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Though she appeared to take on the role like a fish in water, we now know that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex found her life within the British royal family to be extremely challenging. When the duchess and Prince Harry got engaged in November 2017, the former actress seemed eager to get to work. She was thrown into a crash course of royal living and it all seemed like things would work out. Unfortunately, the duchess soon learned that she had no idea what she was getting into.

Though she continued to press forward with royal tours at Prince Harry’s side, along with her own patronages, interests, and charities, the public and press were simply relentless when it came to discussing and covering the Duchess of Sussex.

Just 18 months after she and the duke wed, Meghan decided she’d had enough. Now, we’re learning that the Buckingham Palace staff weren’t exactly enamored with her approach to royal life either.

Meghan Markle jumped into royal life way too quickly

While her sister-in-law, Kate, Duchess of Cambridge dated Prince William for nearly a decade before they wed, and then slowly began taking up more royal work, the Duchess of Sussexes dove right in. It all became very overwhelming.

“It was a relentless schedule,” Daily Mirror royal editor Russell Myers explained. “And I get that it was their first tour and she wanted to hit the ground running, they were the hottest ticket in the world.[But] I’m at a loss to explain it, really, and why they found it [royal life] so hard. Maybe they did try to do too much. Maybe that is a lesson that they will take forward in their new life. But I think it is, honestly, to do with the constraints that they felt they were both under. Whether it will be any different in the private, corporate world, I don’t know. Only she will know, really, the straw that broke the camel’s back. She said she wasn’t being supported within the family. But maybe they did try to do a bit too much. You know, when Kate and William first started out – we’re only seeing Kate come to the fore in the last year or so, and she’s been a royal for nine years. It’s a lifetime job, and you have to take the advice that is there for you.  And undoubtedly, they as a pair never did that, and it’s been to their detriment, unfortunately.”

Meghan Markle never quite understood the difference between being a royal and a public figure

As an actress on the long-running show Suits, the Duchess of Sussex understood what it meant to live her life in the limelight. However, Hollywood still allows a certain level of independence and free-thinking. Unfortunately, the structure of the royal family is quite different.

“As an actress, Meghan expects perfection,” Duncan Larcombe told The Sun “But when you’re in the royal family, you have to learn that it’s not about you, it’s about what you represent.”

It appears that all of this was a perfect storm that made Megxit inevitable.

The Buckingham Palace staff clashed with Meghan Markle

It didn’t help that the duchess and the Buckingham Palace staff never quite saw eye-to-eye. Though Buckingham Palace was initially enamored with the duchess for what she stood for, that soon changed.

“The staff less enamored of the very qualities that made her irresistible to the press: her showbiz lustre, self-confidence, and feminist habits of assertion,” royal expert Camilla Tominey expressed to The New Yorker. “I’ve put it down to a clash of cultures, in the sense that she had come from the celebrity world, which is very fast-paced and quite demanding. The royal world is very different—it’s much slower-paced, and hugely hierarchical. In the royal world, it’s ‘What should we do next?’ ‘Well, what did we do last time?’ Therefore, for Harry and Meghan to be making demands, there was a bit of below-stairs chatter, particularly with the Duchess, that was ‘Well, hang on a minute, who do you think you are?'”

It appears that it was just never a good fit.

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