Meghan Reveals How She Really Felt About Attending the Queen’s Funeral Amid Her Feud With Kate & William: ‘I Was Not Well’
Attending a funeral is already a very complicated thing, particularly when you’re a public figure. There are the emotions of loss and there’s having to live that loss in front of everyone, when everything you do is going to be scrutinized. Now, Meghan Markle is opening up about another thing that made the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II especially hard for her: being away for her kids. The revelations come thanks to the second season of her show, With Love, Meghan, which is now out on Netflix.
In the third episode of the second season, Markle gets emotional as she discusses with Queer Eye star Tan France a time where she had to leave her kids for almost three weeks in 2022. This coincided with Queen Elizabeth’s death. The conversation, which is mostly about the ups and downs of parenthood, touches on how being a mother is so much better than Markle could have ever thought it would be. “It’s better than I ever expected,” she tells France.
Related: Here’s what each royal inherited from Queen Elizabeth
Markle has two kids with Prince Harry: Prince Archie, 6, and Princess Lilibet, 4. France and his husband Rob, meanwhile, share two sons, Ismail, 4, and Isaac, 2. “You know what’s funny?” France says. “When parents are like, ‘Oh, I just can’t wait for them to go to college and be out,’ I’m like, I never want my children to leave,” he adds. “They’re not allowed to get married. Not allowed to leave my house.”
The Duchess wholeheartedly agrees. “I’ll miss them so much,” she says. “You want to be the parent who’s like yes, go do it. Go do your thing. Go live that life. But I’m going to miss you so much.”
It’s France’s comment of, “If I don’t see them for a couple of days, I feel like my heart is broken” that prompts Markle to make the revelation that can be tied directly to the time she was away from Archie and Lilibet for Queen Elizabeth’s funeral. “Oh I know. The longest I went without being around our kids was almost three weeks,” she says in the show. “I was…not well.”
The series of events were as such: In September of 2022, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were already in Europe for a series of engagements when Queen Elizabeth fell ill. That means that, in total, they ended up being away from their children—who were 3 and 15 months old at the time—for 17 days.
It was quite a difficult time for both, to the point that Prince Harry even wrote about it in his 2023 memoir Spare. “Our quick trip would now be an odyssey. Another ten days, at least. Difficult days at that,” he wrote in the book. “More, we’d have to be away from the children for longer than we’d planned, longer than we’d ever been.”
According to the memoir, he and Markle left the U.K. the day after Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and once home, kept Archie and Lilibet close and “couldn’t let them out of their sight.”
The funeral could not have been very easy for either of them, as the two were reportedly not on great terms with Prince William and Kate Middleton even then. And things haven’t really improved all that much. Recent reports have honed in on the fact that Markle is set to release a holiday special this December on Netflix, which is said to clash with Kate Middleton’s annual Christmas carol concert at Westminster Abbey.
As for the brothers, however, things might soon change. A source told Parade that “King Charles really isn’t doing well,” with his health “deteriorating more.” Which might just be the thing that brings the family together again. Hopefully, not at another funeral.
