Our Duchess, Meghan, came home with her Anglo-American brood, and everybody seems to have taken leave of their cotton-picking minds.
What’s going on?
Is Kinsey Schofield, from the coulisses, fomenting their unmoored worst impulses? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea9L5GM1XDI
Because judging by the reaction in certain corners of the internet, one might imagine Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, had arrived in Britain at the head of a conquering army, rather than aboard a private jet with her husband, two children, and two beloved family dogs.
Under one recent Kinsey Schofield video, the comments descended into something approaching hysteria. Harry and Meghan were called “grifters,” “slime” and “vile.” There were demands that their titles be stripped, their access curtailed and that they essentially be banished from royal life altogether, all before anyone had even had breakfast.
And why? Because the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had simply returned home.
And what a homecoming it is.
After six years in California, Prince Harry has brought his wife and their children back to the country of his birth. Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet are beginning an Anglo-American childhood that may stretch between California sunshine and the green folds of the English countryside.
There is something rather beautiful about that. Yet somehow beauty has been almost completely lost in the noise, as others gnash their teeth at the sight of a beautiful duchess and her equally beautiful family simply coming home.
SHE IS our DUCHESS
For years, an extraordinary amount of energy has been devoted to telling us who they want us to believe Meghan is.
Difficult. Calculating. Manipulative. Ambitious. Hollywood. American. An outsider. A bully. Even her character and morality have been picked apart.
Anything, it seems, except simply Meghan.
The implication is unmistakable: “she isn’t one of us”. Didn’t Richard Eden or was it Dickie Arbiter who actually said exactly those words? The implication is unmistakable.
What a tribal, unwelcoming and profoundly inhospitable sentiment.
Except there is one small problem. Who exactly is “us”? Because there are plenty of “us” who look at Meghan and see something altogether different.
We see the young woman who walked into St George’s Chapel on a glorious May morning and became the Duchess of Sussex.
We see a woman who arrived with a life already lived: educated, accomplished, stylish, financially independent and accustomed to earning her own place at the table.
We see a woman who married a prince without surrendering her essential self.
And when royal life became untenable, she did something women have been told for centuries not to do.
She left.
AND THEN SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAPPENED
She flourished. Yes, she did. Perhaps that is the part nobody quite knows what to do with. She made it! The woman who was supposedly destined for irrelevance built an entirely new life.
There was Montecito. A magnificent house beneath the California sun. Children. Businesses. Philanthropy. Friends. Gardens. Dogs. Dinner parties. As Ever. She is not done yet, barely getting started to be honest.
And now back to England.
Not an apologetic return to palace corridors, waiting for somebody to hand her a programme of engagements. Something infinitely more seductive. England on her own terms. If current reports are correct, somewhere in the Cotswolds there is a beautiful old house waiting for this thoroughly modern duchess and her family.
Imagine it.
Muddy boots beside the back door. A fire burning in November. Harry disappearing across the fields with the dogs. Archie and Lilibet tumbling home from school. Meghan in a beautifully cut tweed jacket stopping at Daylesford before lunch.
California lemons on an old English kitchen table.
It’s Montecito meets the Cotswolds. And don’t you dare tell me that isn’t delicious.
THE PEOPLE GET TO CHOOSE THEIR DUCHESS
Perhaps this is what some of Meghan’s detractors have never understood.
Titles may be bestowed by monarchs. Affection isn’t. No columnist can order us to dislike Meghan. No commentator can declare her unacceptable and expect millions of people obediently to avert their eyes. The public gets to decide whom it finds interesting. Whom it admires. Whom it roots for.
And there are people all over the world who see something aspirational in Meghan precisely because she refused to disappear when the fairy tale went wrong. She changed the ending.
That required skill, maturity and experience. That required coming to the game already formed. Meghan knew who Meghan was before the world tried to persuade us to believe a distorted narrative about her. And by holding her own—confidently, consistently and unmistakably—she gave her supporters, and even objective onlookers, the opportunity to discover the real Meghan for themselves.
There is a lesson in that for every woman who has ever been made to feel that she should be grateful simply to have been invited into the room. Sometimes people will convince you that leaving their table means you will go hungry. Then you leave. And discover other tables. Better conversation. More interesting people. Perhaps even a better view.
So let the internet howl. Let them demand exile and confiscated titles. Let them insist that Meghan isn’t one of them. Perhaps she isn’t. She is something considerably more interesting. The American who became an English duchess without ceasing to be American. The royal who discovered that there is life beyond the palace gates. The woman who left Britain beneath a storm of headlines and returned six years later with her husband beside her, her children behind her and an entire life of her own.
She doesn’t need everyone to love her. She certainly doesn’t need permission to come home. Because while some people are still arguing about whether Meghan belongs, the rest of us have already decided that she is OUR Duchess.
Now somebody pour the woman a glass of champagne. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is home.
Designed by Marion T.D. Lewis
Images by ChatGPT
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