Among them: Archie, her now nearly two-year-old son with husband Prince Harry, was not offered any royal titles or patronage.
While she got pregnant with him, Meghan said, she was told the royal family did not want the baby to be given the title of a prince / princess. That meant he would get none of the security usually offered to royal children.
The logic of The Firm (as the royal family is often called) seemed to be that because he wasn’t going to be a prince, he didn’t need protection, Meghan said.
“He must be safe,” she told Oprah. If you say the title is going to affect their protection – we didn’t make this monster machine around us, in terms of clickbait and tabloid fodder. You have [The Firm] let that happen, which means our son must be safe. “
She did not explain who in the royal family made these decisions.
CBS The Duchess of Sussex, pictured during her interview with Oprah Winfrey.
The Archie title itself didn’t really matter to the couple, Meghan said. “All the greatness around this stuff is an attachment I don’t really have.”
But in addition to learning that their baby would not be protected, they also seemed that the rules were being changed in a way that would have a negative effect on their child.
There was the “idea that our son was not safe, and also the idea that the first member of a color in this family was not given the same title as other grandchildren.”
It was hard not to consider Meghan’s race, and the baby, she said, because of other conversations she knew were going on in the background.
Did that mean, Oprah asked, that if the baby was “too brown that would be a problem?”
“I couldn’t figure out why, but if that’s the assumption you’re making, I think that feels like a pretty safe one,” said Meghan. “Which is really hard to understand.”
Pool via Getty Images The Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their infant son Archie Mountbatten-Windsor meet Archbishop Desmond Tutu during their royal tour of South Africa on September 25, 2019 in Cape Town.
The only child to automatically receive the title of Prince is Prince George, the first child of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and that’s because he is the eldest son of the eldest son of the monarch’s heir.