King Charles has been reunited with his estranged son Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. The pair attended a rare, private meeting with the monarch, which also marked his first time seeing his grandchildren, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, in four years.
While the historic get-together took place behind closed doors at Highgrove House, King Charles’s brother-in-law Charles Spencer couldn’t help but make his own public update with a perfectly timed, totally unrelated photo of him at Highgrove.
During their trip to the United Kingdom this week for a one-year countdown event to Prince Harry’s Invictus Games, it was confirmed that Harry, Meghan, Archie, and Lilibet are indeed on the trip.
“This is a private matter and not for public comment,” a palace spokesman said at the time, confirming the family reunion but adding, “The king was able to spend time with his children and grandchildren on the Highgrove visit.”
Royal commentators have widely praised the visit as a key step in mending the broken ties between the two halves of the royal family since Prince Harry and Meghan retreated from public duties as senior royals six years ago and settled in the United States.
“After more than four years of not seeing his youngest grandchild, this visit is a critical moment,” the royal author Tom Bower commented in the wake of the announcement.
Hours after reports broke about King Charles and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex being united behind the walls of Highgrove, Charles Spencer shared a photo on social media. Rather than addressing the much-anticipated family reconciliation, the 9th Earl Spencer, Princess Diana’s brother, delighted fans by sharing an Instagram picture of him outside his ancestral home Althorp holding up a copy of The Daily Telegraph.
“Written in red at the top of today’s @telegraph – how so many Englishmen (like me) with Norwegian wives must be feeling today,” he wrote of the impending FIFA World Cup quarter-final football match between England and Norway that would be held in Miami, Florida.
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He joked about the historic pressure: “It’s similar trepidation to what coastal Anglo-Saxons must have experienced 1,200 years ago, when longboat sails were spotted on the horizon…” While little else about the Duke and Duchess’s UK trip is confirmed as of now, including if they will see more of their royal relatives, a visit to the Spencer’s estate at Althorp has been mooted as a possibility during their trip.