Exclusive: 10 of the Best Revelations from Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s 2017 Engagement Interview — 7 Years Ago Today…. Continue Reading

The Duke of Duchess of Sussex spoke about their love story — past, present and future — in a Nov. 27, 2017 sit-down

Seven (jam-packed!) years ago, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced their engagement to the world

On Monday, Nov. 27, 2017, the official announcement from Clarence House — the office of then-Prince Charles, Harry’s father — read, “His Royal Highness and Ms. Markle became engaged in London earlier this month. Prince Harry has informed Her Majesty The Queen and other close members of his family. Prince Harry has also sought and received the blessing of Ms. Markle’s parents. The couple will live in Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace.”

In a statement, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip — Harry’s grandparents — said they were “delighted for the couple and wish them every happiness.” Prince William and Kate Middleton — then the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge — added in a statement of their own, “We are very excited for Harry and Meghan. It has been wonderful getting to know Meghan and to see how happy she and Harry are together.”

Harry, then 33 (now 40), and Meghan, then 36 (now 43), took part in a photocall that same day in the Sunken Gardens of Kensington Palace, once the home of Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, who died on Aug. 31, 1997, when Harry was just 12 years old. Afterwards, like his older brother William and sister-in-law Kate did upon announcing their own engagement on Nov. 16, 2010, Harry and Meghan sat down for an interview. Harry and Meghan were interviewed by Mishal Husain, and Meghan later said the day’s events felt “rehearsed” in the couple’s 2022 Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, adding that it felt like an “orchestrated reality show.”

So we did the thing out with the press and then we went right inside, took the coat off, sat down and did the interview,” she added. “So it was all in that same moment.”

She said she was instructed to “show the ring” and said “we weren’t allowed to tell our story, because they didn’t want —” before Harry interjected with a laugh, “We were never allowed to tell our story.”

Here are the 10 best revelations from the interview seven years ago.

They revealed how and when they got engaged

The couple — who met in the summer of 2016, less than a year and a half prior — confirmed their relationship in November of that same year and wasted no time preparing to walk down the aisle. After their official public debut as a couple on Sept. 25, 2017 at Prince Harry’s Invictus Games in Toronto — where Meghan was living at the time filming Suits — Harry told Husain that the proposal “happened a few weeks ago, earlier this month, here at our cottage,” referring to Nottingham Cottage, where they lived at the time. “Just a standard typical night for us,” Harry continued.

Just a cozy night, it was — what we were doing, just roasting chicken and having …” Meghan added, as Harry jumped in and added, “Roasting a chicken, trying to roast a chicken.”

“Trying to roast a chicken and it just — just an amazing surprise, it was so sweet and natural and very romantic. He got on one knee,” Meghan said, to which Harry added, “Of course.”

Meghan told Husain that she could barely let Harry finish proposing before asking him, “Can I say yes now?”

She didn’t even let me finish,” Harry added. “She said, ‘Can I say yes? Can I say yes?’ and then [there] were hugs, and I had the ring in my finger and I was like, ‘Can I — can I give you the ring?’ She goes, ‘Oh yes, the ring.’ So no, it was — it was a really nice moment, it was just the two of us and I think [I] managed to catch her by surprise, as well.”

In Harry & Meghan, they revealed more details about the proposal, including a sweet selfie Harry took the night of their engagement — which he later revealed in his memoir, Spare, was Nov. 4.

In the book, he wrote that he popped a bottle of champagne and set up a blanket on the grass in the walled garden of Nottingham Cottage. Harry wrote he “set electric candles around the blanket” because “I wanted it to look like Botswana, where I’d first thought of proposing.”

When he did pop the question, he asked Meghan, “Spend your life with me? Make me the happiest guy on the planet?” he wrote in the 2023 memoir. Meghan, of course, said yes.

They were so happy and they were going to keep it quiet because it was going to be announced a few weeks later,” friend Lucy Fraser said in an interview for the Netflix docuseries. “We had a little engagement party and everyone was dressed in animal onesies. And Meg and Harry were in matching penguin onesies because penguins mate for life, and they were so sweet and we had so much fun.”

She felt like they could take on the world,” friend Lindsay Jill Roth added.

They revealed how they first met

The two revealed that they met through a mutual friend whom they didn’t name, with Meghan saying, “We should protect her privacy and not reveal too much of that.”

Harry added that they had two back-to-back dates in London in July 2016 before taking a third date trip to Botswana together “three, maybe four weeks later” where “we camped out with each other under the stars, we spent — she came and joined me for five days out there, which was absolutely fantastic. So then we were really by ourselves. Which I think, which was crucial to me to make sure we had a chance to get to know each other.”

Meghan said their meeting was a set up, telling Husain, “It was a blind date. And it’s so interesting because we talk about it and now and even then, I, you know, because I’m from the [United] States, you don’t grow up with the same understanding of the royal family and so, while I now understand very clearly, there’s a global interest there. I didn’t know much about him, and so the only thing that I had asked her [their mutual friend] when she said that she wanted to set us up, was, I had one question. I said, ‘Well, is he nice?’ ‘Cause if he wasn’t kind, it just didn’t, it didn’t seem like it would make sense and so, we went and had a, met for a drink, and then I think very quickly into that we said, ‘Well what are we doing tomorrow? We should meet again.’ ”

When asked whether she thought their roughly 16-month courtship was a whirlwind, Meghan responded, “I don’t think that I would call it a whirlwind in terms of our relationship. Obviously there have been layers attached to how public it has become after we had a good five, six months almost with just privacy, which was amazing. But no, I think we were able to really have so much time just to connect and we never went longer than two weeks without seeing each other, even though we were obviously doing a long distance relationship. So it’s — we made it work.”