Meghan Markle Breaks Silence on Duchess Kate Feud, Plus More Revelations From Tell-All CBS Interview

Harry and Meghan Get Candid About Any ‘Regrets’ They Have

After being asked if they had any regrets, Harry said “no” because he’s “really proud” of how far he and Meghan have come. “I’m so proud of my wife. Like, she safely delivered Archie during a period of time which was so cruel and so mean,” he marveled. “And every single day I was coming back from work, from London, I was coming back to my wife crying while breastfeeding Archie. That’s coming from someone who wasn’t reading anything. And as she touched on earlier, if she had read anything, she wouldn’t be here now. So, we did what we had to do, and now we’ve got another little one on the way.”

However, Meghan said she has just “one” regret. “My regret is believing them when they said I would be protected. I believed that. And I regret believing that because I think, had I really seen that that wasn’t happening, I would have been able to do more. But I think I wasn’t supposed to see it. I wasn’t supposed to know,” she shared. “And now, because we’re actually on the other side, we’ve actually not just survived but are thriving. You know, this — I mean, this is miracles. I think that all of those things that I was hoping for have happened, and this is in some ways just the beginning for us. You know, we’ve been through a lot. It’s felt like a lifetime.”

Harry Says Late Mom Diana Would be ‘Angry’ With the Royal Family Situation

“I think she would feel very angry with how this has panned out, and very sad,” Harry revealed. “But ultimately, all she’d ever want is for us to be happy.”

After sharing his thoughts on how Diana would react to the situation, Harry noted he chose to step back because his “biggest concern was history repeating itself.”

“From this constant barrage … I’ve said that before on numerous occasions, very publicly. And what I was seeing was history repeating itself, but more, perhaps — or definitely far more dangerous, because then you add race in and you add social media in,” he explained. “And when I’m talking about history repeating itself, I’m talking about my mother. When you can see something happening in the same kind of way, anybody would ask for help, ask the system of which you are a part of, especially when you know there’s a relationship there, that they could help and share some truth or call … call the dogs off, whatever you want to call it. So, to receive no help at all and to be told continuously, ‘This is how it is. This is just how it is. We’ve all been through it.’ And I think [that was] the biggest turning point for me — and it didn’t take very long.”

Harry Talks About His Relationship With Brother Prince William

“Much will continue to be said about that,” Harry said of his relationship and alleged feud with brother Prince William. “You know, as I’ve said before, I love William to bits. He’s my brother. We’ve been through hell together. I mean, we have a shared experience. But we — you know, we’re on — we’re on different paths.”

Harry later added, “The relationship is space, at the moment. And, you know, time heals all things, hopefully.”

Meghan Reveals She Had Thoughts of Suicide

“I was really ashamed to say it at the time and ashamed to have to admit it to Harry, especially, because I know how much loss he’s suffered. But I knew that if I didn’t say it, that I would do it. And I just didn’t … I just didn’t want to be alive anymore. And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought,” she shared through tears. “And I remember how he just cradled me. And I was — I went to the institution, and I said that I needed to go somewhere to get help. I said that ‘I’ve never felt this way before, and I need to go somewhere.’ And I was told that I couldn’t, that it wouldn’t be good for the institution.”

Meghan also shared that it was “very, very clear” that she had thoughts about harming herself. “I thought it would have solved everything for everyone, right?” she stated.

Harry Says Their Security Was Taken Away After Stepping Down

Following their decision to step down from the royal family, Harry said their security was taken away. “Their justification is a change in status, of which I pushed back and said, ‘Well, is there a change of threat or risk?’ And after many weeks of waiting, eventually, I got the confirmation that, no, the risk and threat hasn’t changed, but due to our change of status, which we would no longer be official working members of the royal family, they’re obviously — what we proposed was sort of part-time, or at least as much as we could do without being fully consumed because of, I think, what most of you guys have covered already.”

Meghan added, “We actually didn’t talk about that. It’s been so spun in the wrong direction, as though we quit, we walked away, we — all the conversations of the two years before we finally announced it.”

Harry Says Father Prince Charles ‘Stopped’ Taking His Calls

“When we were in Canada, I had three conversations with my grandmother and two conversations with my father and — before he stopped taking my calls — and then said, ‘Can you put this all in writing what your plan is?'” Harry remembered. “He asked me to put it in writing, and I put all the specifics in there, even the fact that we were planning on putting the announcement out on the 7th of January. [He stopped taking my calls] because I took matters into my own hands. It was like I need to do this for my family. This is not a surprise to anybody. It’s really sad that it’s gotten to this point, but I’ve got to do something for my own mental health, my wife’s, and for Archie’s, as well, because I could see where this was headed.”

Meghan Opens Up About Why Archie Wasn’t Going to Get a Royal Title

“In those months when I was pregnant, all around this same time — so we have in tandem the conversation of ‘He won’t be given security, he’s not going to be given a title,’ and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born,” she revealed. “There were several conversations about it [how dark the baby would be] and what that would mean or look like.

When Meghan was asked if there was concern that he would be too “brown,” she said she “wasn’t able to follow up with why” Archie wouldn’t receive a title or security. “If that’s the assumption you’re making, I think that feels like a pretty safe one, which was really hard to understand, right?” she went on. “Especially when look, the commonwealth is a huge part of the monarchy, and I lived in Canada, which is a commonwealth country, for seven years. But it wasn’t until Harry and I were together that we started to travel through the commonwealth, I would say 60%, 70% of which is people of color, right?”

