The Sussex family is returning with two children who have never called Britain home.
Meghan and Harry are coming back to the United Kingdom. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are planning to visit next month with their children Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5, marking the first time the family of four has been to Britain together since September 2022. That trip was for Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. Meghan’s last visit after that came just months later in September 2022, for the Queen’s funeral. Neither occasion was a homecoming in any real sense.
This July trip is something different. It is the first time Meghan and Harry are returning under circumstances of their own choosing rather than driven by obligation or grief.
What has kept them away
The reasons Meghan and Harry have stayed out of the UK for so long are not simple, and they have never pretended otherwise. When the couple stepped back from royal duties in 2020 and relocated to California, Harry lost the taxpayer-funded police protection that comes with being an active member of the working royal family. That loss has been the single most consistent point of tension in his relationship with the UK ever since.
Harry has argued repeatedly and publicly that bringing his family to Britain without adequate security is a risk he cannot accept. He has described the UK as central to his children’s heritage and said he wants Archie and Lilibet to feel connected to their British roots. But he has also been direct about what that connection requires. Without confidence in their safety on British soil, he has said, the visits simply cannot happen.
Last year that position was tested in court and Harry lost. A British court rejected his appeal to have the family’s security arrangements reinstated to a level he considered acceptable. The Home Office retains full discretion over what protection, if any, is extended to the Sussexes when they visit, and that ruling left the situation unchanged. It is not clear what security arrangements are in place for the July visit or whether anything has shifted since the court’s decision.
King Charles extended an invitation
Ahead of the trip, King Charles offered Meghan, Harry, and the children royal accommodations for their stay. The gesture is not without precedent. The couple has been offered lodging at Buckingham Palace during previous visits and declined both times. As of June 19, no response to the current offer had been received.
Whether Meghan and Harry accept this time is being watched closely as a signal of where the relationship between them and the royal family currently stands. Accepting would represent a degree of closeness that the couple has not publicly demonstrated in years. Declining would signal that certain boundaries remain firmly in place regardless of the warmer optics surrounding the visit.
What the accommodation offer does not change is the security question. Even if Meghan and Harry stay in a royal residence, the Home Office remains the sole authority over their protection. Charles does not have the ability to extend additional security through an accommodation offer alone.
What this trip represents for Meghan and Harry
For Meghan, 44, the return carries its own particular weight. She left a country where her experience as a member of the royal family was, by her own account, significantly more difficult than the public image of that role suggested. She has spoken in interviews and through other platforms about the toll that period took on her. Returning now, on her own terms, with her children and with some distance from those years, is a different kind of visit than anything that came before.
For Harry, 41, the trip is an ongoing negotiation between the life he chose and the country he came from. He has not hidden his grief over the estrangement from his family or his frustration with how the security question has been handled. A reunion with his father King Charles in September 2025 offered a glimpse of possible reconciliation, but the full shape of that relationship remains unclear.
Archie and Lilibet, who live in California and have grown up largely outside the public eye, will be visiting a country they have little memory of. How Meghan and Harry introduce Britain to their children, and how Britain receives them, will be one of the quiet undercurrents of a trip that is already generating significant attention.