21
White Knight
‘There comes a time when you think, Right, now’s the time to settle down.’
(Prince Harry, May 2015)
Prince Harry met Meghan Markle, star of the US TV legal drama series Suits, early in July 2016, while she was taking a break in London from filming in Canada. Their blind date had been arranged by a mutual friend.
‘I didn’t know much about him,’ Meghan later explained to the BBC, ‘so the only thing that I had asked [our mutual friend] when she said that she wanted to set us up, was, “Well, is he nice?” ’Cause if he wasn’t kind, it just didn’t seem like it would make sense.’
Harry passed the kindness test with flying colours.
‘We met for a drink,’ said Meghan, ‘and then I think very quickly into that we said, “Well, what are we doing tomorrow? We should meet again.”’
At the Kensington Palace photo call following their engagement announcement sixteen months later, Harry was asked when he had decided that Meghan was ‘the one’ – and he replied without hesitation, ‘The very first time we met.’
After their second date in London, Harry invited Meghan to accompany him on a trip to Africa the following month.
‘I managed to persuade her to come and join me in Botswana,’ he said, describing the early days and nights of their romance, and how the two ‘camped out with each other under the stars. Then we were really by ourselves – which was crucial to me to make sure that we had a chance to get to know each other.’
‘To make sure that we had a chance to get to know each other …’
Here was the challenge for both of these fresh-encountered lovers. The delight and passion – their sheer, unbridled attraction towards each other, physical and emotional – went without saying. But the stakes were high. Harry, thirty-three in 2017/18 – a full five years older than William had been when he got married – was well aware of the royal obstacle course that lay ahead for his sweetheart and had brought down his mother.
Already Harry could sense in Meghan the quirks and originalities that made her such a similar character to Diana – extrovert and show-off-y, impulsive, unpredictable, loving and also revolutionary. She was a changer not a conformist, his ‘white knight’ who fought her battles with the same non-royal – indeed, those temptingly anti-royal – qualities of his mother. This woman’s feet were not for binding, and Harry had no wish to inflict Diana-style tortures upon his newly discovered soulmate. He relished the chance to build Meghan into the Diana that death had denied.
As for Meghan, she had been married and divorced before – with Trevor Engelson, a genial Hollywood producer and talent manager to whom she had stayed wed for just two years (2011–13). This meant that Meghan could be described (whisper it!) in exactly the same dreaded terms as Wallis Simpson who had shaken the British monarchy so drastically eighty years earlier – she was ‘An American Divorcee’!
British tabloids would not be slow to make the comparison.
After all the scandal of Prince Charles’s messy divorce and remarriage to Camilla, Meghan’s relatively quiet and civilised separation from Engelson – with whom she remained on good terms – presented no obstacle to Harry and Meghan proceeding rapidly to the altar. Sometime during that first summer and autumn together in 2016 Harry introduced his girlfriend to both his father, who thoroughly approved, and his grandmother, who was reported to feel just the same. According to one source, the Queen was ‘delighted to see Harry in a loving relationship’.
The problem was older brother William. Wills said that he liked Meghan personally – as did his wife Catherine. The press stories of war between the two womenfolk were certainly way off beam – Meghan and Kate actually got on rather well from the start. They might not be best-buddy material, but here they found themselves, sister-outsiders in their extraordinary royal situation, and both of them cool professionals, treating each other with mutual respect. Each was far too canny to make an enemy of a prospective sister-in-law – it only made sense to be friends.
The fundamental conflict was between the two males who had known each other all their lives and had never hesitated to tell each other exactly what they thought and felt. William worried that his brother was moving too fast in his courtship – and he did not shrink from saying as much when Harry started talking about getting hitched to Meghan quite soon.
‘This all seems to be moving rather quickly,’ William was said to have remarked to Harry doubtfully, on the testimony of more than one friend. ‘Are you sure?’
According to another source on this crucial and much-reported confrontation between the brothers that occurred sometime in late 2016 or early 2017, William couched his question in terms of apparent concern for Meghan.
‘He just wanted to stress that becoming part of the royal family is a massive undertaking and the pressure and scrutiny is unrelenting,’ reported Emily Andrews in the Sun. ‘Was Meghan the right one?’
William couldn’t understand how Harry could contemplate marrying this still unknown and untested quantity less than two years after their first meeting. It went against his every instinct – and his own track record. If ‘Waity William’ had taken a decade to test out and approve his life partner, surely his younger brother could ponder his options for just a year or so more?
But ‘Waity William’, of course, took so long to commit to Kate
