Tungsten and the Truth About Royal Welcome

The Myers book was intended to rehabilitate William and Kate. Instead, buried inside its pages, is one detail that accidentally dismantles the entire “we tried to welcome her” narrative the institution has been running for six years.

Charles called Meghan “Tungsten.”

The nickname, after the metal renowned for being tough and unbending under extreme pressure, was reportedly intended as a compliment. Charles was fond of her. He found her charming and engaging. He admired the backbone she gave Harry. A source told the Mail as far back as 2018 that it had become a term of endearment.

Read that again slowly. The King of England privately admired Meghan Markle’s strength enough to give her a nickname celebrating it. And then, when she needed that strength most, when she was pregnant, biracial, and being targeted with documented racist abuse online, that same institution declined to protect her.

Charles didn’t intervene on security. William offered nothing. The protection that Kate had received as a girlfriend, simply by virtue of dating the heir, was withheld from Meghan until after marriage, a threshold that conveniently moved every time Harry raised the issue.

Private admiration. Public abandonment. That is not a welcome. That is surveillance dressed as affection.

The Tungsten nickname also exposes the dishonesty underneath every claim that followed about Kate and Sophie making “repeated attempts” to help Meghan adjust. You do not give someone a metal nickname and then genuinely embrace them. You give someone a metal nickname when you are watching them from a careful, assessable distance, noting their qualities, deciding what use they might be, and reserving the right to withdraw at any moment. It is the language of observation, not belonging.

What the nickname actually reveals is that the institution saw Meghan clearly. They understood exactly who she was. Tough. Resilient. Unbending under pressure. And rather than recognizing those qualities as assets for a family that desperately needed modernizing, they identified them as threats to a system that depends on compliance.

A fully formed woman with her own resources, her own resilience, and a husband who backed her unconditionally was not someone the institution could manage through its usual mechanisms of social isolation and financial dependency. So instead of welcoming her, they tested her. Withheld her security. Briefed against her anonymously. Allowed the press to run escalating campaigns. And when she didn’t break, when the Tungsten held, they called it an agenda.

Now consider the contrast the Myers book does not draw, because drawing it would be too devastating.

Andrew, whose associations with Jeffrey Epstein are documented across years and continents, whose accuser Virginia Giuffre was credible enough to warrant a $12 million settlement, who was photographed repeatedly with Epstein’s primary enabler, retained his titles for years, his HRH for longer than was defensible, his security until public outrage made it untenable, his Royal Lodge despite Charles reportedly wanting him out, and according to recent reports, his chef.

We do not know what nickname, if any, the family had for Andrew behind closed doors. We do not know what they called him when the cameras were off and the sources were speaking freely into royal biographers’ recorders. The Myers book, which has apparently unlimited access to Charles’s private thoughts about Meghan’s metallic qualities, is notably silent on this question.

But we know what the institution did when it came to choosing who to protect.

It wasn’t Tungsten.

The hierarchy of protection inside that family was never about behavior, merit, or conduct. It was about which threats the institution could afford to acknowledge and which ones it couldn’t. Meghan, a biracial American woman with a public platform and a husband who loved her, represented a threat to control. Andrew represented a threat to reputation that was already too embedded in the family structure to be easily excised.

So one got a nickname celebrating her strength and a security arrangement that left her vulnerable. The other got decades of institutional cover and a chef.

The Myers book accidentally made the case that no Sussex supporter could have made more effectively. It confirmed that the family saw Meghan clearly, admired her privately, failed her deliberately, and then spent six years and counting explaining why her response to that failure was the real problem.

Tungsten doesn’t bend. It doesn’t break. It doesn’t pretend the pressure wasn’t there.

Neither, it turns out, does Meghan.