After months of carefully worded statements and media speculation, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sat down with Oprah Winfrey for a tell-all interview detailing their split from the UK royal family, which showed in the US on Sunday night.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex confirmed that “no subject was off limits” for the interview and, as expected, the couple shared many revelations.
Here are five of the most shocking things we learnt from the interview:
Concerns over Archie’s skin colour
Members of the royal family expressed concerns to Prince Harry about how dark his son, Archie's, skin colour would be ahead of his birth, the duchess told Winfrey during one of the interview's most shocking moments.
Revealing she was told when pregnant that her son would not receive a royal title, and therefore the same level of protection as other members of the family, she said: "The first member of colour in this family not being titled in the same way that other grandchildren were…
"We were very scared having to offer up our baby, knowing they weren't going to be kept safe," she added.
"In those months when I was pregnant, all around the 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."
"What? Who is having that conversation with you?" Winfrey asked. "There's a conversation with you ...? Hold up. There's a conversation?"
There are several conversations ... with Harry," Meghan said.
"With how dark your baby is going to be?" Winfrey asked.
"Potentially. And what that would mean or look like," Meghan said.
"And you're not going to tell me who had that conversation?" Winfrey said.
"I think that it would be very damaging to them," Meghan answered. "That was relayed to me from Harry. Those were conversations that family had with him."
Meghan says Kate made her cry
The relationship between Meghan and Kate Middleton, wives of brothers Prince Harry and Prince William, was the subject of much media speculation ahead of Markle’s 2018 wedding and in the years since.
Addressing tabloid rumours that the pair had a row over flower girls’ dresses, Markle said it was the Duchess of Cambridge who made her cry, not the other way round as reported in the media at the time.
“I don’t say that to be disparaging to anyone because it was a really hard week of the wedding and she was upset about something,” she said. “A few days before the wedding, she was upset about something. Yes, the issue was correct, about flower girl dresses.
“I thought in the context of everything else going on in the days leading to the wedding, it didn’t make sense to not doing what everyone else was doing, which was being supportive,” said Meghan, whose father had two heart attacks in the weeks ahead of her wedding.
“What was hard to get over was being blamed for something that not only I didn’t do, but what happened to me and the people that were a part of my wedding going to my comms team, saying, 'I know this didn’t happen',” she added. “Everyone in the institution knew it wasn’t true ...”
When asked why the Palace did not clear up rumours at the time, she told Winfrey: “I don’t know why. I can see now what layers were at play there ... They really seemed to want a narrative of a hero and a villain.”
The pair were secretly married three days before their Windsor Castle wedding
In the first few minutes of the interview, Meghan revealed that she married Prince Harry in private, three days before her Windsor Castle wedding which was watched around the world.
“You know, three days before our wedding, we got married," Markle told Winfrey. "No one knows that. But we called the archbishop, and we just said, 'Look, this spectacle is for the world, but we want our union between us.'
"The vows that we have framed in our room are just the two of us in our backyard with the Archbishop of Canterbury," she explained, as Harry added: "Just the three of us."
Prince Charles ‘stopped taking Harry’s calls’
Prince Harry said that his father Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, had stopped taking his calls.
He denied blindsiding his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, over stepping back as a senior member of the royal family, saying he had too much respect for her.
“I had three conversations with my grandmother and two conversations with my father before he stopped taking my calls. And then he said, ‘can you put this all in writing?’”
Asked why Charles had stopped taking his calls, Harry said: “By that point I took matters into my own hands, it was like, I needed to do this for my family. This is not a surprise to anybody. It’s really sad that it’s got to this point, but I’ve got to do something for my own mental health, my wife’s and for Archie’s as well.”
Harry reveals their second child is a girl
Harry and Meghan revealed they were expecting their second child on Valentine's Day, with a sweet black and white image of the pair posed in their California garden. And, during their interview with Winfrey, they revealed they were expecting a girl.
“To have a boy then a girl — what more can you ask for?" Harry said.
They also said they will not have any more children following their baby girl's arrival. "Two is it," Harry said.
