Just the other day, a former Buckingham Palace switchboard operator was reminiscing about working for the late Queen Elizabeth. One afternoon, a call had come through from Prince Harry in the US and he wanted to speak to his grandmother.
The procedure was to ring the Queen’s private number and let her know who was on the line. ‘She would always thank you and then you would connect the call and leave them to their conversation,’ the operator recalled.
But on this occasion, she did not. ‘When I announced to the Queen that Harry was her caller there was just a stony silence,’ she said. ‘In fact, it was so uncomfortable that I filled the silence myself by saying “Thank you, your Majesty” and then connected them.’
This incident happened during the Covid pandemic, a time of considerable anxiety for the Queen. Her increasingly frail husband Prince Philip was nearing the end of his life and the fallout from Harry and Meghan’s decision to abandon Britain for a life of pampered exile had triggered a series of royal crises.
Even so, the telephonist has never forgotten the moment, telling me: ‘It was memorable because the Queen would never not acknowledge you.’
To this longstanding and loyal servant, the absence of the usual courtesy was a direct result of the tensions and discord sewn by the prince and his wife.
I was reminded of this highly unusual behaviour of a monarch who was rarely – if ever – abrupt with her staff by an extraordinary insight into the Queen’s attitude towards her grandson and the former Meghan Markle, which emerged this week from an American historian who befriended one of the Queen’s close confidantes.
In an at times explosive intervention, Sally Bedell Smith revealed what she claimed was the high emotional cost to the Queen of Harry and Meghan’s departure. She painted a picture of a monarch not just heartbroken but also wounded, saddened and, at times, uncomprehending.
The Queen’s initial joy at Harry’s happiness is said to have steadily dissipated, writes Richard Kay. Pictured in 2015 at the Chelsea Flower Show
Her initial joy at Harry’s happiness is said to have steadily dissipated in the face of the couple’s overbearing behaviour, rudeness and lack of respect. At one stage the Queen was reported to be ‘really upset’.
The source for Bedell Smith, who has written several well-regarded royal biographies, was Lady Elizabeth Anson, party-planner extraordinaire and a cousin to the Queen, who died of emphysema in 2020.
In a blog on the online publishing platform Substack, Bedell Smith, daughter of a US Army general, writes that she had known Lady Elizabeth – always addressed by the Queen as Liza – since 1998.
‘We had many conversations over the years that informed my books about the Royal Family,’ she notes, adding: ‘I was lucky to have her as a friend.’
It is perhaps fortunate, too, that the businesswoman who organised the post-wedding party for the royals at Claridge’s that followed then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s 1981 wedding, as well as gatherings for Sir Mick Jagger, Sting and Baroness Thatcher, is no longer among us and so not in a position to dispute any of Bedell Smith’s claims.
‘She was rightly proud of her closeness to the Queen,’ one of Lady Elizabeth’s personal assistants told me. ‘But she was also very discreet and highly respectful.’ Nevertheless, it is that closeness – and the Queen’s reported views about the troublesome Sussexes – which is crucial.
After all, it is the question we all want to know the answer to – what did Elizabeth (and indeed Philip) really think of Harry’s bride? Did she even like her and how did her affection for a grandson to whom she was once devoted end up souring to the point where Lady Elizabeth confidently described the relationship with his grandmother as ‘blown’?
Accounts of the dramas surrounding the couple’s Windsor Castle wedding, their subsequent departure and the fallout between Harry and his brother Prince William are not new.
And Harry, of course, has written a version of these events in his memoir Spare, which conveniently skates over suggestions that his relationship with his grandmother (and her staff) was anything less than serene.
What has been missing have been the views of those they left behind amid the wreckage of ‘Megxit’. Thanks to convention and a reluctance to play the couple at their own game, the Windsors have largely concealed their hurt behind a grim-faced royal rectitude.
Not completely, however. William exploded with barely controlled anger after his brother and sister-in-law’s Oprah Winfrey showdown in which unnamed royals were accused of racism. It provoked William to declare: ‘We’re very much not a racist family.’
The views of Lady Elizabeth, however, are those of the closest royal family intimate to have spoken out so far, whether she intended her comments to be published or not.
