From her Californian background to her and Harry’s shared personality traits, the clues were obvious from the start, says Catherine Mayer in a riveting new book

It looks like a fairytale – and, in many ways, it is, for this turns out to be a story full of jeopardy. Deceptively traditional in silk and tulle, Meghan pauses on the steps at St George’s Chapel and waves to the cheering crowds.
Inside, royalty lines the pews.
The Tudor Henrys are buried here, so too Jane Seymour, Edward VII, and, in an annexe, George VI and Princess Margaret.
Over bones and dust Meghan glides toward her groom: does she take Harry for richer, for poorer? The new Duke of Sussex turns pink with happiness.

Harry and Meghan in the Ascot Landau carriage during a procession after getting married in 2018

A hereditary monarchy is an unlikely engine of change, but the family’s first biracial member, first declared feminist and, in a sign of institutional shift, the first divorcée permitted to marry a Windsor in the Church of England, seems to hint at progress. Maybe Meghan will be able to use her new position for good.
I click on the screen, scroll back, study the footage again. To revisit these scenes is to peer down the wrong end of a telescope, the optimism of that day as distant as the moon, or at least California, where the Sussexes have lived in exile since 2020.
How did the dream crumble? Even those of us who warned, ‘Don’t do it, Di’ back in the 1980s somehow dared to imagine a better outcome for Meghan Markle when she married into the Royal Family in 2018.
She is different, we told ourselves. We weren’t wrong – but that difference would count against her. How on earth did so many people – who saw what happened to Princess Diana – fall for the princess myth yet again?

Princess Diana visiting Northwick Park and St Marks Hospital in Harrow, north-west London, in 1997

I remember the day Diana died in 1997. After a colleague woke me with news of a car crash in Paris, I headed to Buckingham Palace. A hotel worker pointed to the building and told me: ‘They killed her.’
Over the following days, that accusation gained currency, but few meant it literally. Anger centred on perceptions that the Royal Family hung Diana out to dry.
Back then, and throughout my years as a writer and editor at America’s TIME magazine, frequently covering royal matters, I agreed that the Windsors had contributed to Diana’s vulnerability.
But it was only recently, researching my new book which looks at the lives and roles played by eight royal women, from Anne Boleyn to Kate, the current Princess of Wales, that I finally grasped the nature of the most significant forces that placed Diana in the back of a speeding limousine.
These forces were not the scenarios imagined by conspiracy theorists; rather, they were the reflexes of patriarchal systems – including the ‘patrimonarchy’ – to defend their power structures and hierarchies.
In 1997, I remained dry-eyed. Now, I weep for Diana and the damage such forces continue to inflict.

Prince Harry has spoken of parallels between Meghan and Diana. He is determined to protect his wife, in a way he could not protect his mother, from what he sees as the twin threats from within the palace and the media.
To be a royal woman in any age is to be endlessly scrutinised and judged. Some smile silently and bear the attention. It is when women attempt to define themselves that things get interesting. As Princess Diana declared in her controversial BBC Panorama interview, she ‘won’t go quietly. That’s the problem.’
Meghan’s exit has been at least as noisy, and you don’t have to look far to find echoes in history…
Consider the following description:
‘A commoner raised to royalty, she is a heroine to some, a hate figure to others. Her adherents trumpeted her potential to refresh the monarchy. Her enemies disparaged her as an interloper… too ambitious, too difficult. Still the wedding went ahead – accounts differ on the number of ceremonies – but soon she was gone, her exit brutal. Fans maintain that prejudice and plotting did for her. Critics hold her solely responsible for her own downfall.’
If you assume this to be a description of Meghan, you’re right – but here’s the thing: the same details apply, word for word, to Anne Boleyn.

Anonymous 16th century portrait of Anne Boleyn

A series of patterns marks royal women’s lives. Great queens such as Elizabeth I break or reshape moulds but the safer path to popularity, currently personified by the Princess of Wales, is to perfect the conventional role. Meghan never could have done that even if she wished to do so.
Now she languishes in British opinion polls, but for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor the least popular royal. But if your feelings for her go beyond disinterest to active dislike, even hatred, ask yourself why. Might it be that like royal predecessors, she has been damned as a strumpet, and pitted against other royal women by insidious palace briefings and a culture hostile to women with opinions?

