With the benefit of hindsightr Meghan Markle was never going to fit in with the Royal family. The personality and cultural clash between his relatives and his wife caused Prince Harry to break with tradition in the biggest way possible when he departed from both royal duty and the U.K. altogether in 2020, but the problems between his biological and chosen families were brewing long before then.
Harry and Meghan first got together in 2016, and — in contrast to Prince William and Kate Middleton’s decade-long slow-burn — they were married just two years later in 2018. This must have come as a shock to the Royals, as Harry has admitted that his family was convinced the future Duke and Duchess of Sussex were simply too different to maintain a long-term relationship. According to the couple, there was one big problem the Royals had with Harry’s choice of partner.
The Royal family were “incredibly impressed” with Meghan at first, but one big problem caused them to unfairly “typecast” her
In the second episode of their infamous Netflix series, Harry & Meghan, the duo opened up about how the first meeting between Markle and the Royals went. Although the family was apparently both “impressed” and “surprised” that Harry had managed to find himself such a “beautiful” and “intelligent” girlfriend, it soon became clear they didn’t believe in the relationship.
“I remember my family first meeting her being incredibly impressed,” Harry recalled in the Netflix doc. “Some of them didn’t quite know what to do with themselves. So I think they were. They were surprised. They were surprised that such a ginger could land such a beautiful woman. And such an intelligent woman.”
The issue was that Meghan’s status as both an American and a Hollywood actress meant that the Royals saw their relationship as something of a fling that they didn’t need to get too invested in.
“But the fact that I was dating an American actress, was probably what clouded their judgment more than anything else,” Harry continued. “Oh, she’s an American actress, this won’t last long.”
Meghan concurred with her husband’s recollection, admitting that she felt she was “typecast” by her future in-laws.
“The actress thing was the biggest problem, funnily enough,” Meghan added. “There is a big idea of what that looks like from the U.K. standpoint — Hollywood — and it’s just very easy for them to typecast that.”
This isn’t the only time Harry and Meghan have touched on how the Royals were too old-fashioned and stuck in their ways to fully accept Meghan. One of the most shocking revelations they’ve divulged has to be how they told Oprah Winfrey in their 2021 TV interview that there were “concerns and conversations” about the potential skin color of the son, Prince Archie, before he was born.
Marrying Meghan was certainly a major shake-up of the status quo on Harry’s part, hence why the Royals thought very little of the chances of the couple settling down back when they first started dating. Fast forward eight years, however, and the duke and duchess are still going strong — despite how much the media might not want them to be — and are enjoying their 40s together in their current home of Montecito, California. By all accounts, that Royal who put a bet on them divorcing soon will likely lose their money.