Lady Elizabeth Anson was not only Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin, but one of her closest friends
I too knew Lady Elizabeth, says Richard Kay, and how valued she had become as a sounding board and friend for the monarch
They mirror what many were privately saying in the Palace at the time. As a royal writer over many decades, I too knew Lady Elizabeth and how valued she had become as a sounding board and friend for the monarch – especially after the Queen suffered the double loss of her sister Princess Margaret and her mother within six weeks in 2002.
The chain-smoking Liza and I had our run-ins too – of which more later.
So, who was Lady Elizabeth Anson and why should her reported views be so significant? To the royals, she was very much ‘one of us’, almost a family member. Born in Windsor Castle in 1941, she was not only the daughter of a princess of Denmark’s royal house but a great-niece of the Queen Mother – her mother was, like the Queen Mother, a member of the Bowes-Lyon family – and a god-daughter of King George VI.
As a child, she recalled playing in the royals’ private grounds at Windsor, Frogmore Gardens. When she married in 1972, the then 20-year-old Princess Anne was a bridesmaid, and her society-photographer brother Patrick (the Earl of) Lichfield gave her away to baronet and fellow photographer Sir Geoffrey Shakerley.
It is these impeccable credentials which would have given her a ringside seat to the turmoil created by Harry and Meghan and make her such a credible witness.
Although 15 years separated Elizabeth the party queen and Elizabeth the monarch, late in life the two women spoke at least once a week – sometimes more but never less. They were so close, in fact, that it was said they could finish each other’s sentences.
There were discreet dinners at Lady Elizabeth’s Notting Hill townhouse, where they would exchange the latest gossip. She always invited Prince Philip to these get-togethers but the Queen would often come alone.
Despite once suggesting that she and Princess Diana had much in common – both children of divorced parents who suffered from an eating disorder – the aristocrat, with her bouffant of immaculately coiffed auburn hair, was no fan. She took Charles’s (and the royals’) side in the subsequent marriage breakdown dramas. She was also the family’s fiercest defender. When, in 1996, I revealed secret plans for a surprise party to mark the Queen’s 70th birthday – a riverboat trip on the Thames to a fashionable restaurant – Liza was furious with me. ‘You’ve ruined it for the Queen,’ she shouted down the phone.
Her services as London’s pre-eminent party-thrower, however, meant she was always in demand with the royals: Prince Andrew’s 21st, the ‘dance of the decades’ to mark the Queen Mother’s 100th, Princess Margaret’s 70th, Anne’s 50th, Andrew’s 40th at Windsor Castle and Queen Elizabeth’s 80th at the Ritz Hotel. She was also asked to organise the party for the foreign royals invited to William and Kate’s 2011 wedding.
But she was pointedly not consulted by Harry and Meghan when they began planning their nuptials in late 2017.
Initially, both Lady Elizabeth and the Queen were fans of the articulate and confident 36-year-old American actress who had won the prince’s heart.
According to Bedell Smith, Liza thought Meghan ‘poised, very natural, intelligent and thoughtful’, but added that she was ‘clearly brighter than Harry [and] has to be careful not to overshadow him.’
Does this chime with the Queen’s view? I believe it does. When Harry first took Meghan to tea with his grandmother at the Palace, a footman told me at the time that the Queen beamed at her staff, telling them how much she liked her.
But when Lady Elizabeth made suggestions about the wedding, the actress, while ‘full of charm’, was unforthcoming. Harry subsequently wrote to this veteran of royal soirees explaining that they were ‘going another way’, adding: ‘I am close to my grandmother, and she is content with this.’
On initial meeting, the Queen had told her staff how much she liked Meghan. But as Harry and Meghan planned their wedding failure to follow protocols had made the Queen ‘really upset’
When Lady Elizabeth, a party planner, made suggestions to Prince Harry and Meghan about their wedding, she was rebuffed and told the couple were ‘going another way’
But Lady Elizabeth reportedly said: ‘When I spoke with the Queen she said she is not at all content.’ Plainly upset, the socialite added what turned out to be a prophetic observation: ‘Meghan could turn into nothing but trouble. She sees things in a different way.’
By now, the Queen was also dismayed at developments. She was upset that Harry had asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to officiate at the wedding without first obtaining the permission of the Dean of Windsor, the cleric in charge of the church where the ceremony was to be held.
