Meghan Markle says she wants to be known from now on as Meghan Sussex.
Meghan delivered the naming edict in the second episode of her otherwise studiously conflict-free show, With Love, Meghan, as she is talking to her guest, Mindy Kaling, the former star of The Office, about her childhood.
Meghan is explaining how she was a “latchkey” kid and ate a lot of microwaved food as a child, including Jack in the Box tacos.
Kaling says: “I don’t think anyone in the world knows that Meghan Markle has eaten Jack in the Box.”
The jolly upbeat music which accompanies almost every other second of the Netflix show actually stops and, in a split second, the atmosphere drops several degrees. A faux-amused Meghan stares very hard at the cucumber she is chopping and says, “It’s so funny, too, that you keep calling me Meghan Markle. You know I’m Sussex now.”
Kaling looks genuinely worried, rather like, a Sussex staffer about to be ripped a new one by the boss, as Meghan, more in sorrow than in anger, talks Kaling through the concept of surnames, saying, “When you have kids, you go, ‘I share my name with my children and that feels so… I didn’t know how meaningful that would be to me, it just means so much, to go, ‘This is our family name, our little family name.’”
Kaling, who has three children, replies, “Well, now I know—and I love it.”
The frosty incident occurs as Meghan and Kaling prepare cucumber sandwiches for a kids party with wedges of cucumber so thick they would have made the late Queen Elizabeth II blanch if they’d been served at Windsor Castle.
Meghan and Harry were made Duke and Duchess of Sussex by the late queen when they married in 2018, and Meghan’s embrace of Sussex as a surname is arguably her way of making it clear she has no intention of giving up her title.
Members of the royal family technically have no surname, although the family is collectively known as Mountbatten-Windsor. They therefore tend to use one of their titles to give them a surname. At school and during his military service Harry was known as Harry Wales, because he was fully known as “Prince Henry of Wales. Similarly, his brother was William Wales, while his disgraced uncle Prince Andrew has called himself Andrew Inverness in public documents; one of his titles is Earl of Inverness.
When Prince Harry’s children were born, they were not entitled to the titles prince and princess, so used the surname Mountbatten-Windsor, but are now Prince Archie of Sussex and Princess Lilibet of Sussex, known less formally as Archie and Lilibet Sussex.
Many critics of the couple have urged King Charles to strip Harry and Meghan of their titles after they made damaging allegations during their acrimonious split from the royal family.
Meghan does not address her estrangement from Harry’s family in the show, and, while referring to various friends as “uncle” or “aunt,” does not mention her kids’ blood uncle, Prince William, with whom they are locked in a bitter feud.
There is one thing the two families now have in common though: Kate Middleton has been trying to get the world to call her Catherine for over a decade now. Will Meghan Markle Sussex have any more success?
