The Queen disapproved of divorcée Meghan wearing a pure white wedding dress
... And she also ticked off duchess for chastising a kitchen worker who was preparing a special vegan menu
to royal guidelines and judged too close to advertisement.
But so anxious was the Queen to include her new daughter-in-law, in fact, that she put Meghan on a royal ‘fast track’, granting her the patronages of the National Theatre and the Association of Commonwealth Universities, which she had held herself for 45 years and 33 years respectively. It amounted to a very public endorsement.
In March 2019, she elevated the duchess still further, appointing her vice president of the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust to work alongside Harry, who was already serving as its president.
These were plum roles for Meghan and Harry, so significant they made William ‘slightly jealous’, according to one source.
‘[The Queen’s Commonwealth Trust job] was a role William had rather fancied for himself,’ said the insider.
When Harry and Meghan announced their wish to move out of Kensington Palace, the Queen offered them Frogmore Cottage in Windsor Great Park as their new home. This was not the suite of apartments at Windsor Castle they had hoped for.
It was a generous gesture nonetheless, recalled Lady Elizabeth Anson, who died in 2020.
‘The cottage was a big deal,’ she said. ‘The Queen’s entrance into the gardens is right next to their cottage. It is essentially her back yard, her solitude, and her privacy. She was giving that up in gifting Harry and Meghan Frogmore Cottage. We all thought it was very big of her. She said, “I hope they’ll respect it.”’
In April 2019, the couple finally moved in. Then, the following month, Buckingham Palace announced a still more significant departure: Harry and Meghan were moving their royal household – effectively their office – from Kensington Palace to Buckingham Palace.
The brothers’ royal double act was officially over.
This was deeply disappointing for the Queen. She had expected that the ‘Fab Four’ would work closely together, bringing both modernity and stability.
Now, though, Harry and Meghan had created a new, rival court. There were other clashes, too, between Meghan and her staff.
Her personal assistant, Melissa Toubati, quit after just six months in late 2018.
Meghan’s direct approach had even come to the notice of the Queen. On one occasion in the run-up to the wedding, Meghan went to Windsor Castle for a menutasting and ended up having a tense exchange with a member of staff, according to one source.
‘Meghan was at the castle to taste some of the dishes, and told one of the caterers she could taste egg,’ said the source. ‘She got quite upset, saying that the dish was meant to be vegan and macrobiotic, when suddenly the Queen walked in and said. “Meghan, in this family we don’t speak to people like that.” ’
Then, when Megxit eventually came, with Harry and Meghan’s decision to stand down as working royals in January 2020, it created turmoil between father and son and brother and brother. It destabilised the whole House of Windsor.
According to Robert Lacey: ‘The indignation of Prince Charles, Prince William and the palace with Meghan and Harry was over two things.
‘Firstly, the way that they revealed their entire “Sussex Royal” plan as a done deal on their new website, when it wasn’t a done deal at all, and secondly the fact that the Sussexes were daring to pronounce on royal matters that were far above their pay grade.
‘There was a very strong feeling that went right to the top that the only person who can talk about the
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‘After Megxit, William and Kate felt relief that the drama was gone’
royal family doing things in a different style was the Queen herself, or possibly Charles.
‘On top of that, the Sussex Royal website was the work of Meghan’s American team of staff. Yet it had been paid for by Charles’s subsidies to Harry. That was a big source of grievance.’
The brothers had once been a double act and then a formidable trio with Kate. William had leaned on his brother for support, and Harry had shouldered a great deal of the burden. He had been an honest sounding board, and loyal.
Yet now, in the aftermath of Megxit, William and Kate felt a sense of relief that ‘the drama was gone’, as a source told me.
The Queen confided to a close friend that she was exhausted by the turmoil of it all.
The Queen was very hurt and told me, “I don’t know, I don’t care, and I don’t want to think about it any more,” ’ I was told.
Sadness was not the only response to the split. When it comes to his estrangement from Harry, we know William can be ruthless.
