A royal author believes Meghan Markle did not leave life up to chance and was a firm believer in “controlling” life decisions. Meghan Markle started dating her now husband, Prince Harry, in 2016, but just a few years after joining the Royal Family, Meghan stepped down as a working royal in 2020, alongside her husband.
Tom Bower, writing in his bestseller ‘Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the war between the Windsors’, looked back on the early days of their courtship. He said: “In Meghan Markle’s life, little happened by chance. Beyond the empathetic smile was a woman who disrupted spontaneity and liked to control every aspect of her life. In late September 2016 nothing was more important than her relationship with Harry.”
The author reports Meghan Markle “outed” Prince Harry by sharing a photo on Instagram of her “secret Halloween date” while they were seeing each other, at a Halloween party the couple attended in Toronto with Princess Eugenie and her boyfriend in 2016.
Mr Bower said: “Most at the party were in no doubt that Meghan was ‘outing’ Harry. For her own good reasons she wanted the relationship to be publicised. In media hype, some would call it the ‘Greatest Story since the Abdication’.”
After quitting royal duties, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle shared previously unseen photographs as they partied with Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank on Halloween in their Netflix documentary ‘Harry & Meghan’.
The Duchess of Sussex previously revealed how she and the Duke went out incognito in Halloween costumes for a final night out, while speaking on the Ellen DeGeneres show.
Meghan told Ellen: “He came to see me in Toronto and our friends and his cousin Eugenie and now her husband Jack, they came as well, and the four of us snuck out in Halloween costumes to just have one fun night on the town before it was out in the world that we were a couple. It was a post-apocalypse theme, so we had all this very bizarre costuming on, and we were able to just have one fun final night out.”
Writing in the royal biography, ‘Yes Ma’am: The secret life of royal servants’, which explores the lives of the men and women who serve the royals, author Tom Quinn claims that Meghan Markle caused a panic when the Duchess of Sussex signaled she wanted to operate separately from the Queen.
Mr Quinn said: “Buckingham Palace became really worried when they became aware that Meghan had plans for her life as a working royal that were not going to be part of a general strategy agreed with the staff – she just wanted to do her own thing.
“Which is fair enough if you’re not a member of a tightly controlled institution, but it was never going to be acceptable that Meghan should outshine Princess Anne, Prince Charles [as he then was] and Elizabeth the Queen.”
A former Courtier for Elizabeth told the author: “Elizabeth always had to be the centre and focus of everything the Royal Family did, and I don’t think Meghan understood why that had to make her do things she didn’t want to do. She didn’t understand that when you join the Royal Family, you don’t do as you please, you do as you’re told. In a sense, you become a servant of the family.”
Since quitting royal duties, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle now reside in Montecito, California, with their two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet.
Meghan now appears to have focused much of her energy on her solo business projects and media projects, with season two of cooking show, With Love, Meghan set to debut next week on Netflix.