Prince Harry Made It Back to California for Archie’s 4th Birthday

Prince Harry had a hectic Saturday after attending his father King Charles’s coronation at Westminster Abbey on Saturday morning only to immediately head to Heathrow airport for a plane back home to California. The Duke of Sussex reportedly took a commercial flight with British Airways that landed at LAX at 7:30 p.m., which would be 3:30 a.m. London time.

The weekend still held more ceremonial events for the coronation, but Harry was satisfied with being there for the official main event. The King’s son was seated three rows back with his cousins Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice and their husbands, Jack Brooksbank and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi.

His older brother, Prince William, was front row with wife Kate Middleton and their three children, George, Charlotte, and Louis. Part of Harry’s rush home was the pull of his own family, who was in Montecito, California, celebrating the 4th birthday of his son, Archie. Harry and wife Meghan Markle share Archie and their daughter, Lilibet, and Meghan decided to stay home to host a small gathering for her eldest. She was supposedly invited to attend the festivities.

Instead, she threw a “low-key” party with a homemade lemon cake featuring lemons grown in their own garden, according to the Mail on Sunday. The event was attended by Meghan’s mom, Doria Ragland, and was a “small, intimate gathering,” with a source saying that Meghan “stayed home to celebrate Archie’s birthday because she felt it would be inauthentic to do anything else.”

They added, “She wanted to minimize the drama.”

Even without Meghan being at Westminster, tensions seemed to be high when the duke returned to his family for the first time after the release of his tell-all memoir, Spare, and the couple’s Netflix docuseries Meghan & Harry. Both were hits, and both revealed a fair amount of alleged dysfunction in the royal family and the reasons why the couple decided to step back and head for California.

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