It’s been a worrying week for the Royal family. On Wednesday, separate statements from Buckingham and Kensington Palace revealed that King Charles will attend hospital for an enlarged prostate and Kate Middleton this week underwent major abdominal surgery. Kate’s surgery is said to have been ‘successful’ and she will be recovering in hospital for 10 to 14 days. Meanwhile, Buckingham Palace announced the King will go to hospital next week for the ‘corrective procedure’, but that his condition was benign.

But amongst all the well wishes and concern, it didn’t take long for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle and Harry, to get pulled into the conversation about the royal family’s health. Despite them being over 5,000 miles across an ocean in Montecito. Since the news about Charles and Kate broke, there have been a slew of headlines and social media trolling of the couple which, once again, feels cruel, predictable and nonsensical. 

Some headlines this week have suggested that Harry and Meghan have remained ‘silent’ amid the health struggles of Prince Charles and Kate, because they haven’t (publicly, at least) joined in with the well wishes from other celebrities like Giovanna Fletcher and John Torode. Other headlines have simply focused on how Prince Harry was pictured going to the gym the day before the Palace made announcements about the royal family’s respective surgeries. Some – really pushing it considering the Palace have specifically asked for the Princess of Wales’ condition to remain private – have even suggested that Kate faced ‘emotional strain’ from Harry and Meghan’s ongoing royal drama in the months leading up to her surgery.

The first thing to note here is that we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. Just because there has been no public statement from the Sussexes, who’s to say they haven’t sent their well wishes in private? It also feels unfair that Meghan and Harry are once again being dragged into the conversation. The real news is that Charles and Kate have sadly had to go through serious medical procedures – not that Harry has nipped to the gym to get his daily step count in. What would a statement have done but spawned a thousand more headlines of speculation and hate on social media, at a time when someone is ill? Every word would’ve been poured over for ‘hidden meaning’. It seems understandable in that context Harry and Meghan would ‘stay silent’ in public. For the Sussexes, if they speak they’re centring themselves – and if they don’t, they’re silent. There’s no winning.

On social media, the vitriol against Meghan and Harry is even more toxic, with some users going as far as to suggest that they bet Meghan was ‘deliriously happy’ when hearing the news about Kate and Charles. On the other side Meghan and Harry’s ‘supporters’ on social media have also been posting nasty comments about Kate’s surgery, with one even branding it ‘payback,’ which of course is horrifying. The Daily Mail’s diary editor Richard Eden summed this up in a post on X, where he wrote ‘Some of the posts on here about the Princess of Wales’s health problems from #PrinceHarry and #Meghan’s supporters really disgust me.’

Of course, the way some people are hounding Kate after she has gone through serious surgery is plain nasty. But it’s highly likely the Sussexes think this is the case too. We mustn’t forget that they have no control over what their so called ‘supporters’ say online, and they have previously very critical of the way hate is perpetuated on social media. In 2021, Harry and Meghan abandoned social media all together after becoming disillusioned with all the ‘hate’ they encountered online. To suggest they would in any way sanction messages against Kate is complete fantasy. Again, staying quiet could be a way to keep all of this as low level as possible.

Because given their views on social media, it’s likely the Sussexes would be equally outraged at the vitriol directed towards Kate, especially since they underwent similar experiences themselves. In a podcast to mark World Mental Health Day, Meghan spoke about the ‘almost unsurvivable’ toll of online abuse and said she was the most trolled person in the world in 2019.

‘I’m told that in 2019 I was the most trolled person in the entire world, male or female,’ she said. ‘Now, eight months of that I wasn’t even visible, I was on maternity leave or with a baby. But what was able to just be manufactured and churned out, it’s almost unsurvivable, that’s so big, you can’t think of what that feels like, because I don’t care if you’re 15 or 25, if people are saying things about you that aren’t true, what that does to your mental and emotional health is so damaging.’

There have also been comments about the Royal Family struggling to fill the gaps at engagements, left by King Charles, Kate and William during their recoveries and caring responsibilities. Of course, this has led some to joke about Harry coming back into the fold (Piers Morgan jokingly asking if he could be ‘interim King’). But more upsettingly for all involved, some have weaponised the illnesses against the Sussexes, by inferring they’ve abandoned the family and now left them unable to cope and fulfil Royal duties in hard times.

Because no-one actually knows where Harry, William and Charles’ relationship stands at the moment, speculation has been rife not only about whether well wishes have been sent, but how much the Sussexes knew about the procedures. There’s been stories claiming Harry may have heard about Charles’ prostate diagnoses from the media, rather than the Palace itself. That may or may not be, but after all the family has been through, these stories seem difficult to swallow. It isn’t known whether Harry and William are speaking after the rift caused by Harry’s bombshell memoir, Spare, although it has been reported that Harry and Charles are on talking terms. But is it really our business whether Harry has made a phone call to wish members of his family well? Not really. Health is a very private matter as it is, even when it comes to the Royals who live most of their life in the public eye.

So, instead of using this as an opportunity to pry about family feuds or tear down Harry and Meghan even further, why don’t we all just focus on the matter in hand: wishing Kate and Charles a speedy, and healthy, recovery. Because if we’re being honest – and human – it’s probably likely that’s what’s happened behind the scenes.