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Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife Meghan began a new life yesterday as somewhat ordinary people with financial worries and security concerns after being stripped of their royal titles and public funding by the Queen.
The settlement announced by Buckingham Palace at the weekend saw the 93-year-old monarch assume her painfully familiar role of managing a family crisis that threatened the very foundations of one of Britain’s oldest institutions.
The “Megxit” mess began when the young couple gave up their font-line family duties and announced plans to chart a “progressive new role” in North America on January 8. They did so without winning Queen Elizabeth II’s permission or seemingly knowing how it was all going to work out.
A mad rush of royal family meetings and screaming headlines in the tabloid press culminated with a ruling Saturday that The Daily Telegraph called “the hardest Megxit possible”. The couple lost their right to be called “his and her royal highness” (HRH) much as Harry’s late mother Princess Diana did when she divorced Prince Charles in another family drama that upset the Queen in 1996.
They further agreed to repay £2.4 million ($3.1 million) of taxpayer’s money spent on renovating their Frogmore Cottage home near Windsor Castle. “No royal has ever paid back money,” former royal press secretary Dickie Arbiter wrote in The Sun yesterday. “It is absolutely unprecedented.”
Harry was also stripped of the military titles and patronages he was awarded after serving two tours in Afghanistan with the British Army and rising to the rank of captain. But Arbiter said it was the loss of the HRH “royal highness” title that really made Palace history. “Even when Edward VIII abdicated (in 1936) he dropped from being His Majesty The King to HRH the Duke of Windsor,” he said. Arbiter noted that Princess Diana was not born a royal and had her HRH “obtained through marriage.”