On March 8, it was revealed in additional clips that Harry said the conversations surrounding Archie’s “skin tone” did not involve his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, or his grandfather, Prince Philip.

Meghan Says She Could Not Have Felt ‘Lonelier’ During Her Time in the Royal Family

“I remember so often people within the firm would say, ‘Well, you can’t do this because it’ll look like that. [I would say,] ‘Can I go and have lunch with my friends?’ ‘No, no, no. You’re oversaturated. You’re everywhere. It would be best for you to not go out to lunch with your friends,'” Meghan recalled. “I go, ‘Well, I haven’t left the house in months.’ I mean, there was a day that one of the members of the family, she came over, and she said, ‘Why don’t you just lay low for a little while, because you are everywhere right now.’ And I said, ‘I’ve left the house twice in four months. I’m everywhere, but I am nowhere.’ And from that standpoint, I continued to say to people, ‘I know there’s an obsession with how things look, but has anyone talked about how it feels? Because right now, I could not feel lonelier.'”

Meghan Says She Didn’t Feel ‘Protected’ By the Royal Family

“I believed that [I was being protected]. And think that was, that was really hard to reconcile because it was only, it was only once we were married and everything started to really worsen that I came to understand that not only was I not being protected but that they were willing to lie to protect other members of the family, but they weren’t willing to tell the truth to protect me and my husband,” she confessed.

“It’s hard for people to distinguish the two because there’s, it’s a family business, right? So, there’s the family, and then there’s the people that are running the institution. Those are two separate things,” Meghan continued. “And it’s important to be able to compartmentalize that, because the queen, for example, has always been wonderful to me. I mean, we had one of our first joint engagements together.”

Meghan ‘Didn’t Fully Understand’ What Being a Royal Meant

“I will say I went into it naively. I didn’t grow up with the royal family. It wasn’t part of the conversation at home. It wasn’t something that we followed,” Meghan explained. “My mom said to me a couple of months ago, ‘Did Diana ever do an interview?’ And now, now I can say, ‘Yes. A very famous one,’ but my mom doesn’t even know that. I didn’t do any research about [the royal family]. I’ve never looked at my husband online, I just didn’t feel the need to because everything that I needed to know he was sharing with me well … everything that I thought I needed to know he was telling me.”

“We thought about what we thought it might be,” she continued. “I didn’t fully understand what the job was … what does it mean to be a working royal? What do you do? What does that mean? I knew that he and I were very aligned on all of our cause-driven work, that was part of it our initial connection and we talked about in the beginning of our courtship, but I think there was no way to understand what the day-to-day going to be like and it’s so different because I didn’t romanticize any element of it but I think as Americans especially what you know about the royals? It’s just what you read in fairytales.

Meghan and Harry’s Official Wedding Date Wasn’t May 19

“It’s really fulfilling, and just getting back down to basics,” the former actress said about their carefree life in Santa Barbara. “I mean, I was thinking about that. Even at our wedding, you know, three days before our wedding, we got married. No one knows that. But we called the archbishop, and we just said, ‘Look, this thing, this spectacle is for the world, but we want our union between us.’ So, like, the vows that we have framed in our room are just the two of us in our backyard with the archbishop of Canterbury, and that was the piece that.”

Meghan Says There Was Never a Feud With Duchess Kate

“The narrative with Kate — it didn’t happen,” Meghan revealed while talking about her alleged feud with Duchess Kate (née Middleton). “[The situation] was really, really difficult and something that — I think that’s when everything changed, really.”

Meghan also answered “no” when asked if she made the Duchess of Cambridge cry. “No, no. The reverse happened. And I don’t say that to be disparaging to anyone, because it was a really hard week of the wedding. And she was upset about something, but she owned it, and she apologized,” she shared. “And she brought me flowers and a note, apologizing. And she did what I would do if I knew that I hurt someone, right, to just take accountability for it. What was shocking was — what was that, six, seven months after our wedding?”

Meghan Says She Has No Relationship With Half-Sister Samantha

Meghan said she was raised as an “only child” after being asked about her half-sister Samantha‘s scathing book, The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister: Part 1.

“I think it would be very hard to tell all when you don’t know me,” Meghan said about Samantha, who is 17 years her senior. “This is a very different situation than my dad, right? When you talk about betrayal, betrayal comes from someone that you have a relationship with. I don’t feel comfortable talking about people that I really don’t know.”

Meghan also added Samantha changed her last name back to Markle after Meghan and Harry took their relationship public. “I think that says enough,” the Duchess shared.

Meghan Opens Up About Her Father and Mother

Meghan talked about her estranged father, Thomas Markle, and how she felt after it was revealed he was working with the tabloids ahead of her 2018 wedding.

“We called my dad, and I asked him, and he said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘You know, the Institution has never intervened for anything for us, but they can try to go in and kill this. But if they do this once, we’re not going to be able to use that same leverage to protect our kids one day,'” Meghan recalled. “I said, ‘We won’t be able to protect our own kids one day,’ and I said, ‘I just need you to tell me. If you tell me the truth, we can help.’ And he wasn’t able to do that. And that for me has really resonated, especially now as a mother.”

While she acknowledged her father was “hunted” by the press, she pointed out her mom, Doria Ragland, has stayed hush-hush. “Everyone has accountability. They hunted my mom down,” Meghan said. “You never heard her say a word. She’s remained in silent dignity for four years watching me go through this.”