The 7 Words Prince Harry ‘Desperately Wanted to Say’ to King Charles During Meghan Markle Introduction
Prince Harry held his tongue when his father, King Charles III, first met Meghan Markle. The Duke of Sussex recounted introducing his now-wife to the then-Prince Charles in Spare. Along the way, Harry revealed the seven words he so “desperately wanted to say” to his father but didn’t.
King Charles and Meghan met over tea at Clarence House
In his January 2023 memoir, Spare, Harry revisited the day in 2016 when he introduced Meghan, whom he’d been dating since the summer, to his father, the now-King Charles.
Harry and Meghan met the king, then the Prince of Wales, and his wife, Queen Camilla, the then-Duchess of Cornwall, at Clarence House in London, England, for tea.
After driving through the “lush gardens” that “made Meg gasp,” the couple found themselves standing before King Charles and Camilla.
“Meg and I had rehearsed this moment several times,” Harry wrote. “For Pa, curtsy. Say, Your Royal Highness, or Sir. Maybe a kiss on each cheek if he leans in. Otherwise, a handshake.”
As for Camilla, Harry had told Meghan that a curtsy was “not necessary,” rather a “quick kiss or handshake” would do. “‘No curtsy? You sure?’” he recalled her asking, to which he replied he “didn’t think it appropriate.”
Harry wanted to call the royal family a ‘soap opera,’ not ‘Suits,’ as Charles remarked upon meeting Meghan
As the foursome made their way to a “large sitting room” at Clarence House, King Charles posed a question to Meghan about Suits, the TV show she’d starred in for nearly five years when she met Harry in 2016.
“Pa asked Meg if it was true, as he’d been told, that she was the star of an American soap opera!” Harry wrote, noting he and Meghan reacted with smiles.
However, he “desperately wanted to say” to his father, “‘Soap opera? No, that’s our family, Pa.’”
As for how Meghan responded, she “said she was in a cable drama that aired in the evening. About lawyers. Called Suits,” to which King Charles remarked, “Marvelous” and “How splendid.”
From there, the conversation moved to “acting and the arts generally” before circling back to the topic of Meghan’s own acting career. King Charles had, per Spare, “a lot of questions” and “looked impressed” by how Meghan answered.
“Her confidence, her intelligence, I thought, caught him unawares,” Harry wrote.
Harry ‘flinched’ when Meghan said goodbye to King Charles for the first time
The now-39-year-old continued, saying Meghan’s farewell to King Charles had, at the time, made him nervous. The introduction came after Meghan had met not only the late Queen Elizabeth II but Harry’s brother, Prince William, whom she “freaked” out with a hug.
“We all stood. Meg leaned towards [sic] Pa,” Harry recalled. “I flinched; like Willy, Pa wasn’t a hugger. Thankfully, she gave him a standard British cheek-to-cheek, which he actually seemed to enjoy.”
As they exited Clarence House and stood in the gardens, Harry felt “exultant,” thinking to himself, ‘Well, that’s that then … Welcome to the family.’”
