Meghan Markle Asked Queen Camilla for Help During Crisis

Meghan Markle asked Queen Camilla for help dealing with press hostility and was met with a suggestion they move to Bermuda, according to Prince Harry’s book.

The Duchess of Sussex was at the center of a media storm in 2017 after being named Prince Harry’s girlfriend for the first time months before. Harry had been attempting to pressure his father King Charles III, then the Prince of Wales, into going to war with the British tabloids without success.

Meg, meanwhile, reached out to Camilla,” Harry wrote in his memoir Spare, “who tried to counsel her by saying this was just what the press always did to newcomers, that it would all pass in due time, that Camilla had been the bad guy once.

“The implication being what? Now it was Meg’s turn? As if it were apples to apples.

Camilla also suggested to Meg that I become Governor General of Bermuda, which would solve all our problems by removing us from the red-hot center of the maelstrom.

“Right, right, I thought, and one added bonus of that plan would be to get us out of the picture.”

It’s not entirely clear from Harry’s book what prompted such a pivot after the initial advice to simply ignore the press.

In the 1970s, there had been talk of Charles becoming governor-general of Australia, but Queen Elizabeth II squashed the idea because she felt he would need to have already settled into married life.

Camilla no doubt felt it would be convenient, as Bermuda, a British overseas territory, is off the East Coast of the United States, but an inauspicious history would have hung over such a move.

Edward VIII was made governor-general of The Bahamas, in a move viewed by historians as his exile from Britain, after he abdicated the throne to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Comparisons would have been likely.

Needless to say, it represents one of the earliest known examples of active discussion in the monarchy of the possibility of Harry and Meghan living outside Britain and, if the book’s chronology is accurate, took place sometime before August 2017.