Meghan Channels Wallis—and Comes Up Short

"With Love, Meghan" lacks the authenticity of the Duchess of Windsor’s "The Heart Has Its Reasons"

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex in her interview with Oprah Winfrey on March 7, 2021, and Wallis, the Duchess of Windsor in an undated photograph

I am publishing this Royals Extra several days early, in response to the news about Meghan’s new Netflix series that debuts on January 15. Royals Extra will resume its regular schedule the weekend of January 17.

“We’re in the pursuit of joy”

Last week Meghan Markle revealed the next act in her continuing drama with Prince Harry. It comes nearly seven years after they married in May 2018 and five years since they broke with the British royal family to seek fame and fortune in California. With Love, Meghan on Netflix grandly promises to “reimagine the genre of lifestyle programming” in eight half-hour episodes featuring cookery, gardening, entertaining, flower arranging, and gushy conversation with glossy friends. “We’re not in the pursuit of perfection,” Meghan declared in the show’s preview. “We’re in the pursuit of joy.” She promised to offer “little tips and tricks” and to share her love of “taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it.” She may have become the Duchess of Sussex on her marriage to Prince Harry, but she now seems more intent on styling herself as a one-name phenomenon along with Cher, Bono, and Madonna.

Viewers can be forgiven if they recall that there was little joy to be found in the Sussexes’ pitiless assaults from 2021 through 2023 on King Charles III, Queen Camilla, and the Prince and Princess of Wales. Their weapons were tell-all television interviews, a Netflix documentary series called Harry & Meghan, and Harry’s blistering memoir, Spare. The documentary and memoir netted the couple many millions in income. Their flawed recollections, endless grievances, insults, and accusations clouded the final years of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, ruptured Harry’s relationship with Prince William, and caused endless misery for his father. Harry and Meghan’s two children, Archie and Lilibet, have scarcely seen King Charles and have never met Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle. For that matter, Harry has not met Meghan’s father either.

Within months of Harry and Meghan’s glittering wedding at Windsor Castle, insiders and knowledgeable observers began to draw parallels between their relationship and that of his great-uncle, the Duke of Windsor, and his wife Wallis. Their stories are different in crucial ways yet strikingly similar in others. Both men fell in love with American women: Prince Harry with a divorced television actress from Los Angeles and Prince Edward (known as David) with twice-married Wallis Simpson from Baltimore.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Harry had no problem marrying a divorcee (especially since both Charles and Camilla were previously married), and the royal family saw Meghan’s biracial heritage as an advantage. The couple seemed set for a promising future representing the Crown around the globe with the blessing of the Queen. But in 1936, when David became King Edward VIII on the death of his father, King George V, neither the government nor the Church of England would permit his marriage to a divorced woman “with two husbands living,” in the words of his mother, Queen Mary. On his abdication after chaotically reigning for less than a year, he and Wallis became the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, cut off from the indignant and wounded royal family and exiled from Great Britain.

“Love is in the details”

While watching the trailer for With Love, Meghan—the carefully curated backdrops, the feel-good Lovin’ Spoonful “Do You Believe in Magic?” soundtrack, the giggles and hugs, the fawning exclamations, but most of all the intense domesticity—I was reminded of the Duchess of Windsor and her memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons. In her own meticulous fashion, Wallis was her generation’s apotheosis of a “domestic goddess.” When Meghan said, “Love is in the details,” it felt as if she was channeling Wallis as a 2025 “trad wife.”

Meghan selecting flowers to make a perfect bouquet

Wallis picking flowers in her greenhouse for the arrangements that filled her homes