The second volume of “Harry & Meghan,” Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s documentary about their experiences with the British Royal Family, has dropped and it’s already making waves in the U.K. One headline describes the final three episodes of the series as “Harry’s all out war on William and Charles” thanks to a series of revelations and accusations the couple make about Harry’s brother, father and their staff.
The doc suggests, via interviews with the couple’s friend Lucy Fraser, that the couple’s first royal tour to Australia shortly after their wedding was where things started to go wrong after the Royal Family saw how popular Harry and Meghan were. “The internals at the palace were incredibly threatened by that,” Fraser says. Harry adds: “The issue is when someone who’s marrying in, who should be a supporting act, is then stealing the limelight or doing the job better than the person who was born to do this. That upsets people, it shifts the balance.”
The Liz Garbus-directed docuseries, the first part of which dropped on Netflix last Thursday, also gives viewers a glimpse into Harry and Meghan’s idyllic lives in Santa Barbara, intimate photos of their wedding, private family moments such as their children’s birthday parties and East Egg hunts, and the couple’s final week in the U.K. as working royals before they stepped back. It also touches on their legal spats with the British press, most notably newspaper the Mail on Sunday (the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail).
THE MOST EXPLOSIVE CLAIMS
Among the most explosive claims in the docuseries are that Harry’s brother Prince William “bullied him” out of the Royal Family and “traded” stories with the press and his father King Charles II told lies about him and possibly leaked stories to the media.
“There’s leaking but there’s also planting of stories,” Harry claims of the Royal Family’s relationship with the media. He also said he and his brother, who originally shared an office and staff within Kensington Palace, had sworn never to “trade” stories with the media, a practice he describes as offering journalists a story on members of the family to quash a negative story about to come out about themselves.
“And to see my brother’s office copy the very same thing we promised the two of us would never ever do, that was heartbreaking,” Harry says, although he doesn’t give any specific examples of what stories William tried to suppress.
Harry also implies his own father King Charles (or at least his father’s staff) leaked the story about him and Meghan wanting to move to Canada. The prince details how his father demanded Harry and Meghan put their plans to “step back” from the Royal Family in writing, which Harry says he was reluctant to do because the last time he had put similar plans in writing to his father they’d ended up in the media.
“His dad said ‘Put it in writing’ and he did and it was just five days later it was on the front page of a newspaper,” Meghan claims (the story that Harry and Meghan were planning to leave the U.K. was broken in Jan. 2020 by British tabloid The Sun). Harry adds that The Sun’s reference to Harry and Meghan’s willingness to give up their Sussex titles as part of the deal “was the giveaway that it had been leaked.”
Perhaps the most damning claim in the entire nearly 6-hour long series is that William bullied Harry out of the royal family. Harry recalls that after the couple’s plans to leave the U.K. were made public, a meeting was arranged with Queen Elizabeth II at her country home Sandringham with William and Charles also in attendance. “It was terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me and my father say things that weren’t true and my grandmother quietly sit there and take it all in,” Harry says of how the meeting went down, his interview interspersed with videos of the brothers, who are only two years apart, playing together as children.
Harry goes onto mention events surrounding a newspaper report which claimed that part of the reason he and Meghan were stepping back as working royals was because “William had bullied us out.” “Once I got in the car, after the meeting, I was told about a joint statement that had been put out in my name and my brother’s name squashing the story about him bullying us out of the family. I couldn’t believe it. No one had asked me permission to put my name to a statement like that. And I rang M [Meghan] and I told her and she burst into floods of tears. Because within four hours, they were happy to lie to protect my brother and yet for three years they were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.”