Are you hungry for more Sussex name/title discourse? It’s become a major story this week, with the Duchess of Sussex telling People Magazine that her family name, her surname, is now Sussex. She wants to share the same name with her children and husband. There was also a scene in With Love, Meghan where Mindy Kaling refers to her as “Meghan Markle” and Meghan corrects her, saying “I’m Sussex now.” As I said yesterday, the reaction to that WLM scene is what’s especially telling to me – Meghan just stops for a second and corrects Mindy and that’s it. But the reaction has been that Meghan was “rude” or “mean” or that Meghan did something wrong. It’s a HUGE tell as to how people reacted to Meghan in the UK, and I think we’ve found the root of all of those “bullying” accusations. Meghan: This is my preference. Staffers: OMG YOU’RE SUCH A BULLY.

Anyway, the British reporters/commentators are once again using this whole storyline to cry about the Sussex titles and how dare Meghan still “use” her title, aka her married name. Richard Eden is still flogging this dead horse in his latest column. After an exhaustive summary of the Sussex-name situation this week, Eden spills some dirt about what his royal sources are saying:

Referring to her two children and husband Prince Harry, she said, ‘I love that that is something that Archie, Lili, H and I all have together. It means a lot to me.’ The Sussex name, she concluded, ‘is part of our love story’.

They have, of course, visited Sussex only once, hosting a number of engagements in the county in their wedding year. It is striking, too, that, they chose to use the Royal Family’s traditional surname, Mountbatten-Windsor, on the birth certificates of children Prince Archie, five, and Princess Lilibet, three. Why, then, this sudden enthusiasm for the Sussex name – and the desire to make it known around the world? Royal sources I have spoken to this week believe they know the answer.

‘It’s clearly a warning shot,’ one palace insider told me, confirming that Meghan seemed to be making a very public point of emphasising how much the title meant to her and, by implication, to Harry. Which is to say that the Royal Family should not so much as contemplate stripping them of their titles!

This is a course of action that has been mooted many times since Meghan and Harry abandoned royal duties five years ago, eventually moving to California to seek their fortune. There have been calls to strip Meghan and Harry of their titles whenever they have betrayed and insulted the Firm. And royal sources have suggested that it could be very much a sanction should the couple publish any more tell-all books about the Windsors or agree to further explosive Oprah Winfrey-style interviews.

Only when Charles succeeded to the throne in 2022, did Archie become the grandson of a king. Meghan and Harry had famously shunned royal life and made their home in the supposedly egalitarian US, they began using their children’s royal titles as early as 2023 when they announced the christening of baby daughter Lilibet. It seems beyond doubt that Meghan is anxious to hang on to the baubles of royal life – even if that involves the embarrassment of publicly correcting showbusiness-star ‘friends’ who fail to address her in the style to which she has become accustomed.

[From The Daily Mail]

If she didn’t call herself Sussex, they would hold something else over her head, I’m sure. But once again, they’re doing all of this over her married name. They’re mad that a woman is using her married name. They’re mad that they can’t find a way to take Sussex away from her because they’ve tried to take everything else. Because I remember the actual history of this, I know that Harry and Meghan did give Charles the space of several months to decide if he was going to try to remove the Sussex titles. Charles made no such move, just as he made no move to attend his granddaughter’s christening. That was when Harry and Meghan were like, okay, fine, we’re just going to do it this way and if you don’t like it, too bad: these are the king’s grandchildren and they have prince & princess titles, and our family name is Sussex.

Photos courtesy of Netflix, Archewell.