It was raining in London on the evening of March 5th, and so only a small crowd had gathered outside Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London, to watch the Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrive for an awards ceremony hosted by the Endeavour Fund, a charity that supports wounded ex-servicemen and women. As press photographers waited for the couple to dart from Land Rover to lobby, they had little hope of a great shot: rain complicates flash photography, and the Duke and Duchess might be obscured by an umbrella. Luckily, Samir Hussein, who has frequently photographed the Royal Family, had an inspiration: flashes of cameras in the crowd could create a dramatic backlighting effect, as in a studio shot, and other flashes might illuminate the faces of the Sussexes, Prince Harry and the former Meghan Markle. Hussein snapped a picture the split second that the couple, their arms linked under a single umbrella, turned toward each other and smiled. The image became instantly iconic. The pair gazed into each other’s eyes with the insular complicity of newlyweds, unscathed by the rain falling around them like glittering confetti.

Although the photograph suggested nuptial bliss, it marked the conclusion of a whirlwind divorce—the abrupt separation of the Duke and Duchess from the United Kingdom and its monarchy. The event was the couple’s first public appearance in the U.K. since announcing, in January, via Instagram, that they were relinquishing their roles as “ ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family” and would henceforth be spending much of their time in North America, where they hoped to “carve out a progressive new role within this institution.” In the days after the Endeavour Fund event, the couple—who, amid alarm over the spread of the coronavirus, had left their nine-month-old son, Archie, in Canada, where they had been living—carried out their final engagements before formally stepping down from their official duties, at the end of March. The Duke and Duchess will no longer use the honorific H.R.H., which stands for His—or Her—Royal Highness, though they will retain the titles. In February, in Edinburgh, the person introducing the Prince at a conference on sustainable travel asked him how he preferred to be addressed. “Just call me Harry,” he said. The couple will also stop receiving income from the Sovereign Grant, the pot of public money allocated to the Queen and to family members who represent her in official roles. (The Sovereign Grant currently amounts to about a hundred million dollars.)

The Sussexes have declared that they plan to work, with the goal of becoming financially independent, though for now, at least, they will continue to receive funding, reportedly amounting to several million dollars, from the Duchy of Cornwall, the property of Harry’s father, Prince Charles. An indication of the kind of revenue streams they may explore came in February, when Harry travelled to Miami and gave a speech at an investment summit sponsored by JPMorgan; he spoke of the lingering trauma of his very public childhood and bereavement. And last year he signed up to produce, with Oprah Winfrey, a documentary series for television, on mental-health issues; Winfrey was a guest at the Sussexes’ wedding, which took place in May, 2018, in Windsor. Markle, the former star of the TV series “Suits,” may resume her Hollywood career; at the end of March, the Sussexes relocated to Los Angeles. (President Donald Trump greeted their arrival by tweeting that the U.S. will not pay for their security.)

According to royal experts, the only approximate modern precursor to Megxit—the term that was inevitably coined for the Sussexes’ departure—was the abdication crisis of 1936. Then, King Edward VIII stepped down from the throne in order to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, of Baltimore, Maryland; he became the Duke of Windsor and retreated into a long exile of decadent mooching, in France and elsewhere. Constitutionally speaking, there is no real parallel. A king’s abdication reorders the unfolding of history: without Edward’s withdrawal, the current queen, who is now in the sixty-ninth year of her reign, might never have ascended the throne. Harry’s retirement from the family business does not affect the succession. It has, however, inspired a collective reckoning, for which the British public has been especially primed by three seasons of “The Crown,” in which the soul-crushing nature of the institution has been amply depicted. How bad must being an H.R.H. be in order to make someone want to quit?

In the three months since the Sussexes announced their intention to step down—reportedly, before consulting the Queen, Prince Charles, or Prince William—the British people, or at least their representatives in the media, have been reeling like a spouse blindsided by a partner’s sudden announcement of irreconcilable differences. The question of who, or what, was to blame for the rupture has yet to be conclusively answered. Were Harry and Meghan millennial weaklings retreating into self-care and self-pity, unwilling to withstand the scrutiny of their public life in exchange for the material luxury of their private one? Were they pampered hypocrites, lecturing others about climate change while cheerfully leaping aboard private jets belonging to celebrity friends? Were they just bored, or burned out? Were they fatally undermined by the royal establishment? Were they too ambitious for their second-fiddle roles? Or were they, despite all their privilege, victims—he the target of relentless attention since birth, and she the object of barely concealed racism?

Admittedly, these have not been Britain’s most pressing concerns in recent months. Storms and floods battered the nation for much of the winter, and the instability and anxiety caused by the coronavirus have loomed much larger than the royal drama, especially in the weeks since the Sussexes’ visit, during which Britain has entered lockdown, with hospitals on a war footing. Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, is among the tens of thousands who have tested positive for COVID-19, though his case turned out to be a mild one. On April 5th, the Queen, for only the fifth time in her reign, delivered a special address to the nation. Speaking from Windsor Castle, where she has been in self-isolation, she called on Britons to remain “united and resolute,” and reassured her subjects that “we will meet again.” That same evening, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, was admitted to the hospital with persistent symptoms of COVID-19; he went on to spend three nights in intensive care but was, according to Downing Street, in the “early phase of his recovery” by week’s end.

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Shopping Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen

Dickie Arbiter, a former press secretary at Buckingham Palace, and now a familiar royal commentator, told me, of Harry and Meghan’s departure, “It is sad for the Queen—at ninety-three, the last thing she wants to see is her family disappear into the sunset—and it is also a letdown for the British people. But the British people are stoic, and they get on with it. And, if that’s what Harry and Meghan want, good luck to them.” Yet, even as much larger crises emerged, the ongoing story of Harry and Meghan was compelling to observe, in part because the constitutional insignificance of their actions is counterbalanced by the symbolic weight of those actions.