Rewind to this time last year. Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s engagement just was announced on this day. They would take portraits, dot heir first joint interview, and Meghan would start doing events with Harry in the weeks ahead. She’d received an invitation from the Queen to spend Christmas with the royal family at Sandringham-something most significant others of royals, including Kate Middleton, do not receive until they marry into the family.
Meghan was fast-tracked into royal life-but not everyone was as keen to embrace her as quickly as Harry wanted them to. Harry’s own brother Prince William was among those reluctant, and that created issues, Katie Nicholl reported for Vanity Fair.
A mutual friend of William and Harry’s told Nicholl that Harry was very, very upset that William wasn’t going out of his way to welcome Meghan into the fold. “Harry felt William wasn’t rolling out the red carpet for Meghan and told him so,” the source said. “They had a bit of a fall out, which was only resolved when [their dad Prince] Charles stepped in and asked William to make an effort. That’s when the Cambridges invited the Sussexes to spend Christmas with them.”
Almost a year later, Meghan is now married to Harry, and the two are planning to move away from William, Kate, and Kensington Palace. They’ll make their official residence Windsor’s Frogmore Cottage. The Sun, which broke the news, reported that a royal source said “tension” between William and Harry in part led to the move.
Nicholl echoed this, saying the issues aren’t between Meghan and Kate and that the ill feelings had been mounting between the two princes in the last year.
“Kate and Meghan are very different people and they don’t have a lot in common but they have made an effort to get along,” a source told her. “Any issues are between the brothers.”
Royal correspondent Richard Palmer of the Express was informed by his sources that the move was Harry’s way of “spreading his own wings.”
The story behind Harry and Meghan’s move to Frogmore Cottage? Harry and Meghan spreading their wings. No big fallout but Kate and Meghan not close. No royal properties available in London apparently.
— Richard Palmer (@RoyalReporter) November 26, 2018
And one source told the Daily Mail‘s Rebecca English that the two have just naturally grown apart, that there’s no drama. “The idea of the two of them as ‘the boys’, the brothers doing everything together and living in each other’s pockets, has been pushed with good intentions, but hasn’t really existed for some time,” the source said.
“The truth is that they have both just grown up. They are rare in that they live together and work together, but there has been a stepping back,” the source continued. “They are still incredibly close, closer than most siblings, but now Harry has married and is about to become a father, so it’s a good time for him to be planning his own future. There is no acrimony.”
