Meghan Markle didn’t hold back during her interview with Oprah on Sunday evening.
Among them: Archie, her now nearly two-year-old son with husband Prince Harry, was not offered royal titles or protection.
While she got pregnant with him, Meghan said, she was told the Royal Family didn’t want the baby to have a prince/princess title. That meant he wouldn’t receive any of the security that’s usually afforded to royal children.
The logic coming from The Firm (as the Royal Family is often called) appeared to be that because he wouldn’t be a prince wouldn’t need protection, Meghan said.
“He needs to be safe,” she told Oprah. “If you’re saying the title is what’s going to affect their protection — we haven’t created this monster machine around us, in terms of clickbait and tabloid fodder. You’ve [The Firm] allowed that to happen, which means our son needs to be safe.”
She didn’t elaborate on who in the Royal Family was making these decisions.
Archie’s title in itself wasn’t particularly important to the couple, Meghan said. “All the grandeur surrounding this stuff is an attachment that I don’t really have.”
But in addition to learning that their baby wouldn’t be protected, it also appeared to them that the rules were being changed in a way that would negatively affect their child.
There was the “idea of our son not being safe, and also the idea of the first member member of colour in this family not being titled in the same way that other grandchildren would be.”
It was hard not to consider Meghan’s race, and the baby’s, she said, due to other conversations she knew were going on in the background.
While she was pregnant, there were “concerns and conversations” that Harry heard and passed on to her about “how dark his skin might be when he’s born.”
Did that mean, Oprah asked, if the baby were “to be too brown, that would be a problem?”
“I wasn’t able to follow up with why with that, but if that’s the assumption you’re making, I think that feels like a pretty safe one,” Meghan said. “Which is really hard to understand.”
The only child automatically granted the title of prince is Prince George, Prince William and Kate Middleton’s first child, and that’s because he’s the eldest son of the eldest son of the monarch’s heir. In December 2012, the Queen issued a letters patent declaring that all of William and Kate’s children would be princes or princesses.
When Archie was born in May 2019, his lack of a royal title was reported as a decision the couple made.
“They have chosen not to use a courtesy title,” a royal source told HuffPost U.K. at the time.