Prince Harry didn’t hold back in shutting down rumours about his marriage to Meghan Markle, but his remarks reveal some hidden personal struggles according to one expert.

The duke laughed as he brushed off the claims in a recent sit-down interview with the New York Times, and addressed the fact that he and Meghan have been attending work engagements solo more often recently.

He didn’t hesitate in his response, joking that claims about the couple moving house come up as often as those that they are heading for a divorce. “Apparently we’ve bought or moved house 10, 12 times. We’ve apparently divorced maybe 10, 12 times as well. So it’s just like, what?” Harry joked to Andrew Ross Sorkin, the columnist hosting the event.

Despite finally addressing the rumours about his marriage head on, a royal expert has claimed out the comments did reveal something of the “inner turmoil” that Harry suffers from. “[Harry] said that all the pundits must be very disappointed, and he felt sorry for them that none of these things actually happened,” royal author Hugo Vickers told The Sun.

“What else can he say? He must be roundly fed up with all the kind of speculation that’s been going on over his whole life, ever since he was a little boy, so in that respect, I sympathise with him.”

The royal author added that Meghan and Harry working separately likely does not indicate any marital woes, and instead is probably part of a larger strategy for their careers going forward, in which they both are able to play to their personal strengths.

“They’re always playing to their particular skills. They’re also always having to reinvent themselves. They’re always having to try and keep focused in the public eye,” he added.

The expert’s comments reflect many things that Harry has said over the years, about the massive amount of scrutiny his personal life has generated given his royal position. In his memoir Spare, Harry wrote extensively about how the “role” carved out for him in the public imagination brought him a lot of mental distress, especially when he was younger.

“I’d been cast in my role in the Rolling Royal Melodrama. Long before I was old enough to drink a beer (legally) it became dogma. Harry? Yeah, he’s the naughty one. Naughty became the tide I swam against, the headwind I flew against, the daily expectation I could never hope to shake,” Harry wrote in one moving passage.

“I didn’t want to be naughty […] but every sin, every misstep, every setback triggered the same tired label, and the same public condemnations, and thereby reinforced the conventional wisdom that I was innately naughty.”