Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(63)
With both families alerted, it was time for the happy couple to take a public bow. Their engagement was announced at ten a.m. on Monday, November 27, 2017. The news was released from Clarence House, the home of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. Harry’s father expressed his “delight” at the engagement. The bulletin continued: “His Royal Highness and Ms. Markle became engaged in London earlier this month. Prince Harry has informed Her Majesty The Queen and other close members of his family. Prince Harry has also sought and received the blessing of Ms. Markle’s parents.”
Within minutes, dozens of reporters, photographers, and TV crews assembled outside Kensington Palace for a photo call at the Sunken Garden. At two in the afternoon, on a bitterly cold, windy day, the happy couple emerged and walked arm in arm down to the side of the pond. Harry looked more nervous than his bride, and Meghan stroked his arm reassuringly. They answered a couple of shouted questions, and the prince told the throng that he knew she was the one the first time they met and described himself as “thrilled, over the moon.” Meghan smiled and said they were “so very happy.”
As they walked away, Meghan rubbed his back as if to say, “well done.” The couple walked arm in arm back to the palace for a twenty-minute interview with BBC reporter and campaigner Mishal Husain. The forty-four-year-old mother of three, who had been named Broadcaster of the Year at the 2015 London Press Club Awards, first caught Meghan’s eye for her campaign to win equal pay for women working at the BBC, and she and Harry handpicked her to undertake their engagement interview.
The televised conversation began with the couple describing the moment the prince proposed, saying that they were in Nottingham Cottage, roasting a chicken, when he got on one knee and asked her to marry him. “Just an amazing surprise, it was so sweet and natural and very romantic,” said Meghan, who confessed that she said yes before he had finished the proposal. They recalled that they had met one another through a mutual friend on a blind date in July 2016, and after two back-to-back meetings Meghan had agreed to join him on a safari holiday in Botswana. At the time Harry had never heard of Suits or the California actor, and she admitted that she didn’t have much of an idea about Harry.
This had helped rather than hindered the development of their love affair. As Meghan observed: “Everything that I’ve learned about him I learned through him as opposed to having grown up around different news stories, or tabloids, or whatever else. Anything I learned about him and his family was what he would share with me and vice versa. So for both of us it was just a really authentic and organic way to get to know each other.” It helped to cushion the shock they both experienced with the level of media interest once the romance became public.
Nurturing their relationship had been their priority, and the couple described how they had made a promise from the start to make their long-distance relationship work. “It was just a choice, right,” said Meghan. “I think that very early on when we realized we were going to commit to each other; we knew we had to invest the time and the energy and whatever it took to make that happen.”
It helped to navigate the bumps in the road that virtually from the start the couple saw themselves as a “team” with a shared vision of how they wanted to make a positive difference in society. Their mutual commitment was, Meghan observed, “what got date two in the books.”
She recalled: “It was one of the first things we started talking about when we met was just the different things that we wanted to do in the world and how passionate we were about seeing change.”
As with his brother’s engagement interview, the spirit of their late mother hovered over the occasion. On that November day in 2010 the focus was on Diana’s own engagement ring, which William had carefully carried with him before he proposed to Kate Middleton during a holiday in Kenya. This time small diamonds from Diana’s jewelry collection decorated Meghan’s engagement ring, which was dominated by a conflict-free diamond from Botswana, the country where they fell in love. They were incorporated into Harry’s design so that she would be there to “join us on this crazy journey.”
Just as William had said in his own engagement interview, Harry, too, felt his mother’s absence on these special days. The prince was clear about how she would have responded to her American daughter-in-law. “They’d be thick as thieves, without question. I think she would be over the moon, jumping up and down, you know, so excited for me.”
Certainly there was a real sense of destiny for Harry about his romance with Meghan. As he admitted: “The fact that I fell in love with Meghan so incredibly quickly was sort of confirmation to me that everything—all the stars were aligned, everything was just perfect. It was this beautiful woman just sort of literally tripped and fell into my life, I fell into her life.”
Meghan’s engagement interview was worlds away from the shy, blushing days of Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles and his comment “whatever loves means,” which skewered his romantic reputation forever. It was also different from the more formal and conventional affair when Prince William and Kate Middleton faced the cameras. Then, a visibly, and understandably, nervous Kate deferred to William in her responses. Not this time. Meghan was warm, affectionate, and supportive, more at ease with the media than her royal fiancé. “A breath of fresh air” was a common view.
The rapturous reception to the news of the engagement suggested that this indeed was a popular match and that the country, beset by Brexit angst, still loved a good romance. Naturally the Queen and Prince Philip were “delighted,” especially as the match cemented the monarchy’s acceptance for generations to come. Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge were “very excited” while the Duchess of Cornwall described Meghan as a “star.” “America’s loss is our gain,” she said.