As a high-society event-planner herself, Lady Elizabeth understood only too well just what an embarrassing situation this put the Queen in. ‘Harry seems to think the Queen can do what she wants, but she can’t,’ she told Bedell Smith. ‘On the religious side it is the Dean of Windsor’s jurisdiction.’ As a result, Lady Elizabeth told the writer: ‘Harry has blown his relationship with his grandmother.’ This failure to follow protocols had made the Queen ‘really upset’.
She said she was ‘shocked’ when the Queen told her how much this had saddened her. In her blog, Bedell Smith quotes Lady Elizabeth saying that Harry ‘was rude to her [the Queen] for ten minutes’. This contretemps apparently originated in a polite inquiry from the Queen about the wedding dress and ‘Meghan wouldn’t tell her’.
Her distress was not just at the lack of candour and bad manners of the couple, but the lack of respect shown to her as monarch.
Towards the end of April, with the ceremony only weeks away, Harry and the Queen were said by her confidante to have patched things up. She told the prince that she felt left out of the wedding plans and her grandson subsequently wrote her a letter about what was happening.
Asked if Meghan was being bossy, Lady Elizabeth told Bedell Smith: ‘So I gather. Very much so.’ The implication is that this must have been relayed to her by the Queen. Two weeks before the wedding, the hurt had clearly returned to Her Majesty. And, with it, the most devastating assessment.
‘The jury is out on whether she likes Meghan,’ the Queen’s cousin is quoted as saying. ‘My Jemima [a nickname Bedell Smith claims Lady Elizabeth used for the Queen] is very worried. Harry is besotted and weak about women. We hope but don’t quite think she is in love. We think she engineered it all.’
She added: ‘It’s worrying that so many people are questioning whether Meghan is right for Harry. The problem, bless his heart, is that Harry is neither bright nor strong, and she is both.’
What makes these disclosures so compelling is that the Queen was always cautious about what she said about the couple because they were so sensitive to any criticism.
It was to Lady Elizabeth that the Queen made her only publicly revealed remark about the wedding, which was that the bride’s Givenchy gown was ‘too white’, writes Richard Kay
And, says Kay, the Queen’s reservations about her grandson’s choice of bride continued after the wedding
However, it was to Lady Elizabeth that the Queen made her only publicly revealed remark about the wedding, which was that the bride’s Givenchy gown was ‘too white’.
In the monarch’s view, it was not appropriate for a divorcee getting remarried in a church to look quite so flamboyantly virginal.
She was also uncomfortable with Charles’s decision to stand in for Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, and walk her down the aisle after the retired television cameraman declined an invitation to his daughter’s wedding due to health issues.
The Queen’s reservations about her grandson’s choice of bride continued after the wedding. Stories began emerging of Meghan’s alleged high-handedness towards staff and a growing rift between Harry and William.
‘Meghan and William and Kate are not working well,’ Lady Elizabeth reported to Bedell Smith. ‘That is what the Queen said, particularly about the two girls.’
Meghan also had a new nickname behind Palace walls. ‘We call her “The American”,’ one figure who worked for Queen Elizabeth told me at the time. This was a not-so-subtle nod, I was told, to the Duchess of Windsor, the twice-married US adventuress who provoked the abdication crisis of the Queen’s uncle, King Edward VIII.
In February of 2019, Bedell Smith writes that she spoke on the phone to Lady Elizabeth who unequivocally told her: ‘I don’t trust Meghan an inch. To begin with she was not bad, a straightforward starlet used to public speaking and charity work. The wedge between the brothers is really bad.’
Soon the dramas of Megxit were overwhelming the royals, a time when even a phone call from California was greeted with dread by the Queen, but Lady Elizabeth did not live to witness the full fall-out.
As her health declined, the Queen gave her old friend a parting gift, appointing her a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. It was measure of the esteem in which she was held.
There was one final gesture, a socially distanced meeting – because of Covid – in the gardens at Frogmore, where Lady Elizabeth had played as a child.
We will have to wait for the late Queen’s official biography to know her full, unexpurgated version of the Harry and Meghan shambles.
Despite some jarring recollections – friends have no knowledge of the Jemima nickname – Lady Elizabeth’s account is an intriguing first draft.
