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Prince Harry had a clue the palace would “cut ties” with him and Meghan Markle months before the official 2021 announcement. As the Duke of Sussex shared in his memoir, Buckingham Palace gave him a “preview” in late 2020 when he submitted a request about laying a wreath to remember fallen service members. 

The palace took everything ‘away’ from Harry and Meghan

Despite leaving royal life in early 2020, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex still held on to a few things. That is until February 2021. 

Buckingham Palace announced they’d retain nothing from their days as working royals save for their royals titles. Additionally, they wouldn’t do “any service whatsoever” for Queen Elizabeth II. 

Harry recalled learning the news in Spare: “They took it all away, I thought, even my military associations. I’d no longer be captain general of the Royal Marines, a title handed down by my grandfather. I’d no longer be permitted to wear my ceremonial military uniform.” (Military medals are another story.)

He continued, sharing how he’d reminded himself they could “never” take his “real uniform” or his “real military status.” 

“They made it sound as if there’d been an agreement between us,” Harry said. However, there’d been “nothing of the sort” at the so-called Sandringham Summit in 2020. 

He and Meghan “pushed back” in their own statement released the same day. However, the “slap-down” saw the couple get “vilified every day, every hour, on social media.” 

As a result, Harry avoided the internet, silenced his phone, and asked friends to “stop informing us what they’d read.” 

The palace gave Harry a ‘sneak preview’ that they’d ‘cut ties’ completely by prohibiting a 2020 Remembrance Day wreath

“In all honesty, I hadn’t been totally surprised when the Palace cut ties,” Harry admitted in Spare. “I’d had a sneak preview months earlier.” 

Ahead of the U.K.’s Remembrance Day, or Veteran’s Day stateside, Harry asked “if someone could lay a wreath” for him at the Cenotaph, a national monument in London, England, because he “couldn’t be there” as he’d left royal life. 

When his request was denied, Harry went back with a different question. “Could a wreath be laid somewhere else in Britain on my behalf?” Again, the palace “denied” his request. 

“Nowhere in the world would any proxy be permitted to lay any sort of wreath at any military grave on behalf of Prince Harry,” he recalled being told. He even “pleaded,” but the palace didn’t budge. 

Ultimately, Harry asked one of his former instructors at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, who laid a wreath for him at London’s Iraq and Afghanistan Memorial. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, California, Harry and Meghan laid a wreath of their own. 

Harry doesn’t think going back to royal life is ‘ever going to be possible’

Despite talk of Harry possibly doing work for the royal family at the time of King Charles III’s cancer diagnosis, the idea of returning isn’t possible, in his opinion.

In a January 2023 interview about Spare, he remarked that a potential return would be “unsurvivable” because of a “third party,” presumably the British press. 

“No, I don’t think it is ever going to be possible,” Harry said. “Even if there is an agreement or an arrangement between me and my family, there is that third party that is going to do everything they can to make sure that isn’t possible. Not stopping us going back, but making it unsurvivable.”

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