Prince Harry Made It Back to California For Son Archie's Fourth Birthday

Prince Harry had a hectic Saturday after attending his father King Charles’ coronation at Westminster Abbey on Saturday morning only to head immediately 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 pm, which would be 3:30 am 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 were in Montecito, California, celebrating the fourth 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 her her eldest. She was supposedly invited to attends 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 Raglund 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.

Aimée Lutkin is the weekend editor at ELLE.com. Her writing has appeared in Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire and more. Her first book, The Lonely Hunter, will be released by Dial Press in February 2022.