A key part of the intense public and media interest in whether Archie and Lilibet will receive royal titles is due to Meghan’s allegations in her March 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey that the royal family did not want her and Harry’s children to be princes and princesses.
“There’s a convention — I forget if it was George V or George VI convention — but when you’re the grandchild of the monarch, so when Harry’s dad becomes king, automatically Archie and our next baby would become prince or princess, or whatever they were going to be,” she told Oprah. “While I was pregnant, they said they wanted to change the convention for Archie.”
You can see why people are resurfacing that quote in light of the Palace’s delay in announcing whether Harry and Meghan’s children will have prince or princess titles. Especially given the fact that Meghan explicitly expressed her concern about “the idea of the first member of color in this family not being titled in the same way that other grandchildren would be.”
There is, however, one big problem when it comes to the interview: Meghan’s other remarks to Oprah reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the historic 1917 letters patent. Meghan said that she and Harry were explicitly told by the royal family that their child wouldn’t be a prince, which she said “would be different from protocol.”
Except that it wasn’t. Making their child a prince would have been without precedent and outside the guidelines established by George V. The only reason why William and Kate’s children were all princes and princesses was because the Queen issued a letters patent. Were Harry and Meghan at the time expecting a similar letters patent for their children?
BuzzFeed News has reached out to the Sussexes for clarification.
However, Meghan’s apparent confusion about how royal titles work will mean nothing if the Palace denies Archie and Lilibet the status of HRH/prince/princess — because of how she addressed the issue in the Oprah interview:
“You certainly must have had some conversations with Harry about it and have your own suspicions as to why they didn’t want to make Archie a prince,” Oprah asked. “What are those thoughts? Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s because of his race?… And I know that’s a loaded question but —”
“But I can give you an honest answer,” Meghan said. “In those months when I was pregnant, all around this same time… so we have in tandem the conversation of ‘He won’t be given security, he’s not going to be given a title’ and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.”
That’s it. In the face of that quote, arguments about historical precedent won’t matter to a large percentage of the public. Nor will the fact that, when asked about that conversation by Oprah, Harry said that the remark had been made by one of his family members “right at the beginning” of his and Meghan’s relationship, not during her pregnancy.
If the titles are denied to Archie and Lilibet, all that will matter to a large part of the population is the fact that Meghan saw this coming.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ellievhall/archie-lilibet-titles-prince-princess-hrh-palace