Meghan greets well-wishers during her visit with the late Queen Elizabeth II, 2018

I have no intention of championing Meghan over Kate, but I am fascinated by how and why their public images came to be so at odds.
Like Meghan and Harry’s, every moment of the Kate and William’s wedding in 2011, which I live-blogged for TIME, was choreographed to showcase the future of the monarchy while emphasising its continuity with the past.
The marriage was a marketing triumph for the Windsors and, as a popular US blogger noted, for the princess myth. ‘Little girls dream of being princesses,’ she wrote. ‘Grown women seem to retain this childhood fantasy. Just look at the pomp and circumstance surrounding the royal wedding and endless conversation about Princess Kate.’

Meghan and Harry arriving Mansion House in London to attend the Endeavour Fund Awards, 2020

The blogger confessed that she identified with a princess too, but one with agency, ‘She-Ra, Princess of Power’, the eponymous heroine of a 1985 animated series spun off from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.
That blogger was Meghan writing on the Tig, a website she named after her favourite Tuscan wine, Tignanello. She used her platform to opine on everything from fine food and fashion to gentle activism.
Two years later, she shuttered the site and prepared to put her career on ice, filming her seventh and last series of the legal drama Suits. Shortly afterwards, she and Harry announced their engagement. Would She-Ra really surrender her voice and liberty?

Meghan starring as Rachel Zane in the TV show Suits

‘I don’t see it as giving anything up. I just see it as a change. It’s a new chapter, right?’ Meghan told the BBC’s Mishal Husain. She was proud of her professional achievements, but now it was time to work with Harry as a team to promote ‘causes that are really important to me’.
Everybody looked set to win – the Windsors finally edging towards the diversity of the populations they are meant to represent; a contented Harry saved from a downwards spiral; and Meghan, Princess of Power, handed not a sword but a global platform for those causes.
In those early days, many of her media portraits were enthusiastic, but it was also clear that there was little understanding of Meghan’s background.
Meghan did not live, as reported, in a gang-scarred area, but in middle-class comfort. Her white father, Thomas Markle, a TV lighting director, met her African-American mother Doria Ragland when she was working as a make-up artist on the long-running US soap General Hospital.

Meghan with her father, Thomas Markle

A mixed marriage like the Markles’ was not unusual in LA. Nor was racism. In her first Netflix series, Meghan recalled as a child seeing Doria subjected to racial abuse and mistaken for her nanny. Doria in turn revealed that she had warned her daughter that fascination with her dating Harry was ‘about race’.
Race was a factor. So too was a misunderstanding of Planet Windsor. Meghan’s claim that she had not googled Harry before their first date attracted scepticism, but no matter how many hours, days, weeks or years an outsider spent trawling the internet, it could not convey the weirdness and complexity of palace culture.
‘How do you explain that you bow to your grandmother?’ Harry mused in the same Netflix show.

