Are the Royal family really all that different from the rest of us? Sure, they are super-rich and powerful, they live in palaces, and occasionally they ride around in carriages made of pure gold, but when you get down to it, they’re just people who put their coronation robes on one leg at a time, right? You would think so, and yet the more we learn about the Royals the more it seems like they truly are removed from what we know as reality.
Take the bloody family ritual that Prince George embarked upon this past summer or the wild reaction that King Charles reportedly had the first time he laid eyes on *checks notes* clingfilm. Even Prince Harry and Meghan Markle aren’t immune, despite divorcing themselves from the Windsors years ago. It turns out the Duke and Duchess of Sussex went to desperate lengths to have a baby, which somehow involved mythical creatures, skinny-dipping in the sea, and killer whales.
Harry was almost eaten by killer whales after King Charles gave him some bizarre advice on how to get Meghan Markle pregnant
One of the most peculiar passages of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare involves the tale of how Meghan came to be pregnant with their now eldest child, Prince Archie (5). For those that want to know, it turns out the couple’s son was conceived in the Scottish highlands, right on the edge of the U.K. And, as it turns out, the edge of reason and logical thought.
In Spare, Harry recalls a trip he and Meghan took along with King Charles and Queen Camilla to the Castle of Mey in Caithness, Scotland in August 2018. This was just a few months after their wedding, although they were already eager to start a family. The duke shares that this holiday saw Charles and Meghan suddenly get on famously, noting that their bond “grew stronger during that weekend.” The current king was particularly excited to discover Meghan had the same birthday as the late Queen Mother, his “favorite person.”
“At the memory of Gan-Gan, and the link between her and my bride, he suddenly became buoyant, telling stories I’d never heard, essentially performing, showing off for Meg. One story in particular delighted us both, captured our imagination. It was about the selkies.” Harry recalled. “The what, Pa? Scottish mermaids, he said. They took the form of seals and cruised along the shore outside the castle, within a stone’s throw of where we were sitting. So, when you see a seal, he advised, you never can tell… Sing to it. They often sing back…”
The king’s story of the Selkies lodged in Harry’s brain. “Did I imagine – did Pa promise – that the selkies might also grant a wish?” he remembers thinking. Inspired by Charles’ odd advice, Harry and Meghan set off for the beach later that day and found some “selkies” out in the water. The prince recalled that he “ran to the water’s edge, sang to them. Serenaded them. Arooo.” It wasn’t until Meghan joined in, though, that the seals finally responded. Harry was agog, gushing that this was proof his wife “really is magic” and “even the seals know it.”
Overcome with proof of the selkies’ supposed magic, Harry then “stripped down” and jumped into the water to swim after the seals. It wasn’t until afterwards that the castle’s chef told Harry that he took a major risk by diving in like that. He wrote, “This part of the Scottish coast was teeming with killer whales, the chef said, and singing to seals was like calling them to their blood-soaked deaths.”
Luckily, the singing, the swimming with the selkies, and the narrowly avoided death by killer whales all proved to be worth it. When the couple returned home from their Scottish trip, Meghan took two pregnancy tests and Harry kept them on his bedside table overnight next to a box containing a lock of his mother Princess Diana’s hair. In the morning, they confirmed that a baby was on the way. “Thank you, selkies… thank you, Mummy,” Harry recalled thinking.
So, there you have it. Regular babies get delivered by storks, but apparently Royal ones get chauffeured into the world by selkies.