Royal time off!
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry will take about six weeks off towards the end of the year to spend some valuable “family time” together amid their concerns that the intense scrutiny they’ve faced has been tough on the couple.
Meghan and Harry will spend the time between the U.K. and the U.S. with the likelihood that they could celebrate Thanksgiving in America.
“The duke and duchess have a full schedule of engagements and commitments until mid-November, after which they will be taking some much-needed family time,” a royal source has confirmed to PEOPLE.
Suggestions that the couple might make a move to Africa, where they recently embarked on a royal tour, have also been reignited, with Harry saying in a new documentary that Cape Town would be “an amazing place” for the couple and baby Archie to live.
“I don’t know where we could live in Africa at the moment. We’ve just come from Cape Town. That would be an amazing place to be able to base ourselves,” he says in Harry & Meghan: An African Journey, which debuts on ITV in the U.K. on Sunday.
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The documentary also highlights some of the difficulties the new parents have faced in the last year.
“Any woman, especially when they’re pregnant, you’re really vulnerable, and so that was made really challenging. And then when you have a newborn, you know. And especially as a woman, it’s a lot,” Meghan says.
“So you add this on top of just trying to be a new mom or trying to be a newlywed. It’s um …yeah. I guess, also thank you for asking because not many people have asked if I’m okay, but it’s a very real thing to be going through behind the scenes.”
Asked by ITV’s Tom Bradby if it “would be fair” to say that she’s “not really okay, as in it’s really been a struggle?” the duchess responds, “Yes.”
RELATED VIDEO: A New Documentary to Air Never-Before-Seen Footage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Royal African Tour
Harry also talks about the still raw emotions he feels about the death of his mother Princess Diana 22 years ago and his continuing feeling that press attention led to that .
“I think being part of this family — in this role, in this job — every single time I see a camera, every single time I hear a click, every single time I see a flash, it takes me straight back,” he said. “In that respect, it’s the worst reminder of her life as oppose to the best.”
“Being here now 22 years later trying to finish what she started will be incredibly emotional. But everything that I do reminds me of her,” he continued. “But as I said — with the role, with the job and sort of the pressures that come with that — I get reminded of the bad stuff.”
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In a statement released towards the end of their tour of Southern Africa, Harry, 35, said, “Unfortunately, my wife has become one of the latest victims of a British tabloid press that wages campaigns against individuals with no thought to the consequences – a ruthless campaign that has escalated over the past year, throughout her pregnancy and while raising our newborn son.”
For Harry, Africa is always going to be at the center of his, and Meghan’s, work. He tells the ITV documentary, “The rest of our lives, especially our life’s work, will be predominantly focused on Africa, on conservation . . . . there’s a lot of things to be done. There’s a lot of problems here, but a huge potential for solutions.”
