By Marisa Laudadio
1:31pm PST, Feb 27, 2026
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Before they stepped back from their lives as working British royals six years ago, there were already suspicions
Prince Harry and
Meghan Markle had a very different future in mind, as their behavior raised concerns among palace courtiers.
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After
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle made it clear to palace courtiers they wanted to step back as senior royals in early 2020, the late
Queen Elizabeth II,
King Charles III and
Prince William ordered their staffs to find a way to keep the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in the royal fold. In the new biography
William and Catherine: The Monarchy's New Era: The Inside Story, author
Russell Myers writes about how palace officials had spent a significant amount of time and energy trying to find a solution for the unhappy couple,
RadarOnline.com reported. "We'd spent months trying to work out a role for them, and every time we thought someone had cracked it, there would end up being several reasons why it couldn't work," a senior palace source told Myers.
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Palace officials explored multiple options to keep
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tied to The Firm, but nothing seemed to fit. "Harry being governor-general of Canada wouldn't happen because you need to be Canadian; various ideas of them working across Africa had security implications, or someone else was already doing the job," a senior palace source told author Russell Myers, calling it "almost an impossible task."
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But behind the scenes, aides began to suspect the real issue wasn't logistics but priorities. "We already knew they were intent on signing commercial deals, and that just wasn't going to work within the model," a senior palace source told author Russell Myers, who is also the royal editor of Britain's Daily Mirror. "So we kept saying to them, 'How do you want this to work? Do you actually have a tangible plan that could help us?' But we got nothing in return."
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Months after leaving the U.K. and moving to California in 2020,
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle signed lucrative multimillion-dollar deals with Netflix and Spotify, seemingly confirming what palace insiders had suspected all along. The Duke of Sussex, however, has insisted those deals were born out of necessity after King Charles III cut him off financially. Streaming services were "never a part of the plan" because "we didn't have a plan," the duke told
Oprah Winfrey in a bombshell-filled CBS interview in 2021. "That was suggested by somebody else, by the point where my family literally cut me off financially, and I had to afford security for us."
