Queen Elizabeth’s Confidants Expose ‘Secret Feud’ With Meghan Markle Before Her Death

In all of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s criticism of the royal family, Elizabeth II was the exception. “The queen has always been wonderful to me,” Meghan once gushed, calling her “warm and inviting.” And Harry, who acknowledges that he enjoyed a “special relationship” with the late queen, always blamed courtiers for the Firm’s cold treatment of his wife. His principled and loving “Granny,” he insisted in his bridge-burning CBS interview in 2021, was simply surrounded by manipulative opportunists who fed her “bad advice.”

But in the more than two years since Elizabeth’s death at 96, those close to the monarch have revealed what the queen really thought about Meghan. “There was tension almost immediately,” a source exclusively tells In Touch, “and because Meghan and Harry continued to shockingly defy the queen’s wishes, their relationship was irreparably strained when she passed.” Since then, in a series of bombshell books and interviews, adds the source, “the queen’s confidants have been exposing their secret feud so that the world knows the truth about Meghan.”

The first signs of friction came before Meghan and Harry’s 2018 wedding. In his memoir, Spare, Harry describes the moment the queen summoned them to her private quarters at Buckingham Palace to try on the royal jewels. “Granny said to Meg quite tenderly: ‘Tiaras suits you,’” Harry wrote, adding that after they chose the headpiece, the queen urged Meghan, 43, to do a dress rehearsal with it before the big day. But after that, Harry, 40, explained, they had a hard time reaching the queen’s dresser, Angela Kelly, to hand over the tiara. “She was being obstructive, obviously,” he wrote. “I considered going to Granny, but that would probably mean sparking an all-out confrontation, and I wasn’t quite sure with whom Granny would side.”

Queen Elizabeth ‘Likely’ Would Have Sided With the Royal Dresser

She likely would have sided with Angela, royals sources say. Harry’s “temper tantrums” over the wedding, in which the prince reportedly declared, “What Meghan wants, Meghan gets,” before being admonished by the queen, made headlines. But the tiara wasn’t the only issue: Harry also blames those in the “back corridors of the palace” for questioning whether a divorcée should wear a veil.

But in his book Revenge, royals author Tom Bower revealed that one of those people was the queen herself. Ingrid Seward reported of another complaint in her recent book, My Mother and I. “She told her [friend, Lady Elizabeth Anson,] that the bride’s Givenchy wedding gown was ‘too white.’ In the monarch’s view, it was not appropriate for a divorcée getting remarried in the church to look quite so flamboyantly virginal,” Seward wrote. “Nor was the queen comfortable with [Charles’] decision to stand in for Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, and walk her down the aisle.”

The late Prince Philip had more to say. “He warned his wife to be cautious” about Meghan, Seward wrote, because “of how much Meghan reminded him of the Duchess of Windsor,” the American divorcée who caused Elizabeth’s uncle to abdicate. And while Meghan “knew exactly how to butter up the queen,” Seward has said, Elizabeth saw through her. “When things started to unravel, she was very upset. Eventually, she felt a little bit like we all did: ‘What do they want, this couple? They’ve got everything but it’s not enough.’”

Queen Elizabeth Was Angry the Couple Chose the Name ‘Lilibet’ for Their Daughter

Their “Megxit” ultimatum hit hard, says the source. “The queen felt it was cruel that Meghan was forcing Harry to choose between her and his family and that they dared to try to dictate what kind of working royals they wanted to be.” Then came the CBS interview: “Suggesting that the royal family had been racist toward Meghan was a low blow.”
The final straw? Surprisingly, says royals expert Robert Hardman, it was the name they chose for their daughter, who was born in June 2021.

One staff member “recalled that Elizabeth II had been ‘as angry as I’d ever seen her’ after the Sussexes announced that she had given them her blessing to call their baby ‘Lilibet,’ the queen’s childhood nickname,” he wrote in The Making of a King: King Charles III and the Modern Monarchy. Other reports claimed she told aides, “I don’t own the palaces, I don’t own the paintings, the only thing I own is my name. And now they’ve taken that.” And while the queen issued a statement congratulating the couple, she refused to confirm she gave her permission for the name: “That was just another one of their lies.”

A year later, she was gone. Her funeral marked the last time Meghan set foot in England. So far in America, things haven’t exactly worked out well for her and Harry. For starters, her bid to trademark her lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, was denied, and his app, BetterUp, is steeped in controversy. “It’s as if,” the source says, “the queen is getting revenge from the grave.”