Meghan Markle set to celebrate 42nd birthday at Montecito mansion
Meghan Markle is celebrating her 42nd birthday, after a long line of grenades she has lobbed at the royal family.
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Meghan Markle is set to celebrate her 42nd birthday in what will likely be a low-key celebration with family and friends at her Montecito mansion.
Life has been a rollercoaster ride for the Duchess of Sussex, who has gone from a relatively unknown TV actress to one of the world’s most famous women in just five years since marrying Prince Harry.
As Meghan prepares to celebrates her big day on August 4, these are the dozens of grenades she has lobbed at the royal family, which has been mired in controversy since she came on the scene.
MEGHAN’S ‘POWER MOVE’
The union between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle appeared fraught with drama from the beginning, with reports that Buckingham Palace was not happy with the then Suits star’s choice of jewellery when she was dating the royal.
Finding Freedom author Omid Scobie claimed Palace aides scolded Meghan for stepping out in Toronto wearing a necklace bearing the initials “H” and “M” in a December 2016 outing as it “only served to encourage the photographers to keep pursuing such images”.
In 2019, in what was viewed as a “power move” against Palace officials, Meghan wore another necklace with her and her husband’s initials engraved to the US Open.
In another jewellery drama, the Duchess of Sussex caused controversy when she updated her engagement ring, ditching the Welsh gold traditionally used by the royal family for their wedding bands.
The original ring, designed by Prince Harry, featured a thick gold band with three diamonds, two of which belonged to the late Princess Diana.
Meghan sported a newer version featuring a thinner, diamond-studded micro-pave gold band at the 2019 Trooping the Colour.
At the time, Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty Magazine, queried why Meghan would want to change her ring, especially as Welsh gold is in extremely short supply.
WEDDING ROWS
The wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry will go down as one of the most drama-filled in royal history, mainly due to Meghan’s feud with the then Duchess of Cambridge.
The pair are said to have clashed over Catherine’s insistence that the flower girls wear tights in line with royal protocol, which Meghan disagreed with.
Meghan later told Oprah Winfrey in her explosive 2021 interview that Catherine “made me cry and it really hurt my feelings”.
Her candid comments exposed the feud between the sisters-in-law and a protective Prince William is said to have gone ballistic.
Just weeks after her wedding, Meghan again raised eyebrows with her refusal to follow royal protocol when she failed to wear a hat while on her first solo engagement with the late Queen.
Meghan hurled another “truth bomb” at the royals in relation to Catherine when she told Winfrey how she felt during the pair’s apparently friendly joint appearance at Wimbledon in 2019.
“It’s nothing like what it looks like,” Meghan told Winfrey.
In yet another wedding drama, Meghan is said to have angered the royals when she and Prince Harry announced at Princess Eugenie’s 2018 wedding to Jack Brooksbank that they were expecting their first child
“It didn’t go down particularly well with Eugenie, who a source said told friends she felt the couple should have waited to share the news,” Scobie wrote.
THE BUILD-UP TO MEGXIT
Meghan’s explosive 2019 interview in South Africa with ITN presenter Tom Bradby exposed the tensions within the royal family including Prince Harry’s feud with Prince William.
The Duchess of Sussex became visibly emotional as she admitted her past year as a member of the royal family had been “hard”.
“I really tried to adopt this British sensibility of a stiff upper lip,” she said. “I tried, I really tried, but I think that what that does internally is probably really damaging.”
Meghan would later claim on her Archetypes podcast that she had been forced to continue with royal engagements on the trip after a fire in son Archie’s nursery.
In November 2019, the Sussexes opted not to have Christmas with the royal family, a move that is said to have “disappointed” the late Queen.
Meghan delivered her biggest grenade yet in January 2022 when the Sussexes announced they were stepping back as senior members of the royal family and would split their time between Britain and the US.
After ten days of talks between senior family members, it is agreed the couple will no longer be working royals.
In March 2020, Harry and Meghan carry out their last official engagement at the annual Commonwealth Day service in London and leave for California in a move dubbed “Megxit”.
ALLEGATIONS OF RACISM
In her infamous Oprah Winfrey interview in March 2021, Meghan claimed there had been “conversations” within the royal family about her then-unborn first child’s skin tone.
The comments plunged the royals into crisis, with Prince William vehemently denying the family was racist when approached by a reporter during a visit to a school with wife Catherine.
Meghan also claimed the royal family refused to help her when she was feeling suicidal and that they refused to give her son Archie a royal title.
Archie and his sister were later officially named as prince and princess when King Charles acceded to the throne in 2023.
When Meghan and Harry welcomed their daughter months after the Winfrey interview, it was announced the child would be called Lilibet, after the late Queen’s pet nickname.
Senior royals were said to be bemused by Meghan’s choice of name as it was always considered personal to the Queen.
ISSUES WITH ROYAL AIDES
Meghan’s issues with royal life allegedly included the famous walkabouts the family is famous for.
She allegedly said while in Sydney in 2018: “I can’t believe I’m not getting paid for this.”
Valentine Low, a royal correspondent for The Times, wrote that Meghan “failed to understand the point of all those walkabouts”.
The Duchess was also accused of bullying royal staffers — which she vehemently denied — amid reports in The Times that she drove two personal assistants out of the household and reduced one employee to tears.
She was later accused of being “rude” and “passive aggressive” to a royal aide during a Windsor Castle walkabout after the Queen’s death.
In the Sussexes’ explosive Netflix series Harry & Meghan, the Duchess hit out at The Firm, claiming she “wasn’t being thrown to the wolves, I was being fed to the wolves.”
NETFLIX BOMBSHELLS
Prince Harry and Meghan’s tell-all Netflix series rocked the royal family with its revelations and one infamous scene proved particularly cringe-worthy.
Her re-enactment of the deep curtsy she supposedly offered the Queen during their first meeting, while a bemused Prince Harry looked on, sparked anger among royal fans.
Meghan also revealed that she first met Prince William and Catherine while wearing a ripped pair of jeans and said she didn’t realise hugging was jarring for a lot of British people.
“I guess I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside,” she said.
The Duchess described her engagement interview as “an orchestrated reality show” and said she “rarely wore colour” during her time in the UK as she understood you could not wear the same colour as the Queen in a group event.
She said she was not given lessons in protocol and had to google the national anthem in order to learn the words.
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