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Prince Charles gave Harry and Meghan “a substantial sum” after they quit

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Updated on June 26, 2021

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When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stepped down as senior royals this year, he decided to vent his grievances in public, telling Oprah Winfrey in a shocking March interview that his father, Prince Charles, had “literally cut me off financially.”

According to a Clarence House spokesperson, Prince Charles continued to support the Sussexes until the summer of that year.

Both of Charles’ sons, the Dukes of Sussex and Cambridge, and their families contributed to the prince’s £4.5 million expenditure.

The financial report does not specify how much money went to each prince, but a spokesperson for Charles at Clarence House confirmed that the Prince of Wales had set aside “a substantial sum” to help Harry and Meghan move out of their royal duties. “That funding ceased in the summer of last year,” the spokesman said. “The couple are now financially independent.”

The numbers, which were published for the first time in the Queen’s annual financial statements, came three months after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex accused the royal family of racism in their contentious interview with Winfrey, a charge Prince William officially rejected.

A spokesman for the Sussexes, on the other hand, maintains that what Harry told Winfrey is not contradictory. “You are conflating two different timelines and it’s inaccurate to suggest that there’s a contradiction,” the spokesperson stated. “The Duke’s comments during the Oprah interview were in reference to the first quarter of the fiscal reporting period in the U.K., which starts annually in April. This is the same date that the ‘transitional year’ of the Sandringham agreement began and is aligned with the timeline that Clarence House referenced.”

The financing bill, including additional spending such as Charles’ capital expenditure and transfer to reserves, fell by almost £1.2 million in the fiscal year after the Sussexes ceased to be senior royals.

The couple’s exit from the working royal family was characterized as “a matter of enormous sadness to the family” by a Clarence House spokesman, who added, “I betray no confidence when I say they’ve been very successful in becoming financially independent.”

The records also show that Harry and Meghan have returned £2.4 million to the public purse for the cost of renovating Frogmore Cottage, near to Windsor Castle, although this amount also pays their rent to keep it as their UK residence until at least March 2022.

Harry and Meghan negotiated multimillion-pound agreements with Netflix and Spotify, and the duke told Oprah that he did so to pay for his security.

He said that he had the £7 million Diana left him and that “without that, we would not have been able to do this.”

Charles is reported to have been angry and outraged by Harry’s assertion in the Winfrey interview that his father had cut off his financial assistance. “Charles was quite upset at the suggestion he had cut Harry off,” a source told Vanity Fair. “Initially he didn’t and he went on to provide for some time, but there was a point when Charles decided enough was enough. The bank of dad couldn’t keep handing out indefinitely.”

The duke and duchess’s combined fortune was estimated to be £18 million before Megxit, but it would have been significantly increased by their high-profile deals.