In January, after months of speculation from royal watchers in the know, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announced their plan to step back from their roles as senior royals in a post on their now-defunct @SussexRoyal Instagram account. There had been plenty of reports that the couple wasn’t happy, and in an October interview with Tom Bradby, their friend and a journalist with ITV, they both admitted that they had been struggling with the pressure that came along with being in the royal orbit. Still, the abruptness and finality of their announcement came as a shock to nearly everyone involved—including the courtiers and aides at Buckingham Palace.
So while it seemed obvious that things must have been messy behind the scenes when the couple made the announcement, it wasn’t until this week, with the release of Finding Freedom: Meghan and Harry and the Making of a Modern Royal Family, that the true extent of the bedlam has come to light. In the book, authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand go through the play-by-play of the months when Meghan and Harry’s hunch that things might be better outside the family turned into a full-blown royal crisis. In their telling, the situation was even more chaotic than it appeared from the outside.
Before the couple made their decision to leave, they had already made connections to some of the people who would come to make up their post-royal team. In the summer of 2019 Meghan reunited with Keleigh Thomas Morgan, the Sunshine Sachs publicist Meghan used to work with while she was still acting. Thomas Morgan went on to help with promoting the issue of British Vogue that Meghan guest-edited during her maternity leave, and also helped Harry form his sustainable-travel venture Travalyst, according to Finding Freedom. She continued to assist the couple from afar throughout the following months and officially joined their team after the royal exit.
After their October tour of southern Africa, at the end of which they announced their blockbuster lawsuit against a British tabloid, the couple decided to take a sabbatical from their royal duties though the holiday, which they spent in a waterfront mansion on Vancouver Island. It was here that they made their decision to leave their roles as senior royals and give up public funding for their offices, Scobie and Durand report. Though Meghan and Harry had mentioned plans to move abroad in the past, in the days before Christmas 2019, Harry and Meghan sent an email to Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth, explaining their decision to leave the U.K. and requesting an in-person meeting. The email was apparently vague about the details, in case it was leaked.
In the book’s retelling, this is where everything begins to fall apart. First, one of Charles’s aides insisted that the pair would not be able to meet with the queen until January 29, long after their planned return to the U.K. at the beginning of January. “He felt like he was being blocked,” a source close to Harry told Scobie and Durand.
Next, someone with the email leaked the information to a tabloid reporter, who began asking questions about Meghan and Harry’s decision. A royal source told Scobie and Durand that they thought either Meghan or Harry must have leaked the letter themselves, in order to pressure the palace to move faster, but Meghan and Harry denied this. The reporters believe that a pretty wide variety of aides to the family would have had enough information to share the contents of the email. After this, Buckingham Palace began to draft a statement about their decision, and Meghan and Harry had the chance to see a draft.