Meghan Markle Faced a Rather Rude ‘Awakening’ That She Wasn’t a ‘Disney Princess': Former Butler
When Prince Harry married Meghan Markle in 2018, the world saw what looked like the textbook definition of a fairytale. A Hollywood actress stepping into the role of a duchess, and living out a story that would appear straight from one of the storybooks. But life inside the palaces is far from being magical. According to an ex-Palace staffer, Markle soon discovered the magic was mundane, and that the royal life came with strict rules, long-standing traditions, and things would be very different from the world she was coming from.
According to Grant Harrold, a former butler to King Charles who knew both Prince William and Harry well, Markle soon realized that royal life wasn’t anything like the fantasy she had imagined. “I think the problem with Markle is that she went into the organization and she assumed that after watching all the Disney princesses that she thought it was going to be like that,” Harrold argued recently while promoting his new book, The Royal Butler. As per Page Six, he stressed, “When you join the royal family, you are given rules and protocols to follow.”
Harrold recalls that everything began to change for Harry when he met Markle in 2016. “As soon as Markle came into his life, everything changed,” he said. “It could be that Harry had his own awakening and suddenly decided he didn’t like the organization, but the problem is that Markle was with him when it happened. The biggest change in Harry’s life is Markle.”
The whirlwind romance led to marriage in less than two years. But the Sussexes’ time as working royals lasted just 18 months before they stepped down from their royal duties altogether. For Harrold, this shift meant Markle’s disillusionment with palace life and Harry’s frustration with the institution he had been born into.
In another instance shared by Harrold, that was rather cheeky, Prince Philip allegedly could not resist but say out loud, “Thank f–k that’s over,” to the late Queen, as soon as the Sussex nuptials came to an end. “It was very funny. I think he was speaking for the majority of people, but he was the man who actually said it,” Harrold explained.
The contrast with Harry’s earlier life is what is particularly striking for the butler. Harrold remembers him during his long relationship with Chelsy Davy, when his life revolved around smaller, close-knit gatherings mostly comprising a small group of friends, and Prince William and Princess Kate. “There’s a local pub near Tetbury,” Harrold recounted, "and you’d walk into the bar and you’d have William and Harry and Kate and Chelsy Davy, all sitting there. They were just fun. As I’ve said all the way along, they were just a family that all got on really nicely.”
It is that sense of togetherness that makes today’s fractured royal relationships so jarring to those who knew the brothers during their younger years. Harrold remembers them as practically inseparable. “The two of them were not just the best of friends, they were inseparable,” he said. “At Highgrove, they were always together. They were walking together, in the pub together, on motorbikes together. Very rarely did they do stuff separately.”