It goes without saying that Meghan Markle’s relationship with the British Royal Family has been icy for years. It was hardly helped when she and Prince Harry left the Firm for pastures new, and then dealt its biggest blow yet after Meghan’s bombshell allegations towards Charles and other family members, including Kate Middleton.
Before the Sussexes’ exit from the UK, Meghan and Kate seemed to get along. In 2019, Harry and Meghan welcomed their firstborn child, son Archie, and Kate was over the moon for the couple.
However, it may have been as early as this point that their relationship began its downward spiral. That’s at least according to new reports that suggest Meghan had a clear answer to Kate’s question about whether she was allowed to take the first picture of their newborn son or not.
In February of last year, Harry and Meghan sat down with TV host Oprah in the garden of her home in Montecito, California. There, they proceeded to spill the truth about their experiences within the Royal Family. Suffice to say the statement they made changed things forever.
Harry and Meghan were practically shut out of the Royal Family after that. If reports are to be believed, none of the royals the wanted anything to do with them.
Meghan didn’t hold back in the interview, revealing that then-Prince Charles had refused to take Harry’s phone calls.
However, the most shocking part occurred when Meghan claimed conversations had taken place within the palace concerning how dark Archie’s skin would be.
“They were concerned that if he were too brown, that that would be a problem?” Oprah asked Meghan.
“I wasn’t able to follow up with why,” Meghan replied. “But that — if that’s the assumption you’re making, I think that feels like a pretty safe one.”
She declined to name the specific person who had made the comment, adding only: “I think that would be very damaging to them.”
These days, Meghan’s relationship with several royal family members remains strained. One individual in particular that the former actress had a hard time with from the beginning – and vice-versa – was Kate Middleton.
Authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand claim in their book Finding Freedom that the two were not exactly feuding at the start.
According to them, the two royals just didn’t know each other well enough.
“Meghan would agree with the assessment that the duchesses were not the best of friends,” they wrote. “Their relationship hadn’t progressed much since [Markle] was Harry’s girlfriend.”
Moreover, Durand and Scobie add that Kate didn’t make a significant effort to welcome Markle into the family, at least not in the way people might have expected.
Meghan had hoped that Kate would take her under her wing and guide her through all the new things that someone coming from “outside to the Firm” should know about. But that, the authors claim, never happened.
“Meghan was disappointed that she and Kate hadn’t bonded over the position they shared, but she wasn’t losing sleep over it,” Durand and Scobie wrote in Finding Freedom, adding that “Meghan would far rather have had Kate check in on her during the most difficult times with the press.”
Before Harry and Meghan’s wedding, things heated up between Kate and Meghan. She stated that Kate Middleton had made her cry over the flower-girl dresses on her wedding day – which directly contradicted earlier claims made by the tabloids.
“It really hurt my feelings. It was a really hard week of the wedding. And she was upset about something, but she owned it, and she apologized. And she brought me flowers and a note, apologizing,” Meghan said.
“I think so much of what I have seen play out [in the media] is this idea of polarity, where if you love me, you don’t have to hate her. And if you love her, you don’t need to hate me,” she added.
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