3 months ago
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There were several parts of Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, which really stuck with me. Harry’s musings about whether the royal family is a death cult, Harry feeling like he got punched in the throat when he saw Meghan for the first time on his friend’s social media, and how he and Meghan used to walk around the grounds in Windsor, around all of the tombs and gravesites. For more than a century, members of the Windsor clan have been buried or entombed in Windsor. Most of them are intimately involved with planning their funerals and burial arrangements, and that’s especially true of royals high up in the line of succession. Still, it’s creepy as hell when the Mail’s Ephraim Hardcastle column wonders aloud if Harry will be buried in America.
Harry insists that the US is now his residence but specialist expatriate law firm Blevins Franks warns of the pitfalls: ‘HMRC will look for any indication that you see Britain as your homeland and may return one day. Even stating in your will that you wish to be buried in the UK could work against you.’
So has Harry stipulated where he will be interred? Even Wallis Simpson is reposing in the family graveyard at Frogmore following a royal reconciliation, although she and the Duke of Windsor had bought burial plots in Baltimore where her father is buried.
Meghan, however, does not seem to be in any mood to be reconciled with her own family, let alone her in-laws. Harry could become the first royal to be laid to rest in the US.
Is this the brave new frontier of threats being issued to Harry? “You can’t have a home in the UK, you can’t visit us, you can’t have security and now you can’t be buried here!” They’ve well and truly run out of things to “take away” from Harry so now he doesn’t get to be buried in Windsor, and neither does Meghan. To that I say: oh well. Harry has made it perfectly clear that his life is in California, with his wife and children. And no, the premise of “it will look bad for Harry’s American residency if he says he wants to be buried in the UK” falls flat too. US Immigration/DHS doesn’t give a sh-t about any of that.
Photos courtesy of Netflix.
