Meghan Markle slams royal protocols after Archie nearly caught in terrifying fire incident

Meghan Markle took a veiled swipe at royal protocols when she recalled having to go on an official engagement just hours after a fire broke out in their son Archie's nursery.

The Duchess of Sussex recalled the terrifying incident in the first episode of her "Archetypes" Spotify podcast, where she was joined by her longtime friend Serena Williams.

The former "Suits" star said the incident happened during her and Prince Harry's tour of South Africa. Their son Archie, who was only four and a half months old, had stayed behind with his nanny at their housing unit while they carried out official visits.

Markle shared, "We finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say there's been a fire at the residence. There's been a fire in the baby's room."

They raced back to the residence and met "amazing nanny, Lauren" who was "in floods of tears." She was supposed to put Archie down to sleep in his room but decided at the last minute to get a snack.

"Her instinct was like, 'Let me just bring him with me before I put him down.' In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire," the Duchess of Sussex continued.

She said "there was no smoke detector" but "someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway" and went in and put out the fire with an extinguisher. Thankfully, everyone was safe but shaken. But there was the matter of their public engagement.

The duchess continued, "As a mother, you go, Oh, my God, what? Everyone's in tears, everyone's shaken. And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement?"

Meghan Markle said she told those around her at that time that "this doesn't make any sense" and asked, "Can you just tell people what happened?" But admitted that the "focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels."

"...And part of the humanising and the breaking through of these labels and these archetypes and these boxes that we're put into is having some understanding on the human moments behind the scenes that people might not have any awareness of and to give each other a break."

Meghan Markle then seemingly slammed royal protocols when she said that she and Prince Harry ended up having to leave Archie because they had to "do another official engagement." A surprised Williams said that she "couldn't have done that" to her own child to which the duchess replied, "Oh well."