Prince Harry was reportedly “reluctant” to leave the royal family, but his grandmother Queen Elizabeth gave him a harsh ultimatum and she didn’t give him much of a choice.
In his new book, Queen Elizabeth II, author Hugo Vickers, a longtime friend of the royal family, details Prince Harry’s growing frustration with the family before Meghan Markle and Meghan Markle stepped down as royals.
When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex fled London for Canada in 2019, Vickers wrote that Prince Harry was “keen to discuss the way forward” with the Queen upon their return. However, things did not go as the prince expected.
“He wanted a half-in, half-out arrangement that would allow him to work for the royal family while being self-funded. In the new year of 2020, three of his private secretaries, Sir Edward Young, Sir Clive Alderton and Simon Case, went into summit mode at Sandringham House and drafted a proposal,” Vickers writes.
“Prince Harry went to Sandringham for talks and was told he was either all in or all out. He reluctantly left and returned to Canada.”
In January 2020, the Sussexes announced they would be stepping away from their official roles as working royals, leaving behind their Frogmore Cottage home given to them by the Queen, and moving to live full-time in California three months later.
Prince Harry and Markle were formally asked to vacate the villa after Prince Harry released his bombshell memoir Spare in 2023.
In June 2022, before Queen Elizabeth passed away, the couple took their children Prince Archie, 6, and Princess Lilibet, 4, on a final trip to London to spend time with their great-grandmother and fulfill her final wishes.
As Page Six previously reported on Tuesday, royal biographer Robert Hardman has laid out Queen Elizabeth II’s final wishes for all of her great-grandchildren in his upcoming biography, “Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. The Inside Story.”
“The Queen had hoped that all of her great-grandchildren would come to Balmoral at some point that summer, even if the Sussexes were unable to attend,” Hardman wrote.
“She wanted everyone in her family to have happy memories of her,” a family friend claims in the book, according to excerpts published in Monday’s Daily Mail.
The Sussexes remain largely estranged from several members of the royal family, including Prince William and his wife Kate, but their last public appearance in Windsor was to mourn the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022.
