Meghan Markle Saw Life at Frogmore Cottage as a 'Jail Sentence'

Meghan Markle entered the royal family thinking she would live a life similar to the Princess Diaries, but the U.K. isn't the same as the fictional Genovia! Royal expert Tom Bower claimed the Suits star was shocked when her reality as a duchess didn't align with her vision.

“She didn’t realize when she hooked up with Harry that he didn’t have much money and wasn’t going to live in a palace," Bower said. “They didn’t have the pressure [to make a huge income while in the U.K.] when they didn’t have a very large house overlooking the Pacific."

When the Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry announced their move to the U.S., the pair stressed they wanted to become financially independent and purchase their own home.

“Meghan never wanted to live in a small house in England. For her, Frogmore was like a jail sentence," the author added.

In the Sussexes' tell-all docuseries, Harry & Meghan, the couple complained about their first royal residence.

"Kensington Palace sounds very regal, of course, it does, it says 'palace' in the name. But Nottingham Cottage was so small," Meghan shared. "People thought we lived in a palace and we did. Well, a cottage in a palace."

Harry admitted that he often bumped his head while walking around the estate.

"The whole thing is on a slight lean, [with] really low ceilings," the Duke of Sussex noted. "So I don't know who was there before but they must have been very short."

Prior to Harry & Meghan's release, the former actress told Oprah Winfrey that she didn't know what to expect when marrying into the British monarchy.

"I would say I went into it naively because I didn’t grow up knowing much about the royal family. It wasn’t part of something that was part of conversation at home," the mom-of-two said during her 2021 interview. "It wasn’t something that we followed."

"My mum even said to me a couple of months ago, ‘Did Diana ever do an interview?’ Now I can say. ‘Yes, a very famous one,' but my mom doesn’t know that," she added.

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Meghan later blamed her ignorance on growing up in the U.S.

"We thought a lot about what we thought it might be. I didn’t fully understand what the job was: What does it mean to be a working royal? What do you do? What does that mean? He and I were very aligned on our cause-driven work, that was part of our initial connection," she explained.

"But there was no way to understand what the day-to- day was going to be like, and it’s so different because I didn’t romanticize any element of it," she continued. "But I think, as Americans especially, what you do know about the royals is what you read in fairytales, and you think is what you know about the royals."