In the fifth episode of the Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan, the Duke of Sussex said it was “terrifying” for his brother, now the Prince of Wales, to “scream and shout” at him during a meeting on January 13 at Sandringham about plans for Harry and his wife, the Duchess of Sussex, to move abroad.
He said: “I went in with the same proposal that we’d already made publicly, but once I got there I was given five options – one being all in, no change, five being all out. I chose option three in the meeting – half in, half out. Have our own jobs but also work in support of the Queen.
“It became very clear very quickly that goal was not up for discussion or debate. It was terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me and my father say things that just simply weren’t true. And my grandmother, you know, quietly sit there and take it all in.
“But you have to understand that, from the family’s perspective, especially from hers, there are ways of doing things and her ultimate, sort of, mission, goal/responsibility is the institution.”
The Duke of Sussex said he wrote to his father, the then Prince of Wales, in January 2020 to say that he and his wife would be willing to relinquish their titles if the couple’s plan to move to Canada as working royals did not work out.
In the fifth episode of the Netflix series Harry & Meghan, Harry said: “By the time I was speaking to my father from Canada, the family and their people knew that we were trying to find a different way of working for the minimum of two years.
“Canada, I was speaking to my father, ‘This is the plan’, and he says ‘Can you put it in writing’, and I said I would rather not because of what happened last time…
“And he said ‘I can’t do anything unless you put it in writing’. So I put it in writing, sent him emails on the 1st and the 2nd and the 3rd of January. And in one of those I had mentioned that if this wasn’t going to work out, then we would be willing to relinquish our Sussex titles if need be. So that was the plan.”
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