This week, the Daily Mail was desperate for news about the Duchess of Sussex, so they dusted off a 2014 post from Meghan’s old blog, The Tig. When the British media learned that Prince Harry was dating Meghan in 2016, they dug through The Tig and turned every blog post into a blaring headline, including the fact that Meghan had a popular lifestyle blog in the first place. Well, suddenly in the year of our lord Beyonce 2023, the Mail is newly enraged that Meghan referenced “Princess Kate” in 2014. Don’t you realize that this is the smoking gun which proves that Meghan was “lying” when she said she didn’t google or know much about the Windsors?? So instead of covering that Mail post specifically, here’s an excerpt from Vanity Fair’s coverage:

In 2014, Meghan Markle started a blog called The Tig, where she posted regularly about lifestyle topics and current events. Though she shut down the website in April 2017, six months after her relationship went public, the posts were preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and occasionally tidbits will recirculate. On Wednesday, the Daily Mail brought back a 2014 entry she published referencing Prince William’s 2011 wedding to Kate Middleton, citing it as evidence that Meghan couldn’t have been telling the truth when she said she didn’t know much about the royals before she met Prince Harry.

In the introduction to a blog entry where she interviewed Princess Alia Al Senussi, a descendent of Libyan royalty who works in the art world, Meghan mentioned that as a child she loved tough princesses like She-Ra from the ’80s cartoon, She-Ra: Princess of Power. She also mentioned that the idea of a “princess” still exerts power on adults too. “Grown women seem to retain this childhood fantasy,” she wrote. “Just look at the pomp and circumstance surrounding the royal wedding and endless conversation about Princess Kate.”

You might think that calling her future sister-in-law “Princess Kate” might be a sign that Meghan didn’t actually know too much about royal forms of address… But to the Mail, this “suggests that she not only knew exactly who the royals were—but that she’d also formed several very strong opinions about the Monarchy and its many traditions, years before she met her future husband.”

The idea that Meghan held “very strong opinions” about her future husband and his family originates in a statement Meghan made during the March 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, when the duchess said that, as an American, she didn’t actually know too much about what joining the family would entail. “I didn’t do any research about what that would mean,” Meghan said. “I didn’t feel any need to, because everything I needed to know he was sharing with me. Everything we thought I needed to know, he was telling me.”

[From Vanity Fair]

I’ll admit, when Meghan said that to Oprah, I didn’t really believe her either. How can you date someone famous without Googling him? But as time goes on and Meghan explained further in the Netflix series (and as Harry explains in Spare), I sort of understand where she was coming from and what she meant – she didn’t research Harry because she believed he was as he presented himself to her, because she wanted to get to know him the old-fashioned way. She also just believed whatever Harry told her, and he would instruct her on how to greet his family, what to wear, etc. She didn’t feel the need to do research because Harry was teaching her what HE thought she needed to know.

At this point, as I said, I do believe that Meghan kind of came into the institution blind, with a somewhat narrow, simplistic understanding of what everything meant. I think when Meghan met Harry, she had a general idea of the identities of Harry, William, Kate and QEII, but as an American, no, she didn’t understand the monarchy or “the system.”

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.