Prince Harry 'blew up' his relationship with the late Queen Elizabeth II over one crucial Meghan Markle wedding decision, royal confidant reveals
The new claims come from royal author Sally Bedell Smith, who has shared previously unreleased recollections from the late Lady Elizabeth Anson, a high society party planner and one of the Queen's closest friends for decades.
Lady Elizabeth, who died in 2020 aged 79, was a cousin to the Queen, a goddaughter of King George VI, and a great-niece of the Queen Mother.
She worked with the Royal Family for more than 60 years and became a trusted confidant to the late monarch, particularly from the time of the Golden Jubilee in 2002.
In excerpts published on Bedell Smith's paid Substack, Royals Extra, Lady Elizabeth, known as 'Liza' to friends, is said to have been a trusted confidante to whom the Queen privately expressed concerns about Harry and Meghan Markle ahead of their 2018 wedding.
Lady Elizabeth initially described Meghan as "full of charm" after meeting her following the couple's engagement.
But her views quickly shifted.
"Meghan could turn into nothing but trouble," she said.
According to Lady Elizabeth, Harry informed her that he and Meghan were going "another way" when it came to wedding decisions.
"He said, 'I am close to my grandmother, and she is content with this'," she told the American journalist.
But when Liza raised it with the Queen, she recalled a different response.
"She was not at all content," she said.
One crucial point of contention was Harry's decision to approach the Archbishop of Canterbury to lead the wedding ceremony at St George's Chapel - without first getting permission from the Dean of Windsor.
She added that the Queen was hurt by how the situation was handled.
"Harry has blown his relationship with his grandmother," she said.
"She said she was really upset. I was shocked when the Queen told me this, how she was so saddened. I had no idea about the conversation, that he was rude to her for ten minutes."
Just two weeks before the wedding, Lady Elizabeth recounted another conversation with the Queen, whom she affectionately referred to as 'Jemima', expressing concerns about Meghan's intentions.
"The Number One Lady- I call her Jemima- says the jury is out on whether she likes Meghan," Liza reportedly said.
"My Jemima is very worried."
It's was also revealed by Lady Elizabeth that "Meghan and William and Kate are not working well".
She added: "That is what the Queen said, particularly about the two girls."
Thankfully, it's understood that Harry went to the Queen "on his own" and they "patched things up" prior to the wedding.
In 2020, however, the Sussexes stepped back from royal duties and relocated to Montecito, California.
It was the same year Lady Elizabeth died, while Queen Elizabeth II passed away in September 2022.
Reflecting on her friendship with Lady Elizabeth, Bedell Smith wrote: "From 1998 until her death in November 2020, I was lucky to have her as a friend- early on, she asked that I call her Liza- and we had many conversations over the years that informed my books about the royal family."
While she kept many of Lady Elizabeth's "most sensitive observations confidential" the author said she was now sharing these stories "to help illuminate the lives of the royal family members Liza knew well."
