Meghan Markle joined Prince Harry outside Windsor Castle this weekend to greet and gather flowers from members of the public paying tribute to the Queen after her death on Thursday. Having stepped down as a senior royal in March 2020, The Duchess of Sussex didn’t have to be there. But she came anyway—holding Harry’s hand, hugging anyone who needed comfort.
As she made her way along the crowd that lined the driveway, a woman was seen dropping her head to avoid Meghan’s gaze. After The Duchess of Sussex moved on, she turned to the person next to her and seemingly smirked, shaking her head and laughing while many others neglected to hold their hands out for a greeting, looking to the side and awkwardly adjusting their hair.
Smirking and giggling, this move has now been heralded a ‘snub’ by the tabloid press. ‘Look at how they are treating her,’ read one [now viral] Tweet. ‘A whole middle-aged woman acting like a petty teenage girl,’ added another.
But teenage girls are behaving better than that, actually. One fourteen-year-old was interviewed by CNN after spontaneously offering a hug to Meghan: ‘I just wanted to show her that she’s welcome here…I wanted to hug her after everything that’s happened,’ she said.
Politicians in the middle of conflict, footballers who’ve just lost career-altering matches, family members who despise each other at Christmas: all shake hands out of courtesy and respect—even when they don’t want to. The inability to show Meghan the same generosity goes against the diplomatic legacy of the woman these snobbish adults are supposedly there to honour.
‘Meghan Markle trashed the royal family when the Queen's beloved husband was dying and continued to do so just weeks before her death,’ broadcaster Sophie Corcoran claimed on Sky News. ‘The reason people in this country don’t like Meghan has nothing to [do] with her race and everything to do with the fact that she’s not a nice person.’
But, regardless of the genesis of this hostility, if you support the royal family enough to spend hours of your life waiting for them outside the gates of Windsor, then show them support by following their lead and being kind: 'I want to express my love for Harry and Meghan as they continued to build their lives overseas,’ King Charles said in his first speech as King in what is now being described as an ‘olive branch’ moment for the family.
‘The queen…has always been wonderful to me,’ Meghan made clear in March 2021 after she'd stepped down from royal duties. And, despite perhaps anticipating that there would be some hostility towards her, Meghan has stayed in England to support her husband and the rest of her family because Queen Elizabeth is Harry’s granny who they loved and named their daughter after. She doesn't deserve to be punished for that.