He backed the banishment of his uncle Andrew, for example, and has never wavered in his belief that second-tier royals, such as his cousins Beatrice and Eugenie [daughters of Prince Andrew], to whom he is close, can have no official role to play in a modern monarchy.
There is perhaps a silver lining. William and his father, the King, are closer now than they have been
for many years, speaking on the phone almost daily.
Charles is often at Sandringham in Norfolk, which means he can see William and Kate at Anmer Hall nearby, while William, Kate and the children take an annual holiday at Birkhall, the King’s private home in Scotland. The King can also depend on his wife. He often runs ideas and speeches by the Queen Consort. Indeed, there are times when she calls the shots.
When Charles became embroiled in the cash-for-honours scandal in September 2021, first revealed in the Mail on Sunday, it was Camilla who insisted he get rid of his longstanding aide, Michael Fawcett.
‘She said Michael had to go. She essentially ousted him,’ according to a friend.
‘She was never really a fan of Fawcett and she could see how damaging this could be to Charles’s reign.’
Camilla intends to keep her Wiltshire home, Ray Mill House, which she bought following her divorce from Andrew Parker Bowles, and which has served as an escape from royal life.
According to a family friend: ‘The idea of being Queen doesn’t much appeal to her. She worries about the pressure on Charles.’
A fund of common-sense advice, Camilla was not afraid to speak plainly when, in the course of a recent visit to Britain, Harry suggested that a mediator be employed to help them all clear the air.
Spluttering into her tea, Camilla told Harry it was a ridiculous idea, that they were a family and would sort it out themselves, said a family friend.
The Princess of Wales, meanwhile, has notably grown into her role. Rebecca Priestley, her private secretary for six years, told the Daily Mail that Kate ‘knows every decision is for the rest of her life, everything is for the long game’, and Kate’s playing it accordingly.
Recent years have seen her move ever further into the spotlight, something very apparent earlier this year when Kensington Palace released a trio of photographs to mark her 40th birthday. The images were confident, bold even.
It’s no overstatement to say they heralded a new age of Kate. Taken by Italian fashion photographer Paolo Roversi, they showed Kate in two Alexander McQueen frocks and in jewellery from both the Queen’s and Princess Diana’s collections. It was a significant contrast to her debut on Vogue’s cover in 2016, when she was dressed in a brown country coat and a green fedora.
William had been wary about her doing things that could be seen as too showy. At that time, he didn’t want her to do anything that might be compared to the famously sexy yet sophisticated portraits of his mother by Mario Testino.
If the Roversi pictures showed a self-possessed Kate, they marked a mellowing on William’s part, too. A former aide said: ‘William has always been very firm that his role is about duty, not celebrity, but he recognises in today’s world that he and Kate can use their global profile as there is a huge amount of interest in them. There is always something meaningful behind a redcarpet moment.’
That is the point for the Prince and Princess of Wales, and it is what they hope to impress on their children. The family already have a unique global platform, and following the departure of Harry and Meghan, they no longer have to share it.
‘When Harry suggested a mediator, Camilla spluttered into her tea’
With many seeing Charles III as something of a transitional king, can this young family keep Britain believing in the kind of monarchy the Queen represented, the one that is a force for good in British life? Will William and Kate renew the mystique and magic that served the late Queen so well?
William has had the advantage of having observed his grandmother at work for decades.
‘He certainly models himself on the Queen’s sense of duty,’ said one of his long-standing former aides.
‘There are also elements of his father’s duty that he takes into close consideration, but the values he most looks up to are his grandmother’s.
‘He knows that the institution has to be genuine, it has to be authentic, relatable, and really make a difference to people’s lives.’
That’s their royal ambition: to be new Elizabethans. The monarchy is theirs to fashion as they see fit.
©Katie Nicholl, 2022
The New Royals, by Katie Nicholl, is published by Little, Brown on October 4. It’s priced at €27 in hardback