Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Officially Move Out of Frogmore Cottage

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle just made another royal exit.

Three years after stepping back as working members of the U.K. royal family, the pair have given up Frogmore Cottage in Windsor. The news also comes months after the couple were asked to leave the royal residence, which was renovated for them and where they have stayed during occasional trips since they moved to the United States in 2020.

"We can confirm that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have vacated Frogmore Cottage," Sir Michael Stevens, keeper of the Privy Purse, said at the annual Sovereign Grant account briefing on royal finances, Sky News reported June 29. "We will not be going into any detail on those arrangements here."

He added, "Safe to say that, as has previously been stated, the duke and duchess have paid for the expenditure incurred by the Sovereign Grant in relation to the renovation of Frogmore Cottage, thus leaving the Crown with a greatly enhanced asset."

In March, a spokesperson for the couple confirmed to E! News that "The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been requested to vacate their residence at Frogmore Cottage." NBC News reached out to Buckingham Palace at the time but did not receive any comment.

The news came more than a month after the release of Harry's controversial memoir, Spare, in which he criticized the Royal family.

In the book, he talked about how he and Meghan acquired Frogmore Cottage, explaining that in 2019, when she was pregnant with their now-4-year-old son Prince Archie, his grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, offered the home to him as an official residence after he told her that they "needed a new place to live." He further noted that their Nottingham Cottage home in Kensington Palace was "charming but too small."

Prior to moving in, the couple had Frogmore Cottage renovated, transforming five apartment units to a single residence. Harry noted that the Queen gave him and Meghan the permission to pursue the project to, as he put in, "make the place habitable."

The project cost 2.4 million British pounds ($3 million) and was initially covered by the Sovereign Grant, which comes from the U.K. Treasury and funds the costs of the Royal family's households and travel expenses. Harry and Meghan sparked a public backlash over their use of government money and ultimately repaid the renovation costs.

In mid-2020, the couple—now also parents to daughter Princess Lilibet, 2—relocated to the United States, buying a $14 million home in the duchess' native California. Harry last visited Frogmore Cottage in earlier this month during a trip to London to testify against Mirror Group Newspapers Ltd. in a phone hacking case, to which the company has denied any wrongdoing.

 

In their 2022 Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, Harry spoke about leaving the U.K. after stepping back as working Royals.

"We always saw Archie running around the garden at Frogmore Cottage and maybe jumping in the Queen's pond," he said. "That was all part of our future, and everything changed really, really quickly. We knew that we were going to get some breathing space from this very painful experience that we'd been stuck in, but also it was really sad."

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