Meghan Markle shared a rare photo showing Prince Archie’s face as a young baby sleeping on Prince Harry’s chest to mark the 7-year-old’s birthday.
The Duchess of Sussex usually only shares pictures where her children’s faces are not visible to safeguard their privacy but waived the policy, perhaps because the youngster is now unrecognizable from his baby photo.
Meghan captioned the image: “7 years later… happy birthday to our sweet boy.”
Why It Matters
Harry and Meghan have sought to keep their children’s faces off social media to help avoid the childhood the prince grew up with, in which he experienced first hand some of the paparazzi frenzy that targeted his mother Princess Diana.
Needless to say, like many celebrities, Meghan does post photos of her children and references motherhood regularly in interviews and in her Netflix show With Love, Meghan, creating some tension over whether she is happy to trade off motherhood or not.
Prince Archie Turns 7
Born Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor on May 6, 2019, at London’s Portland Hospital, Prince Archie arrived at a moment of significant transition for the Sussexes as they reshaped their working lives, having just left Kensington Palace where working relations with Prince William and Princess Kate had become toxic.
They set up a new private office at Buckingham Palace but the upheaval continued just months later when they moved abroad. Archie spent his first months in Britain, living at Frogmore Cottage, the couple’s former home in Windsor, before they flew out, first to Canada in November 2019 and then to America in March 2020.
No sooner had they arrived then the coronavirus pandemic took hold meaning his first couple of years were unusually isolated, though he did have some unusually expansive grounds to play in.
The Sussexes initially moved to Tyler Perry’s Los Angeles mansion before buying their own place in Montecito and moving in that summer.
Archie became an older brother in June 2021 when Princess Lilibet was born and became a prince only in 2022 after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, after which his grandfather, King Charles III, became the new British monarch.
Despite his royal lineage, Archie’s upbringing has diverged sharply from that of his cousins in Britain. While Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis are gradually being introduced to public duties, Archie and his sister Princess Lilibet, 4, are being raised with an emphasis on normalcy and independence.
Prince Archie’s Experiences With the Paparazzi
Archie has had several run-ins with the paparazzi though may have been too young to remember them. The first was when he was photographed in a baby sling strapped to Meghan’s chest in Canada in 2020.
The second came while they were living at Perry’s Los Angeles home and photos of Archie playing in the private grounds with his grandmother Doria Ragland where captured using a drone and sold to German magazine Bunte. The Sussexes sued picture agencies over both those images and won.
Another incident saw Meghan photographed picking Archie up from pre-school in 2021 and Harry went on to tell the Armchair Expert podcast about the impact the moment had.
He told host Dax Shepard: “Page six of the celebrity.land, they took photos of my son being picked up from school on his first day.”
“It’s this sort of rabid feeding frenzy and going back to the kids point it’s absolutely true,” Harry continued. ” These kids don’t get a choice; they don’t get a say in it.
“If it [paparazzi attention] becomes any worse then what you’re basically accepting is … let’s punish people who have got a talent and have literally worked their asses off to get to a point where, yes, they’re making money and, yes, their fans are contributing to that but they’re bringing entertainment and value to society.”
Since then though, the market for photos of the couple’s children has not been so fierce and they have had to do less to protect their privacy.
Public appearances remain rare. Beyond early outings as an infant and occasional family snapshots, Archie has mostly been shielded from the media attention that defined earlier generations of royal children.
As he turns 7, Prince Archie represents a new chapter in royal history: a child born into one of the world’s most recognizable institutions, yet growing up beyond its traditional structures.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newsweek.com ’
