When Meghan Markle stood on the Buckingham Palace balcony for her first Trooping the Colour in June 2018, Kate Middleton asked her a simple question: What did she think of the ceremony? Markle's answer, a single word, landed like a stone in a still pond.
"Colourful."
That was it. Prince Harry, writing in his memoir "Spare," described what followed: "And a yawning silence threatened to swallow us all whole." The moment, barely a month after Harry and Markle's May 19, 2018, wedding, captures in miniature the tension that would eventually fracture the House of Windsor and send the Duke and Duchess of Sussex packing to California.
The anecdote matters less for its content than for what it reveals about how Harry has chosen to handle family life, by publishing it for the world to read.
Harry wrote that he and Markle returned from their Mediterranean honeymoon "just in time for the official June celebration of Granny's birthday." Trooping the Colour, the annual military parade marking the sovereign's official birthday, was one of the couple's first public appearances as husband and wife.
"Everyone present was in a good mood, upbeat," Harry recalled. But the mood did not hold.
Kate Middleton's question was innocuous enough. A new sister-in-law asking the newest member of the family what she made of one of the monarchy's grandest traditions. Markle's quip, "Colourful", could have been charming. Instead, it apparently produced a silence so heavy that Harry felt compelled to memorialize it in a bestselling book years later.
Days after that balcony appearance, Harry wrote, Markle went on her first royal trip with Queen Elizabeth II, and the two "got on famously." That detail, offered by Harry himself, raises an obvious question: if Markle could build an easy rapport with the 92-year-old Queen, what exactly was going wrong between her and Kate?
Later that same month, the four principals, Harry, Markle, William, and Middleton, sat down to hash out their grievances. The list of complaints Harry disclosed in "Spare" reads less like a royal crisis and more like a family squabble that got out of hand.
William and Middleton were reportedly "miffed" that Harry and Markle had not given them Easter presents. Harry and Markle, in turn, told William and Middleton they were irritated that the couple had switched seats at the May wedding. Middleton told Markle she was owed an apology for Markle's reference to her hormones as "baby brain" while Middleton was pregnant.
Harry's own verdict on the summit was blunt: "None of this airing of grievances was doing any good." He added, "We weren't getting anywhere."
What stands out is not that royal in-laws bickered over presents and seating charts. Families do that. What stands out is that one member of the family decided the world needed to know about it, in hardcover, with a publicity tour.
The trajectory after 2018 tells its own story. Harry and Markle last participated in Trooping the Colour in 2019, appearing together on the Buckingham Palace balcony on June 8 of that year. By the beginning of 2020, they had left England.
In 2022, during Queen Elizabeth II's platinum jubilee, Harry and Markle returned to London for the celebration, but they did not appear on the famous balcony with senior royals. Instead, they watched the parade from a side window of Buckingham Palace, separated from the family they had publicly accused of racism, coldness, and institutional cruelty. The symbolism was hard to miss.
Royal biographer Hugo Vickers has described how the Sussexes' departure and their interview with Oprah Winfrey added strain during Queen Elizabeth II's final years. Whether one views Harry and Markle as victims or provocateurs, the late Queen bore the consequences of a family rupture she did not seek and could not mend.
This past Saturday, Trooping the Colour kicked off in London once again. King Charles III and Queen Camilla led the procession. Prince William rode alongside Kate Middleton, with their three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis, joining the celebration.
Harry and Markle remained stateside. They were not invited.
While the royal family paraded through London, the 41-year-old Duke of Sussex made a video appearance at the Invictus Germany Sports Festival in Düsseldorf. Harry, who created the wounded service member and veteran sports competition in 2014, told contestants it was an "honor" to send his message as they gathered for "another Invictus sporting title."
"Germany is setting a powerful example of what it means to honor service with dignity and enduring commitment."
The Invictus Games shared Harry's message on Instagram. It is worth noting that Harry's charitable work with veterans is genuine and widely respected, even by many of his critics. But the optics of a prince addressing a German sports festival by video link while his father, brother, and sister-in-law ride carriages through London are hard to ignore.
The distance between Harry and the rest of the Windsor family is no longer measured in miles. It is measured in memoir chapters, television interviews, and years of public grievance. Royal commentators have drawn comparisons between Harry's self-exile and earlier royal departures that ended in isolation and regret.
There is a pattern in modern celebrity culture, and Harry and Markle have fully embraced it, of treating private grievances as public property. The logic runs like this: if the institution wronged you, you owe it to the world to say so, loudly, repeatedly, and profitably.
The problem is that this logic has consequences beyond book sales. It poisons relationships that might otherwise heal. It turns every family gathering into a potential headline. And it makes reconciliation nearly impossible, because every olive branch risks becoming another chapter.
Consider the Easter-presents dispute. In any normal family, a missed gift is a passing irritation. In a family where one member has a publishing contract, it becomes evidence in a public case against the institution. The same goes for "baby brain," the switched seats, and a one-word joke about color.
Queen Elizabeth II, who governed her public image with a discipline that made prime ministers flinch, understood something Harry apparently does not: silence is not weakness. Sometimes it is the only thing holding a family, or an institution, together.
Meanwhile, Harry's ongoing legal battles with British media continue to surface private communications and contradictions that undercut his claims to value privacy above all else. A man who publishes his family's most awkward moments in a global bestseller has a difficult time arguing that his own private messages should remain sealed.
Saturday's Trooping the Colour proceeded without Harry and Markle, as it has for several years running. King Charles, despite facing his own share of public criticism on other fronts, rode out to greet the troops. Kate Middleton, who has weathered health challenges and relentless tabloid scrutiny, stood on the balcony with her children.
The monarchy, for all its flaws, showed up. It did the job. It did not publish a memoir about it afterward.
Harry's one-word anecdote from 2018, "Colourful", was meant to illustrate how quickly things went wrong between Markle and the royal family. But read another way, it illustrates something else entirely: how a family that once shared a balcony now shares nothing but grievances, and only one side keeps putting them in print.
The silence that followed Markle's joke in 2018 lasted a few uncomfortable seconds. The silence between Harry and his family shows no sign of ending, and Harry's memoir is a big reason why.
