Fifteen months ago, Prince Harry said he could not “see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the U.K.”
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex had fled to America amid a seemingly irreparable royal rift, a vicious media environment and a British public that was angry about their criticism of the monarchy. Harry told the BBC that it was “really quite sad that I won’t be able to show my children my homeland.”
Now, he will. In a move that appears to have caught even King Charles III by surprise, Harry and Meghan are planning to settle back in Britain in the coming weeks. Their children, Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5, will enroll in school here. Royal watchers said the family would live in private accommodations outside of London.
The question that everyone in Britain seems to be asking is: What changed?
“They want their children to grow up as British citizens as much as Americans,” said Ed Owens, a royal historian. “They want their children to imbibe the tradition, culture, history, heritage of their father’s country.”
“Of course,” he added quickly, “there are other factors at play here.”
The most significant of those may be the chance to further repair Harry’s relationship with his father, who was diagnosed with cancer in February of 2024. Buckingham Palace has said that King Charles is responding well to treatment, but in the BBC interview last year, Harry said, “I don’t know how much longer my father has.”
The BBC interview was the latest turn in a remarkably public war of words waged from across the Atlantic by Harry and Meghan over the last six years. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, a book called “Spare” and a six-part Netflix documentary, Harry unloaded on the monarchy in ways that no former member of the royal family had dared to do.
That created the kind of split that most families rarely come back from.
In 2025, Harry met with his father for tea at the king’s London residence, in what appeared to be the first step toward healing their rift. And last month, the six-year frostiness between father and son appeared to thaw a bit further when Harry and Meghan brought their children on a trip to Britain. The family met privately with King Charles and Queen Camilla at Highgrove House, a royal residence outside London, though a person familiar with the meeting said the possibility of a permanent move back to Britain did not come up then.
If the possibility of patching things up with the king was one motivation for the upcoming move, it seems unlikely that a similar rapprochement is in the works with Harry’s brother, William, the Prince of Wales. William is said to be furious about Harry’s decision to write a tell-all book. In the BBC interview, Harry conceded that “some members of my family will never forgive me.”
Mr. Owen said Harry’s decision to move back may be informed by the history of Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson. “They never managed to reconcile with the wider British royal family,” he said. “They died sort of embittered and alone and estranged from the family and living abroad.”
And then there is the British media.
Harry all but declared war on the country’s tabloid journalists over the past decade, accusing them of a media feeding frenzy at his family’s expense. He won court cases against the publishers of The Daily Mirror and The Sun for phone hacking and the use of private investigators. More recently, his claims of bugging and wiretapping by The Daily Mail were dismissed by the court.
Now that those cases are settled, it remains to be seen how Harry and Meghan will be treated by their journalistic adversaries.
Royal observers said on Thursday that they expect the duke and duchess to keep low profiles, in part by likely choosing a place to live in the south of England, well outside London and far from the tabloids based there.
That may not be enough to insulate them from the public, however. Harry and Meghan remain popular among many members of Britain’s younger generation. But recent surveys have shown that the broader public views Harry negatively, especially in comparison to his brother.