Prince Harry Wasn't Penniless When Meghan Markle Met Him

On the Sussex finances, and the inconvenient arithmetic of who brought what

There is a version of the Sussex story that has been circulating with some enthusiasm lately: Meghan Markle built something from nothing, that she is the engine of whatever commercial enterprise the couple has managed to construct in California, and that Harry is, at best, a decorative presence who has now been instructed to find gainful employment.

“Meghan finally told Harry he needs to step up financially,” one unnamed insider recently confided to an American publication, with the gravity of someone announcing a national emergency.

I have some thoughts on this.

Let us begin with what is actually true. The Duke of Sussex arrived at this marriage with considerably more than a title and a wardrobe. When Harry and Meghan stepped back from royal life in early 2020 and relocated to Los Angeles, it was not a leap into the void. Harry himself said so, plainly, in his interview with Oprah Winfrey. “I have what my mum left me,” he said, “and without that we wouldn’t have been able to do this.” He was not being modest. He was being accurate.

Diana’s estate, at the time of her death in 1997, was valued at approximately £21 million. After inheritance tax, something in the region of £13 million was available to her sons. Harry’s share, originally around £6.5 million, was invested and grew to roughly £10 million by the time he received it at thirty. That is, in any conventional sense of the phrase, real money. It was money that preceded Meghan Markle by two decades. It was money that had nothing whatsoever to do with Netflix, or Spotify, or a lifestyle brand in its early stages.

There was also the matter of the Queen Mother. When she died in 2002, a trust established for her great-grandchildren was distributed. The bulk of it, by most accounts approximately $17 million, went largely to Harry, on the understood basis that William would one day inherit the sort of institutional wealth that makes such supplementation redundant. This, too, preceded the relationship entirely.

It would be tiresome to pretend that Harry’s financial position is in any way comparable to his brother’s. It is not, and the gap is not close. William, upon his father’s accession in 2022, inherited the Duchy of Cornwall, a medieval estate now valued at well over a billion pounds. It generates approximately £23 million annually, from which William and his family draw their income. The contrast with Harry’s situation is not subtle.

But the contrast with Meghan Markle’s situation at the point of their marriage is also worth noting, and it is noted less often. She came to the relationship with an estimated $5 million in earnings from her acting career, which by any reasonable standard is a successful career. She was not, by Hollywood measures, a major film star. She was a working actress with a steady role in a cable drama. The capital she brought was talent, drive, and ambition, all of which are real. But the liquid assets in the room when they married tilted somewhat in his favour.

The current narrative, in which Harry is a financial burden who must be reminded of his obligations, is not without its ironic dimensions. The suggestion that he now needs to be told to get a job, framed as though this represents some kind of revelation about his character, requires one to overlook rather a great deal.

None of this is to say the Sussex finances are in robust health. The reports of significant expenditure, of a household that operates at the high end of Montecito’s already elevated standards, of commercial deals that did not quite yield what was originally hoped, are not implausible. Two sources of substantial institutional wealth, once removed, leave a hole that is difficult to fill purely through content production. The math is not comfortable.

What I do object to is the particular framing being applied. It is the framing of a woman managing an asset that has proven unexpectedly difficult to monetise. Harry as the problem. Harry as the drag. Harry as the one who needs to be sorted out.

The man walked away from a settled institutional life, burnt the considerable bridges that sustained it, and brought to his new existence funds that kept the enterprise solvent through its early years. Whether that was wise is a separate question, and one I have addressed elsewhere at some length. But it was not the act of someone who brought nothing to the table.

Diana’s money bought the first chapter. What comes next is, I admit, less clear.