Meghan Markle recently sparked outrage among friends of the royal family after publishing a message addressing herself as “Your Royal Highness” via The Daily Beast.
Markle and Harry never formally surrendered their His/Her Royal Highness (HRH) titles but agreed to stop using them after they quit the royal family and left the United Kingdom. Until now, the deal had held despite growing calls in the U.K. for the couple to be stripped of their titles.
However, Markle called that agreement into question by publishing a letter from Ukraine’s vice president on Instagram using the greeting this weekend.
Buckingham Palace declined to comment. However, a friend of King Charles III told The Daily Beast that he would be dismayed at Markle posting a screengrab to Instagram of a message from a senior Ukrainian’s vice prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, that began, “Your Royal Highness, I would like to express my sincere thanks for everything your family is doing for Ukraine.”
“It’s outrageous. Every time you think they can’t make it worse, they make it worse,” the friend of the king said. “The deal with the HRH was a way to stop them cashing in while letting them walk away with pride and dignity and trust, and now Markle is using her HRH on a website which seems to exist to sell jam.”
“They say they want reconciliation,” the source added. “I’m sure the king’s first reaction will be dismay, but he simply doesn’t allow himself to get angry about things like this anymore.”
A friend of Prince William’s said: “It’s actually quite a clever way of testing the water, because there is deniability there, she can say, ‘Well, I just wanted to publish this nice letter to raise awareness for Ukraine, and oops! they got my name wrong—but oh, actually, now I think of it, I never gave the title up anyway, and maybe I will start using it again.‘”
“It’s a step in the wrong direction, basically, away from the agreement. You’d have to be an idiot to believe that she didn’t know exactly what she was doing when she posted that message, unedited, to her stories.”
An expert in heraldry who knows the family told The Daily Beast: “There were plenty of people at the time who said it was a mistake to make not using the title a mere gentleman’s agreement rather than just removing it. This post may not matter in and of itself, but it raises a bigger question: What are they going to do if she simply starts using her HRH again? She probably can’t be stopped as things stand right now. The bottom line is, she is, officially, an HRH. It was never removed.”
