Harry and Meghan’s hard exit

When Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, made the bombshell announcement that they planned to “step back” from their royal duties, they said they hoped to carve out a “progressive new role” within the monarchy.

But under a severance deal announced over the weekend, the couple will lose most of the privileges and perks of royalty once they give up their full-time status and forsake Britain for an uncertain future in Canada and the United States. It’s a harsher deal than the soft exit they’d imagined.

“It brings me great sadness that it has come to this,” Harry said of the agreement, which codifies one of the most dramatic ruptures within the British royal family since King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry an American, Wallis Simpson.

Details: Harry and Meghan will forgo public funding of their activities, abandon their royal designations and repay the more than $3 million they spent refurbishing their residence on the grounds of Windsor Castle. But for now, their website has retained references to “His Royal Highness” and “Her Royal Highness.”

Quotable: Penny Junor, a royal biographer, said the British royal family was “trying to prevent a half-in, half-out arrangement, which doesn’t work.”