Prince Harry has changed his country of residence from Britain to the United States in official paperwork, four years after quitting the palace for a new life in California.
The Duke of Sussex filed a notice changing his personal details in connection with Travalyst, his eco-tourism non-profit.
It comes after Harry and Meghan Markle lost their U.K. home, Frogmore Cottage, having been evicted by the royals last year, leaving them with no permanent base in Britain.
For four years, Harry continued to list his country of residence as the U.K. in the documentation that confirms his status as a “person with significant control” over Travalyst, holding 75 percent or more of the shares and voting rights.
The fact he has now changed tack suggests a renewed commitment to their new home in America, and that the Sussexes are in no particular hurry to replace Frogmore.
A filing at Britain’s Companies House, seen by Newsweek, read: “New Country/State Usually Resident: UNITED STATES.”
The date the change was made is cited as 29 June, 2023, in paperwork that was made public for the first time on Wednesday.
That is—to the day—exactly when Buckingham Palace confirmed publicly that Harry and Meghan had officially moved out of Frogmore Cottage.
The couple were sent an eviction notice in January 2023, just days after the publication of the prince’s memoir, Spare, which made sweeping allegations against the royals.
The book painted Queen Camilla as a schemer who briefed against Harry to the media as part of a quest to become Queen Consort, for example.
The Sussexes were given until after King Charles III’s coronation to actually leave Frogmore, and Harry appears to have dated the change in residency to the exact same moment as news stories announcing that Buckingham Palace had confirmed his departure.
Harry’s relationship with Britain is a complicated one. He unsuccessfully appealed against the British government to try to get his police team reinstated and affirmed his commitment to the country of his birth in the process.
His legal representative said in January 2022: “The U.K. will always be Prince Harry’s home and a country he wants his wife and children to be safe in. With the lack of police protection comes too great a personal risk. Prince Harry hopes that his petition—after close to two years of pleas for security in the U.K.—will resolve this situation.”
However, just months later he told NBC that America was his home: “Home for me, now, for the time being, is in the States. And it really feels that way, as well. We’ve been welcomed with open arms and have got such a great community up in Santa Barbara.”
One major factor in that discrepancy may be his assertion that he, Meghan and their children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, are not safe in Britain without police bodyguards.
Frogmore had been internally restructured from staff accommodation into a family home with a nursery at a cost of $3.2 million in public money.
Harry and Meghan also pumped some private funds into the interior decor while they lived there during their time as working royals.
However, once they quit Britain for a new life in America the home lay largely unoccupied, barring a few days a year when Harry visited.
That status is not unusual for royal residences, many of which are used in some seasons and not at all in others.
The Sun reported that the royals wanted Prince Andrew to move out of his own mansion, 30-bedroom Royal Lodge, and into Frogmore, however, he refused.
The house for Harry and Meghan offered far more than a home, as it falls within the police cordon that surrounds Windsor Castle.
Harry and Meghan had their police protection team stripped away from them when they quit the palace, so the house was an oasis within which they still had de facto police bodyguards.