After an event where every single member of the royal family had been, including the Queen.”
“The next morning they’d set up breakfast for Harry and I,” Meghan added, before her spouse revealed that her attendance at the event was the one to make headlines.
“And on the front page of The Telegraph, Meghan,” he continued.
Harry said that, at the time, Meghan didn’t want to be blamed for being put on the front page of the newspaper over other members of the royal family.
“She was like, ‘but it’s not my fault.’ And I said, ‘I know and my mum felt the same way,” he explained.
The episode also showcased different headlines about Meghan and Harry and how their achievements could affect the royal family, specifically Prince William and Kate Middleton. To the camera, Harry then explained why his wife’s popularity wasn’t viewed as a positive thing.
“The issue is, when someone who’s marrying in, who should be a supporting act, is then stealing the limelight, or is doing the job better than the person who was born to do this, that upsets people, it shifts the balance,” he said.
He also claimed this shift changed a certain perspective.
“You’ve been lead to believe the only way that your charities can succeed, the only way that your reputation can be grown or improved, is if you’re in the front page of those papers,” he said. “But the media are the ones who choose who to put on the from page.”
Throughout Volume II of Harry and Meghan, the duke proceeded to speak about the media’s impact on his family. He claimed that his wife’s miscarriage was likely caused by the stress around their lawsuit against Associated Newspapers Limited.
In 2021, Meghan won her privacy case against the Mail on Sunday, which is published by ANL, over the publication of a “personal and private” handwritten letter to her estranged father, Thomas Markle. Meghan sued ANL over a series of articles that reproduced parts of a letter she sent to her father in August 2018. In 2020, Meghan applied to the High Court to request that the names of five friends who defended her to a US magazine were not released publicly.
Speaking about Meghan, who was pregnant at the time of the lawsuit, Harry recalled how much she was struggling due to the case.
“I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what The Mail did,” he said. “Now, do we absolutely know the miscarriage was cause by that? Of course we don’t, but bearing in mind the stress, the lack of sleep and the timing of the pregnancy, how many weeks in she was, I can say from what I saw that miscarriage was created by what they were trying to do to her.”
