Prince Harry with Meghan visit the town hall in Duesseldorf, Germany. Photo / AP
Since 1851, Balmoral, the royal family's Scottish estate, has been a place of peace and calm.
It's where they have gone to spend long summer holidays, far away from (most) of the prying lenses of the press, to relax together and to do as millions of other British families have done forever – watch their father try to barbecue soggy snags in the rain.
But in the early hours of Friday morning, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex arrived back at the estate just over 25 years to the day that he, aged 12, woke up inside the castle to be told the life-changing news that his mother Diana, Princess of Wales had been killed in Paris.
Once again, the Deeside estate is a place of mourning for the 37-year-old Duke after the death of the Queen at age 96.
He and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex had been back in the UK since last weekend when they returned for a series of charity outings, a pseudo-royal tour replete with a walkabout, a speech and some carefully corralled cheering crowds.
For the Sussexes, this period of time was meant to be the firing of the starting gun on their debut as content creators and supposed Hollywood power players.
In September, Meghan's debut podcast Archetypes launched, hitting the number one spot nearly immediately. (It has now lost top billing to Joe Rogan's eponymous show and the Duchess' highest ranked episode, her most recent with actor Mindy Kaling, is sitting in 21st spot.)
The remaining months of 2022 had been shaping up to be the biggest yet for the California-based twosome since they quit royal life so dramatically in the early days of 2020.
After the pandemic; after the political tumult of the presidential election; after the arrival of their daughter Lilibet; now finally the opening bell was going to be rung on their post-royal careers. Podcasts, TV, a book! World, watch out!
However today, those plans must surely be in disarray.
There is, of course, Harry's memoir, with reports suggesting that publisher Penguin Random House wants the still-as-yet-unnamed title to be on shelves in time for the lucrative Christmas rush, the contents of which are said to have caused no end of fretting and nerves in royal circles.
Ever since the reported A$27 million ($30m) deal was announced last year, speculation has been rife that such an extravagant sum would demand that Harry agree to sensationally unburden himself of royal revelations; that the Duke, having spent much of the past two years pillorying The Firm, would use all those hundreds of pages for a fresh onslaught of royal agitprop.
While he and Meghan have, most notably in their jaw-dropping Oprah Winfrey interview, steered a very, very wide path away from uttering anything but silver-tongued praise for his grandmother, the same could not be said for his father, now King Charles III, and his brother Prince William, as of today the Duke of Cornwall and Cambridge.
Countless reports have suggested that Harry's book will, as the Mirror reported earlier this year, "shake the monarchy to the core" and will lay bare his true feelings about his stepmother, the new Queen Consort, Camilla.
In late August a publishing source told Page Six: "Harry has some truth bombs in his book that he is debating on whether to include or not."
The question is, will Penguin Random House continue with the book's publication schedule, especially if it presents a less-than-flattering picture of the newly minted sovereign and his heir apparent?
On one hand, they would seem to have invested vast wads of money into this book and interest in the royal family is about to reach fever pitch. However, on the other hand, Americans today are demonstrating a surprising level of public grief, with the news of Her Majesty's passing dominating the New York Times and Washington Post.
As surprising as it might be, and even in the wake of the Sussexes' allegations of racism and cruelty, polling done in May this year found that 63 per cent of Americans still had a favourable view of the Queen.
Against this backdrop, would Penguin risk putting out a book that might run so counter to public sentiment about the Queen or at a time of global sympathy for the House of Windsor? Would they take a chance on one of the biggest publishing releases in modern history only for it to (potentially) constitute kicking the royal family while they are down?
Executives at Netflix now face the same predicament when it comes to the future of the "at home" docuseries about the Sussexes that has been in the works for at least a year now. (Or as Meghan recently somewhat nonsensically described the series in an interview with The Cut, as a documentary that would be about their "love story".)
Does Netflix decide to ride the wave of renewed obsession with all things palace-related all the way to score streaming gold? Or would it look crass and opportunistic to put this series out now?
More broadly, the Sussexes now face a serious threat to the brand they have built since quitting royal-dom as the little guys speaking truth to power; the authentic voices who refused to be silenced or squashed by a stultifying palace so wholly thrown by their humanitarian chutzpah and pep.
While they launched their charity arm Archewell in late 2020 (releasing a letter that gifted the world the absurdly pretentious opener, "I am my mother's son. And I am our son's mother") they have so far managed to achieve nothing of real note on this front.
Instead, their current identity in the wider US firmament is as celebrities and not as the public figures and leaders they seem to so urgently wish to be.
A speech here and there and a smattering of meetings with the great and good have, hardly surprisingly, failed to translate into them being viewed as serious power players in Washington or New York. They might take themselves ridiculously seriously but the people who actually count have yet to do so.
Instead, what Harry and Meghan have achieved since hitting the US more than two years ago is to wage a painfully public PR campaign in which they have pitted themselves against the royal family, a strategy that has paid some dividends in terms of popularity and fame.
But today? That looks like a myopic gambit that could be about to backfire.
Harry and Meghan have spent the past two years defining themselves entirely in opposition to a family and institution, which are today objects of the world's sympathy and as of now, the Sussexes are no longer able to play the Bad Palace card.
The Duke and Duchess suddenly find themselves in a sort of 21st-century emperor's new clothes situation: Take away their signature woe-is-us lamenting routine and what are you left with? Two famous people who have achieved nothing meaningful and have saddled themselves with a huge mortgage.
While the UK comes together to mourn the loss of the history-making Queen, in a moment of national unity and sorrow, Harry and Meghan now find themselves in the highly unenviable position of being caught, at least for now, on the wrong side of history.
• Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years of experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles.
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