Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have shared some insights into their life in a new Netflix documentary
Harry asked Meghan if she knew how to curtsy before meeting his grandmother
Harry described during episode two how Meghan meeting the Queen for the first time was a “shock to the system”.
Harry said: “My grandmother was the first senior member of the family that Meghan met. She had no idea what it all consisted of so it was a bit of a shock to the system for her.” Meghan said: “There wasn’t like some big moment of ‘Now you’re going to meet my grandmother’. I didn’t know I was going to meet her until moments before.
“We were in the car and we were going to Royal Lodge for lunch, and he’s like ‘Oh, my grandmother’s here, we’re going to meet her after church.’ And I remember we were in the car driving up and he’s like ‘You know how to curtsy, right?’ And I just thought it was a joke.”
Harry said: “How do you explain that to people? How do you explain that you bow to your grandmother? And that you will need to curtsy. Especially to an American. That’s weird.”
Meghan added: “Now I’m starting to realise ‘This is a big deal’. I mean, Americans will understand this… We have medieval times, dinner and tournament. It was like that.”
Meghan said she found the “formality” of being in the royal family “surprising”.
She said: “When Will and Kate came over, and I met her for the first time, they came over for dinner, I remember I was in ripped jeans and I was barefoot.
“I was a hugger. I’ve always been a hugger, I didn’t realise that that is really jarring for a lot of Brits.
“I guess I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside.
“There is a forward-facing way of being, and then you close the door and go ‘You can relax now’, but that formality carries over on both sides. And that was surprising to me.”
Harry says wearing a Nazi uniform in 2005 is one of his biggest mistakes
Harry spoke about when he wore a Nazi uniform to a private party in 2005 during episode three of his Netflix series.
He said: “It was probably one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I felt so ashamed afterwards. All I wanted to do was make it right.” He said there is a “huge level of unconscious bias” in the royal family.
The documentary referenced when Princess Michael of Kent wore a Blackamoor-style brooch to an event the Duchess of Sussex attended in 2017.
Harry said: “In this family, sometimes you are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. There is a huge level of unconscious bias.
“The thing with unconscious bias, it is actually no one’s fault. But once it has been pointed out, or identified within yourself you then need to make it right.
“It is education. It is awareness. It is a constant work in progress for everybody, including me.”
The royal family didn’t understand why Meghan needed protection from the press
Harry has said members of the British royal family asked why Meghan should be “protected” when they questioned newspaper headlines about her.
Speaking in episode two of Harry & Meghan, he said: “The direction from the Palace was don’t say anything.
“But what people need to understand is, as far as a lot of the family were concerned, everything that she was being put through, they had been put through as well.
“So it was almost like a rite of passage, and some of the members of the family were like ‘my wife had to go through that, so why should your girlfriend be treated any differently? Why should you get special treatment? Why should she be protected?’”
“I said ‘the difference here is the race element’.”
Meghan says she was never close enough to her half-sister to have a falling out
In episode three, Meghan addressed her relationship with her elder half-sister Samantha Markle.
She said: “The UK media, I truly believe, wanted my mum’s side of my family to be the ones that all this drama could be stirred up with and they just had my mum who is classy and quiet, and then you have the other side of my family that is just acting differently.
“My half-sister, who I hadn’t seen for over a decade, and that was only for a day and a half, suddenly it felt like she was everywhere. I don’t know your middle name, I don’t know your birthday. You are telling these people that you raised me and you are calling me Princess Pushy?”
Meghan added that she didn’t have a “fall out” with Samantha, adding: “We didn’t have a closeness to be able to have (one) – and I wanted a sister.”
Harry also admitted he “shouldered” the breakdown of Meghan’s relationship with her father, Thomas Markle.
The pair have been estranged since he was caught staging paparazzi photographs ahead of her wedding.
Harry said: “Of course it is incredibly sad what happened.
“She had a father before this and now she doesn’t have a father.
“And I shouldered that because if Meg wasn’t with me, then her dad would still be her dad.”
Their parents’ divorces shaped their own marriage
Harry has spoken of being “pulled from one place to another” during his parents’ divorce.
Speaking in episode two, he said: “I think most kids who are the product of divorced parents have a lot in common, no matter what your background is.
“Being pulled from one place to another, or maybe your parents are competitive, or you’re in one place longer than you want to be in, you’re in another place less than you want to be…
“There’s all sorts of pieces to that.”
Harry and Meghan were keen “not to make the same mistakes our parents did” while bringing up their children.
They spoke about how the breakdown of their parents’ marriages had affected their approach to raising son Archie, three, and daughter Lilibet, one.
Meghan said: “There’s so much from anyone’s childhood that you bring with you into the present. Especially when you’re the product of divorce.” Harry added: “What’s most important to the two of us is to make sure that we don’t repeat the same mistakes that perhaps our parents made.”
“I think most kids who are the product of divorced parents have a lot in common, no matter what your background is.
“Being pulled from once place to another or maybe your parents are competitive, or you’re in one place longer than you want to be or in another place less than you want to be. There’s all sorts of pieces to that.”
Harry and Meghan say racist press coverage was there from the start of their relationship
Episode two of Harry & Meghan looked at some of the headlines in the UK tabloid press ahead of Kensington Palace’s statement on the media’s treatment of Meghan, They included “Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton”.
Meghan said: “Firstly, I’m not from Compton, I’ve never lived in Compton, so it’s factually incorrect. But why do you have to make a dig at Compton?”
Other headlines shown in the Netflix documentary are “One’s gone GanstER”, and another saying Meghan’s ancestors were a “tailor, a teacher and a cleaner in racially divided Jim Crow South”.
Harry said: “Eight days after the relationship became public I put out a statement calling out the racist undertones of articles and headlines that were written by the British press as well as outright racism from those articles across social media.”
Speaking about the press coverage of Meghan’s background, her mother Doria Ragland said paparazzi would take pictures of deprived neighbourhoods in Los Angeles.
Ms Ragland told the Netflix documentary: “They would take pictures of different parts of say Skid Row and say that is where I lived and that is where she was from.” “It was horrible,” Meghan said.
“But I continued to hold the line. Say nothing.”
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