, told The Daily Beast: “Since Queen Elizabeth’s death, Charles’ silence on this matter has been deafening. There were many occasions when the king, in an effort to heal the rift between the Sussexes and the rest of the royal family, could have made the grand gesture and bestowed titles on Archie and Lilibet, but Charles clearly chose not to.”
“Harry and Meghan forced the Palace’s hand. Rather than continue to wait around to see if King Charles would bend and finally bestow them on the Sussex children, Harry and Meghan took the bull by the horns and did it themselves. You have to admire their audacity. It’s really very American of them.”
While some observers might consider it hypocritical to be garlanding your children in titles bestowed by an institution you claim drove you out of the U.K. in fear of your life, the latest move by the Sussexes definitively answers the question of whether or not Harry and Meghan will ever relinquish their own titles. They won’t. Nor will the Palace ever try to strip them.
This week’s move by the Sussexes cannot be seen in isolation from the frenzied blur of activity by both sides in recent months. The Netflix films may feel to those following the royal story like they happened a lifetime ago, but in fact the second tranche of them only came out on Dec. 15 —less than three months ago.
Since then we have had the reverberating bombshell of Harry’s book and the drama around the Sussexes’ eviction from Frogmore Cottage, not to mention the ongoing will-they-won’t-they around their coronation invites.
But if anyone needed proof of the disastrous collapse in relations between the two sides, it is surely evident in the fact that the news of the princely status of the Sussex children was broadcast not in a joint statement, accompanied by a photocall with grandpa and a dignified reminder that these adorable mites are sixth and seventh in line to the throne, but in a negative story, ripe with anonymous briefings to People magazine.
