After Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle stepped down as working royals, the duchess opened up about some of the things she disliked and the rules she had to follow. Meghan Markle told Oprah Winfrey that there were people who were not members of the the royal but worked for them that were in charge of managing her life. Those people were also in possession of her passport, her driver’s license, and her keys, she said.
Now as the couple are estranged from the king and the rest of the royal family, it was revealed that there’s one thing Meghan Markle and King Charles agreed on- a palace rule in particular that is part of the everyday protocol.
fortmic.com reported that the rule was brought up in Tom Quinn’s book Gilded Youth An Intimate History of Growing Up in the Royal Family.
An ex-royal staffer told that author that Meghan “hated being controlled by royal protocol.” She and King Charles can’t stand how “royals have to announce in advance when they are leaving the palace and where they are going”, the staffer claimed. The rule is an essential one as it’s “partly for security but partly also to avoid a situation where a senior royal is upstaged by a more junior royal leaving just when the more important person leaves.”
The former palace worker said, “I think Charles agreed with Meghan on many points – he thought much of the protocol was silly, but it is hard to change … I don’t think in the whole of history there was ever a greater divide between what someone expected when they became a member of the royal family and what they discovered it was really like. [Meghan] was hugely disappointed.”
Before she and Harry stepped down, the Duchess of Sussex was said to have had a good relationship with her father-in-law. King Charles had then even walked the duchess down the aisle on the Sussexes’ wedding day.