Harry's Last Dance: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Not Allowed To March In With The Queen

Yesterday's Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey was the happiest situation, at which Meghan Markle was instantaneously being reintroduced to the larger Royal Family and, also, serving her valediction to it in service to the Queen. But the event worked out in a curious way, and gave us all a good solid glimpse of them in their last full complement, doing proper duty under significant intramural pressures. The reported sticking point was the procession into the church, as per the court gossip and a few of the lead coursing hounds of press on the royal beat.

The issue was: The courtiers mandated with fashioning the architecture of the service — and the Queen and Charles, who would have signed off on it — apparently left Harry and Meghan out of the traditional inner-family procession into the church behind the Queen. Put another way, Harry and Meghan Markle, as outgoing royals — were to be seated with other minor royals such as Prince Edward and Sophie of Wessex in advance of the Queen's annual processional arrival with Charles, Camilla, William and Kate.

The programs for the service were printed publicizing this architecture. Last year, Harry and Meghan had been in the thick of it, marching in with the Queen. This year, no.

Obviously, given their two-month-long fight to retain any shared of royalty that they could make stick to them, the structure of the program didn't sit well with Harry or Ms Markle, who exposed their displeasure to the point that an adjustment had to be made. It seems to be detail participation in that procession, but, allegedly, it was not. Solely unclear is to whom, of the Sussex couple, did being left out of the procession mean so much. Did it matter more to Harry, given his rapprochement luncheon with his grandmother? The procession was composed of Harry's immediate family. Or was Ms Markle the likelier to have her Hollywood Emmys-seating antennae rubbed the wrong way by the step-down in status?

In the larger sense, the event and the soon-to-be un-royal couple's response to it give us fair room to ask what, exactly, the Sussexes want or hope to accomplish with such strivings for the minor trappings of royalty. If they are going to keep doing this — keep dogging the details so closely and microscopically — As a royal Harry doesn't have much left to prove. He is and will foreseeably remain sixth in line to the throne. His grandmother, who is very much still running the show, has reassured him that he is always welcome back, and in fact, that is the express purpose of the 12-month "review period" built into the Megxit agreement with Buckingham Palace.

Source:Forbes.com