Now picture Meghan plunged into this alien life, servants and aides around all the time, zero privacy. Should she regard staff as potential friends? Would they serve her or spy on her or, as in Tudor times so often the case, both? Harry has described the royal existence as ‘this surreal state, this unending Truman Show’.
It is tempting to think that if Meghan had shut up, closed down, worn nude tights and deferred as if her life depended on it, she might have made a go of things.
But look more closely at California, the place that shaped her, and you realise that was never going to happen. Just as Americans are apt to conflate the histories and cultures of, say, England and Scotland, so the British talk about the States – with the exception of locations familiar from films and TV shows – as an amorphous blob.
To understand Meghan, we need to look to the Golden State.
Californians pride themselves on doing things differently. Hard-nosed entrepreneurialism coexists with multiple strands of spiritualism. Positivity is considered, well, a positive. So are career choices and behaviours the British disdainfully label ‘attention-seeking’.
The entertainment industry is one of the main employers in the state; contracts include clauses requiring performers to publicise their work, and a significant social media footprint is not an option but a necessity for those who hope to rise.
Meghan’s creation of the Tig fits into that pattern, as does her brand ambassadorship for the designer Ralph Lauren, and her cultivation of press contacts in the pre-Harry period, all now routinely cited as proof of her insatiable ambition.
Emotions and feelings – topics to rattle the teacups in the drawing rooms of those British people posh enough to have drawing rooms – are not merely up for discussion among Californians, but central to conversation.
There is a perception that Californians hug more than other Americans and Meghan once described William and Kate recoiling from her embrace. ‘They came over for dinner, I remember I was in ripped jeans, and I was barefoot,’ she says. ‘I was a hugger. I’ve always been a hugger. I didn’t realise that is really jarring for a lot of Brits.’
Another sign that Meghan might not mesh smoothly with the buttoned-up Windsors could be detected during the Sussexes’ official visit to South Africa.
When Tom Bradby inquired how she was coping with the pressures of royal life, she replied, ‘Thank you for asking, because not many people have asked if I’m OK.’ Back home, such an oversight would be unthinkable.
She went on to muse that ‘it’s not enough to just survive something, right? Like, that’s not the point of life. You’ve got to thrive, you’ve got to feel happy.’
This simple, seemingly uncontroversial idea would shake the monarchy, dislodge Harry and send both of the Sussexes to the place that nurtured it.

Meghan and Harry in an interview on the day their engagement was announced

In common with other public figures, royals tend to envy the upper echelons of popularity, failing to realise that the comfortable middle of the table is the place to be.
Harry and Meghan’s marriage raised the groom to an all-time peak, fleetingly above Elizabeth II; the bride charted as high as sixth place.
Soon enough, she learned the difference between manageable celebrity and her new level of fame: one opens doors, the other imprisons you.
Princess Diana found herself in a similar position. And she too, felt suffocated.
There is no need to sympathise or connect with Meghan, nor watch her shows or consume news about her. However, like Diana or indeed Kate, to dismiss her as unimportant is to miss the problem she embodies.
Meghan matters, quite simply, because she is one of the most prominent women in the world. Her name recognition charts at 100 per cent in recent multi-country polls, an astonishing level of fame. That she is a woman of colour and, rightly or wrongly, associated in the public imagination with particular value sets, adds to her significance.
To those who clamour for Meghan to be expunged from public life like a latter-day Anne Boleyn, I’d ask one question: what exactly has she done to earn such hostility?
The Sussex Squad suspects her critics of misogyny, racism or an admixture of the two, misogynoir. Detractors say Meghan has earned their contempt by inflicting reputational damage on the monarchy.

Meghan and her mother, Doria Ragland, arriving at Cliveden House Hotel the night before her wedding to Prince Harry, 2018

Meghan has also been accused by staff of bullying. My book examines these allegations within the context of palace culture, which can be simultaneously hierarc­hical and dysfunctional. Over the decades, complaints from staff have ranged from racism to rape, all denied and unproven.
It is not my intention to minimise the seriousness of the bullying allegations against Meghan, but rather to ask critics whether, in light of the wider context of Windsor failings including Andrew’s behaviour, what we know – or think we know – about her explains the strength of the animosity towards her.
Might other factors be at play too? Does her voice grate? Is she simply too Californian, too politically correct, too new-age-y for British tastes?
Perhaps resentment towards Meghan stems from her snagging a prince and then forgetting to be grateful.

Meghan on the steps of St George’s Chapel in Windsor for her wedding, 2018

There is also an idea that she is ‘too political’. A well-informed source tells me that Meghan does not think of herself as rebellious. In 2018, she cheered the #MeToo movement, not to wage politics, but on the reasonable assumption that ending sexual harassment was a mainstream goal – and therefore uncontentious.
A theory spread by Meghan’s (antagonistic) biographer Tom Bower and others, including the Sun’s veteran royal photographer Arthur Edwards, promotes the idea that Meghan duped Harry into believing she would settle for the royal role, while always intending to tear him from the bosom of his family.
My own research, which has included conversations with deeply informed sources, produced a different picture: two people, naively optimistic that they could develop their own interpretations of the royal job, thrown off balance as they hit resistance and swiftly developing a siege mentality.
Where some couples moderate each other’s responses, the one more inclined to conciliation, the other to confrontation, Harry and Meghan share similar reflexes.
Amid rising tensions, and with Harry ever more fearful for her safety, Meghan and Harry did not surrender the idea of royal service but began to reimagine it. Perhaps they could base themselves on another continent ‘still doing work for the Queen, but beyond the reach of the press’. Meghan had proved a natural at royalling. Her in-laws might recoil from her hugs, but strangers on the street leaned into them.

