She was not even at the Coronation.
That is the most striking fact about the story of Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton‘s rivalry at one of the most significant royal events of the decade.
When King Charles III was crowned at Westminster Abbey on May 6, 2023, Meghan remained in California.
Harry sat alone in the congregation, a few rows back from the front, conspicuously apart from the working royals who surrounded him.
And Kate — Princess of Wales, future queen consort, everything that Meghan had decided she did not want to be — stood at the centre of the ceremony in a white gown and the Spencer tiara, luminous and composed.
The absence was its own statement.
But the pattern it represented — Meghan’s compulsive need to command the same attention Kate commanded, to occupy the same cultural space, to be seen as equally significant in a world that persistently ranked them differently — stretched back years before the Coronation and continued long after it.
Understanding Meghan’s relationship with Kate requires understanding the particular torture of being perpetually compared to someone who seems, by institutional design, to always come first.
A palace staffer quoted in the New York Post put the feeling plainly and without apparent sympathy: Meghan “hated being a second-rate princess” to Kate.
The word “hated” is doing significant work in that sentence.
It is not describing mild frustration or professional envy.
It is describing something visceral — an emotion powerful enough to shape behaviour, powerful enough to drive decisions that cost Meghan enormously.
The staffer’s account described a woman whose sense of self could not accommodate the secondary status that the royal family’s hierarchy assigned her, no matter how significant her actual role or how beloved she was outside the institution.
The Coronation year brought the rivalry into sharp focus in an unexpected way.
In June 2024, as Trooping the Colour approached — the annual military parade at which the royal family traditionally presents a united front and Kate, as Princess of Wales, occupies a prominent position — Meghan’s team made an announcement that royal watchers immediately noted for its timing.
The launch of American Riviera Orchard, Meghan’s lifestyle brand, was announced in a manner that ensured it would receive significant media coverage in the days immediately preceding the parade.
The timing was not an accident, according to royal commentators who watched the sequence of events closely. “It was deliberate,” one expert stated. “You don’t announce a brand launch of this profile in the week before Trooping without understanding the coverage dynamics.” The effect was to split media attention — to ensure that Meghan’s name and image were circulating in the news cycle at precisely the moment when Kate would otherwise have dominated it.
It was a move straight from the playbook of competitive Hollywood PR, and it landed exactly as intended.
Kate, to her credit, had navigated the rivalry with remarkable public composure throughout.
Whatever her private feelings about the woman who had arrived in her family and proceeded to generate more media coverage than the future queen, she had maintained the same serene, professional exterior that defined her public persona.
She had not given interviews about the tension.
She had not used surrogates to speak against Meghan.
She had simply continued to do the work.
The contrast in their approaches to royal life was visible from the beginning.
Kate had spent years preparing for her role before marrying William — years during which she observed, adapted, and learned what the institution required.
She accepted the constraints and the protocols, the endless public engagements and the careful management of her image, with what appeared to be genuine equanimity.
Meghan arrived with a different philosophy entirely — one that prioritised authenticity over institutional conformity, personal expression over protocol, individual narrative over collective duty.
Neither approach is objectively wrong.
But they were incompatible in the context of a family in which hierarchy determined almost everything, and in which Kate’s position — as the wife of the heir to the throne — was immovable.
Whatever Meghan achieved, whatever attention she generated, whatever causes she championed, the institutional logic of the monarchy placed Kate above her.
The future queen would always outrank the prince’s wife.
That is simply how it worked.
Those who have spoken to people inside the royal household describe Meghan’s frustration with this reality as genuine and sustained.
She had not spent her career building a public profile to be someone’s supporting cast.
She had not made the choices she made — the career sacrifices, the transatlantic move, the embrace of a life she had not been born into — to occupy a position defined by its relationship to someone else’s importance.
The palace’s answer to this frustration was, essentially, that this was the job, and that everyone within the institution was in some sense in service to the whole.
Meghan’s answer was Megxit.
It was the only move available to her if she wanted to be the principal rather than the support — to build something that was hers rather than always being contextualised as Harry’s wife, which was always contextualised as William and Kate’s counterpart.
In leaving, she removed herself from the comparison game.
But the game, it turned out, continued without her presence requiring it.
The Coronation happened and she wasn’t there.
Trooping the Colour happened and she managed only to compete with it from a distance.
Kate’s cancer diagnosis in early 2024, and her subsequent withdrawal from public duties for several months, briefly removed the object of comparison from the field.
The world’s attention turned to her health, her recovery, and the quiet courage with which she navigated a diagnosis she chose not to share immediately.
When she returned to public life at Trooping the Colour in June 2024, the response was overwhelming — a wave of warmth and relief that had little to do with rivalry and everything to do with the simple fact of her continued presence.
Against that backdrop — Kate’s physical vulnerability, her battle back to health, the public’s heartfelt response to her return — Meghan’s brand launch landed differently than it might have in a different moment.
The calculated timing that might once have seemed sharp read, in the context of Kate’s cancer recovery, as something less flattering.
It is possible that this, too, was calculated.
It is possible it was simply unfortunate timing.
What it was not, by any reading, was accidental.
The rivalry between these two women has been constructed partly by tabloids, partly by palace politics, and partly by the incompatible needs of two strong-willed people occupying roles that were, almost by design, in competition with each other.
Whatever Meghan’s feelings about Kate personally — and there are conflicting accounts of their private relationship, ranging from genuine early warmth to deep mutual frustration — the institutional structure they both inhabited guaranteed that their stories would be told as a competition, and that one of them would always be winning.
