After Years Away, Harry and Meghan Plan U.K. Return With Kids

In a potential turning point for one of the royal family’s most closely watched family dynamics, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are preparing to bring their two children back to the United Kingdom for the first time in years. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex plan to travel to England in July for the Invictus Games, and this time, Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5, will make the journey across the Atlantic with them.

The news feels significant precisely because it contradicts something Harry said just over a year ago. In May 2025, after losing a court appeal for enhanced security for his family, the prince told the BBC:“I can’t see a world in which I would bring my wife and children back to the U.K. at this point.”At the time, he called it“really quite sad”that safety concerns seemed to rule out sharing his home country with Archie and Lili. That statement felt final—a reluctant acceptance that his children might grow up without meaningful connection to the place where he was born.

Yet here we are in June 2026, and the plan has shifted. What changed isn’t entirely clear from the reporting, but the move suggests something important may be thawing. Harry also signaled in that same 2025 interview that he’d abandoned the fight:“I would love reconciliation with my family. There’s no point in continuing to fight anymore,”he said, acknowledging the deep rifts with King Charles III and Prince William. Whether this trip signals actual progress on that front remains to be seen, but the willingness to bring the children back at all marks a departure from the position he held just months earlier.

Since moving to Montecito, California, in 2020 after stepping down as senior working royals, Harry and Meghan have built a life deliberately separate from the U.K. They’ve carved out space in their California home—complete with those two palm trees Meghan described in a 2022 interview with The Cut, connected at the base, that Harry called“us.”It’s a home where they’ve focused on raising Archie and Lili away from the intensity of royal and tabloid scrutiny. Yet the desire to show his children the country he loves, despite everything, seems to be winning out.

The July trip to the Invictus Games could serve as both a practical bridge and a symbolic one. It’s an event close to Harry’s heart, a foundation he’s championed for years, and bringing his family along transforms it from a solo obligation into something that includes his children in his world. Whether it opens doors to broader reconciliation with the wider royal family remains uncertain, but it does suggest that whatever security concerns persist, they’re no longer absolute barriers to the return he seemed to have resigned himself to never making.