Meghan attending a street dance class during their visit to Star Hub community and leisure centre in Wales, 2018

It severely hampered their search for solutions that they batted away good advice with the bad, reading interventions as the product of dusty palace thinking or inter-household rivalries.
Confronted with an innovative proposal, often the first reflex of officials is to squash or temper it. In his twenties, Charles tangled with courtiers who tried to block his first substantial initiative, the Prince’s Trust. It would be too political, they argued.
Princess Anne offers an object lesson too, combining her sporting career and equestrian businesses with service as a working royal. A hybrid model can succeed, and not all ideas that bend or break with tradition destabilise the monarchy.
‘Yes,’ said an insider when I pointed this out, ‘but that depends on the royal in question.’ Anne is staunch and sensible, Harry his mother’s son. Meghan would not have respected boundaries. Left to their own devices, they risked becoming more Andrew-and-Sarah than Anne-and-Timothy.
That analysis, widely shared by family and officials, meant the institution spent less energy on helping the Sussexes expand their role, and more on containing them.

Harry and Meghan, in turn, continued to misread their situation, assuming that courtiers were misrepresenting them to the top decision-makers – the Queen, Charles, even William – who would surely see the merit of their case if given the chance.
After all, the Sussexes connected with younger and diverse populations across the realms, demographics left cold by other Windsors. The monarchy needed them.
There were, however, other issues at play. The prospect of change loomed large, with Elizabeth soon to pass the crown to Charles, already in his seventies and expected to reign for, at most, a couple of decades.

King Charles and Queen Camilla with Meghan at The Prince of Wales’s 70th Birthday Patronage Celebration, 2018

The paramount concern of these principals and their officials was to smooth the way for the next two kings and their consorts. In this context, the volatile, limelight-stealing Harry and Meghan appeared not jewels in the crown, but risks.
‘Megxit’, a term rejected by Harry as sexist, therefore became inevitable.
Palace briefing began to suggest that Meghan was ‘an acquired taste’ and ‘quite opinionated’. There were news items about staff departures and a contemptuous nickname applied to Meghan, ‘Duchess Difficult’.
Who does that remind you of?

Queen Elizabeth II laughs with Meghan during a ceremony to open the new Mersey Gateway Bridge in 2018

These days, Diana is regarded in some quarters as a secular saint. To her younger son, she is an inspiration and a warning.
Meghan has studiously avoided such direct parallels, at least in public. But that has not protected her from allegations that she angles to position herself as a new Diana, nor from belittling comparisons with her.
An Instagram post in which Meghan wears a Northwestern University sweatshirt provoked howls of rage because Diana had been photographed in the same sweatshirt. ‘That may be [Meghan’s] most pathetic attempt yet at cosplaying Harry’s mother,’ snarled one commenter. ‘She is completely psychotic now,’ fumed another.

Diana sporting a Northwestern sweater

Meghan in a Northwestern sweater

Thousands of similar posts ignored the fact that Meghan, unlike Diana, was a Northwestern alumna, with a degree in International Relations and Theatre Studies.
‘Meghan is no Diana,’ a palace insider muttered to me recently. If this sentiment chimes with you, think about the venom directed at Diana, like the Sunday Mirror column about her written the day before her death, which hit newsstands the next morning.
‘It’s a pity Gucci don’t make designer face zips,’ wrote Carole Malone. ‘Then when Diana was on the verge of opening her ill-informed mouth and causing an international incident (an increasingly frequent occurrence these days), she could just keep her trap shut.’
Diana was no Diana either – until she could no longer speak for herself.
In this sense, Meghan has indeed come to resemble Diana, the iteration of 1997: the crown jewel turned pariah, the benchmark against whom other royal women are measured and found, by comparison, to pass muster.