For the second half of their Oprah chat, Prince Harry accompanied Meghan Markle, and the prince talked candidly about how their choice to step down from senior royal family positions changed his relationship with his father, Prince Charles, the future king.

After he and his wife left the UK for Canada, Prince Harry claimed his father “stopped taking my calls.”

Instead, he said, he was instructed to put his intentions to step down as a senior royal in writing.

Harry announced that the Queen was blindsided by his and Meghan’s decision to stand down as working royals, claiming that he had so much respect for her.

“I had three conversations with my grandmother, and two conversations with my father before he stopped taking my calls. And then he said, can you put this all in writing?”

‘It’s very sad it’s got to this point,’ Harry said of the circumstance in which he was compelled to depart the UK.

Oprah replied, “You just said your dad stopped taking your calls.”  ” Why?”

“By that point I took matters into my own hands, it was like, I needed to do this for my family. This is not a surprise to anybody. It’s really sad that it’s got to this point, but I’ve got to do something for my own mental health, my wife’s and for Archie’s as well.”

When asked if bridges had been built with Prince Charles, he said: ‘I feel really let down because he [Prince Charles] has been through something similar. He knows what pain feels like and Archie is his grandson.

‘I will always love him, but there’s a lot of hurt that’s happened.

‘I will make it one of my priorities to try and heal that relationship.

‘They only know what they know – I’ve tried to educate them through the process of being educated.’

After the couple’s tour of Australia and New Zealand, Harry said all changed: “My grandmother has been amazing throughout. My father, brother, Kate, and all the rest of the family—they were they were really welcoming. But it really changed after our Australia tour. It was also the first time that the family got to see how incredible she [Meghan] is at the job. And that brought back memories.”

“When I’m talking about history repeating itself, I’m talking about my mother,” he said. “When you can see something happening in the same kind of way…to receive no help at all and to be told continuously this is how it is, this is just how it is. We’ve all been through it. This union, us, me having a girlfriend was going to be a thing…just the two of us to start with. I hadn’t really thought about the mixed-race piece because I thought, well, I’ve spent many years doing the work and doing my own learning…my god it doesn’t take you very long until you became aware of it. It takes living in her shoes in this instance for a day or those first eight days to see where it was gonna go and how far they were gonna take it and get away with it and be so blatant about it. We’re talking about the U.K. press here. And the U.K. is my home; that was where I was brought up. I’ve got my own relationship with the media. I asked for calm with the British tabloids: once as a boyfriend, once as a husband, and once as a father.”

When asked about the “tipping point” that prompted the pair to flee the UK, Harry said, ‘I was desperate. I went to all the places which I thought I should go to, to ask for help – we both did, separately and together.’

‘You left because you were asking for help, and didn’t get it?’ Winfrey said.

‘Yeah,’ Harry responded. ‘Basically. But we never left.’

‘‘We never left the family,’ Meghan said.

Her husband said that he ‘went to a very dark place’ as well as Meghan, who opened up to Oprah about how much she had struggled within the family.