For the last five years, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have been living a private life in Montecito, the exclusive Santa Barbara enclave where they purchased a home in July 2020. But ever since the duchess started a new Instagram account in January, she has been posting photos from the 7.4-acre estate, including images of her children that would have previously been reserved for a TV special or Netflix docuseries. Over the weekend, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet of Sussex were the stars of a post on Meghan’s account, which featured them in the family’s garden.
“Sunday kind of love…with my little loves,” Meghan captioned the photo, which showed off Archie and Lili’s fiery red hair but not their faces.
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Lili also moonlit as a taste taster in an Instagram Stories video that demonstrated Meghan turning strawberries from the garden into preserves. “What do we think, Lili?” Meghan said in footage that only featured her three-year-old daughter’s hands. Lili replied, “I think it’s beautiful.”
The posts are a sign that Meghan and Harry are comfortable giving the public a sneak peek into their home life in a way that is closer to what they might have done when still living in the palace. When they first became parents in May 2019, Meghan and Harry were working royals, and that meant there was some expectation that their children would also be public figures. But from the beginning, they had plans to do things differently than Kate Middleton and Prince William, who, like Princess Diana and then Prince Charles before them, posed for photos on the steps of the Lindo Wing at St. Mary’s Hospital in London soon after each of their children were born.
In contrast, Harry and Meghan delayed Archie’s birth announcement until after they had returned home from the hospital, bypassing the traditional Royal Rota press information system in favor of a post on their now defunct joint Instagram account, @SussexRoyal. The new member of the Windsor clan was first introduced to the world in a Frogmore Hall photo call that took place two days after his birth, but Meghan and Harry’s bid for some control had already caused a serious controversy among the UK’s tabloid media, which ultimately led the couple to becoming more agitated by press intrusion. Eventually, though, Archie was shown in official photos of his christening, and when Harry and Meghan took a trip to South Africa that fall, he posed with Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
By the time Lilibet was born in June 2021, more than a year had passed since their initial royal exit, and the couple was luxuriating in their privacy. They shut down their Instagram account and were vigilant about protecting their children, even suing a photo agency that sought a photo of Archie in 2020. That said, by announcing Meghan’s second pregnancy with an image from a maternity shoot and sharing their baby’s gender during a high-profile interview with Oprah Winfrey, they were walking a fine line between privacy and publicity that would later be mocked in a South Park parody, which called their recent years a “Worldwide Privacy Tour.”
The first public picture of Lili was a profile view in the family’s 2021 holiday card, and the public didn’t see her whole face until the next summer. In June 2022, photographer Misan Harriman shared a portrait he took at her first birthday party, which was held during Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee weekend. Though the public hasn’t gotten a direct view of her face since, Lili in particular has become an increasingly large part of Meghan’s social media output. When Meghan launched lifestyle company As Ever, Lili was a costar in the brand imagery, seen running alongside her mother in an aerial photograph.
