Meghan Markle Was in a ‘Good Place’ With Queen Elizabeth — Until an Incident Changed Things Behind the Scenes
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When Meghan Markle came into the royal family, there was so much hope surrounding her engagement to Prince Harry — and Queen Elizabeth II was reportedly a big fan.
According to Robert Hardman’s upcoming book, Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. Her Story, out May 19, the late monarch did her best to incorporate Meghan into the palace. In June 2018, just weeks after her wedding to Harry, the Duchess of Sussex and Elizabeth took an overnight trip to Cheshire on the royal train. According to Hardman, via the Daily Mail, the queen was “keen for Meghan to learn the royal ropes.”
“The Queen was really wanting to give it a go,” a source told the author. “She was so sweet, she had brought Meghan a present and tried so hard. The train always left at 11 o’clock at night, and the Queen was on the platform to welcome her. They had breakfast together in the morning, and she was always trying to do small things, to show her the ropes and bring her in.”
Elizabeth reportedly put great thought into Meghan’s patronages with the National Theatre and the Association of Commonwealth Universities. Harman believes Meghan and Harry were “in a good place” with the entire royal family at the time — but as the world knows, things quickly soured between Meghan and Harry and Prince William and Kate Middleton.
“Despite wildly over-optimistic talk of a new royal ‘dream team’ or, even more fancifully, a ‘Fab Four’, resentments were growing,” wrote Hardman while noting that the Sussexes’ growing popularity didn’t sit well with the then-Cambridges. That’s when the brothers split offices, and the feud officially became a public spectacle.
The brothers turned against each other, and there were allegations that William’s office was planting stories about Meghan in the British tabloids.
“There’s leaking, but there’s also planting, of sorts. So if the comms team wants to be able to remove a negative story about their principal, they will trade and give you something about someone else’s principal. So the offices end up working against each other,” Harry claimed in the fourth episode of his Netflix docuseries, Harry & Meghan.
The Duke of Sussex added that he and William “made an agreement that we would never let that happen to our office” because they both “saw what happened in our dad [King Charles III]’s office” with Princess Diana. Still, that promise was not enough to stop the long-running feud.
It’s a reminder of what could have been if Harry and Meghan had felt more welcome at the palace, which has been mired in scandal after scandal since the passing of Queen Elizabeth. It’s a royal family that the late monarch probably wouldn’t recognize anymore.
More on the royal family:
Click here to see a complete timeline of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s feud with the royal family.