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Age
an hour ago
- The Age
At Glastonbury, left-wing politics are shocking again
The notion that conservatism is 'the new punk rock' has been a common trope of the Donald Trump era, repeated by alt-right college kids, thirsty politicians and headline writers. Progressives, the argument went, had become the uptight enforcers of taboos, while right-wingers were impudent insurgents pushing the bounds of permissible expression. As people on the left increasingly valorised safety and sensitivity, members of the new right revelled in transgression and cast themselves as the champions of free speech. This idea was always disingenuous; when they gain authority, American conservatives almost inevitably use the force of the state to censor ideas they don't like. But it took hold because it contained a grain of truth. Left-wing culture, especially online, could be censorious, leaving many who interacted with it afraid of saying the wrong thing and resentful of its smothering pieties. The right, by contrast, offered the license to spout off without inhibition. That is almost certainly part of what drew so many alienated men into Trump's orbit. In 2018, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West said that wearing a MAGA hat symbolised 'overcoming fear and doing what you felt, no matter what anyone said'. This year, his id fully liberated, he put out a track titled Heil Hitler. Increasingly, however, it's the left that is rediscovering the cultural power of shock, largely because of horror over the massacres in the Gaza Strip and the minefield of taboos around discussing them. Consider the international uproar over the performance of the punk rap duo Bob Vylan at Britain's Glastonbury music festival this past weekend. The act's singer led a teeming crowd — some waving Palestinian flags — in chants of 'Death, death to the IDF,' the Israel Defence Forces. Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, criticised Bob Vylan for 'appalling hate speech,' and demanded answers from the BBC for why it aired the set. The police are reviewing footage of the show to see whether any criminal laws were broken. (Bob Vylan was set to tour the United States this year, but the State Department has revoked its members' visas.) The band was not the only one at Glastonbury to cause a scandal. Even before the festival started, Starmer criticised it for featuring the Irish rap group Kneecap on the lineup. In April, Kneecap led crowds at Coachella in chants of 'Free, free Palestine' and displayed messages accusing Israel of genocide, prompting the sponsor of their US visas to drop them. Footage later emerged of one member of the band, Mo Chara, displaying a Hezbollah flag, leading to a terrorism charge. (He has said the flag was thrown onstage and he didn't know what it represented.) The police are also investigating Kneecap's appearance at Glastonbury for possible public order offences. Loading Both these bands intended to be inflammatory, and they succeeded. 'What happened at Glastonbury over the weekend is part of a coordinated, ideological insurgency against the Jewish people,' Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in The Free Press. 'The level of depravity displayed at #Glastonbury2025 was astonishing, one that should prompt serious self-reflection and soul-searching among British society,' wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. It's hard to remember the last time musicians managed to cause such outrage. I understand why supporters of Israel are frightened and disgusted by the spectacle at Glastonbury. Many see no reason other than antisemitism for growing progressive hostility to Zionism. They've witnessed Jews being attacked, demonised and ostracised in the name of justice for the Palestinians. They find it especially bitter to see violence against Israel cheered at a music festival less than two years after a music festival in Israel was attacked by Hamas. But while antisemitism surely drives some animus toward Israel, it's not nearly enough to explain why so many idealistic young people have become so deeply invested in the cause of Palestine and so sickened by the pulverisation of Gaza. To understand why, you need to grasp what Israel's war in Gaza looks like to them.
Sydney Morning Herald
an hour ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
At Glastonbury, left-wing politics are shocking again
The notion that conservatism is 'the new punk rock' has been a common trope of the Donald Trump era, repeated by alt-right college kids, thirsty politicians and headline writers. Progressives, the argument went, had become the uptight enforcers of taboos, while right-wingers were impudent insurgents pushing the bounds of permissible expression. As people on the left increasingly valorised safety and sensitivity, members of the new right revelled in transgression and cast themselves as the champions of free speech. This idea was always disingenuous; when they gain authority, American conservatives almost inevitably use the force of the state to censor ideas they don't like. But it took hold because it contained a grain of truth. Left-wing culture, especially online, could be censorious, leaving many who interacted with it afraid of saying the wrong thing and resentful of its smothering pieties. The right, by contrast, offered the license to spout off without inhibition. That is almost certainly part of what drew so many alienated men into Trump's orbit. In 2018, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West said that wearing a MAGA hat symbolised 'overcoming fear and doing what you felt, no matter what anyone said'. This year, his id fully liberated, he put out a track titled Heil Hitler. Increasingly, however, it's the left that is rediscovering the cultural power of shock, largely because of horror over the massacres in the Gaza Strip and the minefield of taboos around discussing them. Consider the international uproar over the performance of the punk rap duo Bob Vylan at Britain's Glastonbury music festival this past weekend. The act's singer led a teeming crowd — some waving Palestinian flags — in chants of 'Death, death to the IDF,' the Israel Defence Forces. Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, criticised Bob Vylan for 'appalling hate speech,' and demanded answers from the BBC for why it aired the set. The police are reviewing footage of the show to see whether any criminal laws were broken. (Bob Vylan was set to tour the United States this year, but the State Department has revoked its members' visas.) The band was not the only one at Glastonbury to cause a scandal. Even before the festival started, Starmer criticised it for featuring the Irish rap group Kneecap on the lineup. In April, Kneecap led crowds at Coachella in chants of 'Free, free Palestine' and displayed messages accusing Israel of genocide, prompting the sponsor of their US visas to drop them. Footage later emerged of one member of the band, Mo Chara, displaying a Hezbollah flag, leading to a terrorism charge. (He has said the flag was thrown onstage and he didn't know what it represented.) The police are also investigating Kneecap's appearance at Glastonbury for possible public order offences. Loading Both these bands intended to be inflammatory, and they succeeded. 'What happened at Glastonbury over the weekend is part of a coordinated, ideological insurgency against the Jewish people,' Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in The Free Press. 'The level of depravity displayed at #Glastonbury2025 was astonishing, one that should prompt serious self-reflection and soul-searching among British society,' wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. It's hard to remember the last time musicians managed to cause such outrage. I understand why supporters of Israel are frightened and disgusted by the spectacle at Glastonbury. Many see no reason other than antisemitism for growing progressive hostility to Zionism. They've witnessed Jews being attacked, demonised and ostracised in the name of justice for the Palestinians. They find it especially bitter to see violence against Israel cheered at a music festival less than two years after a music festival in Israel was attacked by Hamas. But while antisemitism surely drives some animus toward Israel, it's not nearly enough to explain why so many idealistic young people have become so deeply invested in the cause of Palestine and so sickened by the pulverisation of Gaza. To understand why, you need to grasp what Israel's war in Gaza looks like to them.
Sydney Morning Herald
4 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Love, loss and found family among America's lower working class
FICTION The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong Jonathan Cape, $34.99 Ocean Vuong achieved fame as a poet before his acclaimed debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, andthere's creative continuity in follow-up The Emperor of Gladness. Previously examined motifs undergo complex transformations so that it reads like the literary equivalent of a musical variation. Autobiography is grist to the mill for Vuong. His mother fled Saigon for the US, via the Philippines, when he was an infant. He was raised in Connecticut among an extended family of Vietnamese refugees. He's also openly gay. These experiences inspire but do not define his creative fiction, and if the vaunted lyricism of a particular style of American dreaming marks the opening of The Emperor of Gladness – a flashy choric invocation of a dead-end Connecticut town, its ghosts inviting suicidal 19-year-old, Hai, to escape by jumping off a bridge – it isn't long before sublime cadence and melancholy grandeur yield to a different kind of song. An old woman spies the boy in the rain, and roundly tells him: 'You can't die in front of my house, okay?' This is Grazina – a force to be reckoned with, having survived Hitler and Stalin in Lithuania during WWII, and now in a battle to preserve her independence against the onset of dementia. Hai moves in as an unofficial carer, to keep her out of a nursing home. Grim doesn't begin to cover their living conditions; the house is decrepit and built on a toxic contamination site and Grazina can't afford to feed them. So Hai lands a job (courtesy of his cousin Sony, named after the television manufacturer) at a budget restaurant chain. As Hai's friendship with Grazina grows, he bathes her, comforts her when decades-old war trauma resurfaces, and engages in role-playing historical battles with her to manage her sundowning. He reads Slaughterhouse Five and The Brothers Karamazov from her dead husband's library and, alas, stumbles across an unused bottle of serious painkillers … dire news for someone recovering from opioid addiction. At work, Hai rocks up to every shift pinned to cope with the drudgery. Genuine camaraderie and unlikely dignity are found among the motley crew who work there, despite some extreme weirdness. Long-serving Maureen evades grief in conspiracist thinking – she believes lizard men control the world, she speaks like a drag queen, and she harbours a Star Wars obsession. Manager BJ conducts herself with an almost martial pride – giving inspirational speeches, slipping cake mix into the cornbread to make it more appealing, and training to achieve her dream of making it on the commercial wrestling stage. Dreams are thwarted in this place – except perhaps for Sony; his unaffected desires, whether in crafting origami penguins or in his encyclopedic knowledge of the American Civil War, throw into sharp relief the miseries inflicted on other characters by unattainable ones.
