New Prince Harry Queen claim is the worst yet

Reports suggest Meghan Markle and Prince Harry did something that sent shockwaves through the palace.

COMMENT

In political circles it’s sometimes called “taking out the trash”. Have a bad news story that needs to be released? Put it out late on a Friday or on the same day as some big event like the Melbourne Cup to ensure as few people pay attention as possible as they are busy swigging warming glasses of Aussie sparkling.

This week, by complete accident, Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were the beneficiaries of exactly this.

For days now, the biggest royal story in the world has been that of newly promoted Queen Mary and world’s first Gen X King Frederik, Buddhist bead-wearer and poster boy for manly waterworks. What that has meant is that every royal writer worth their Debrett’s has been laser-focused on goings-on in Copenhagen rather than the latest Sussex-related hullabaloo that has taken over London.

But a hullabaloo there has been after Harry’s nemesis of a newspaper the Daily Mail started serialising excerpts from highly respected royal biographer Robert Hardman’s new book Charles III: The Making of A Modern Monarch.

Harry and Meghan have been beneficiaries of “taking out the trash” this week. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images for the Invictus Games Foundation

So far the revelations have ranged from the entertainingly wry (years ago Queen Camilla’s family nicknamed her ‘Lorraine’, a play on ‘la reine’, the French words for ‘the Queen’) to stirring up a major Sussex controversy.

I know, I know. We’ve been here before, oh so many times, some new morsel about something that Harry and Meghan did, said, wrote, emailed, ate, mimed, or spelled out via morse code doing the front page rounds. How many times has some new titbit or claim that casts the couple in a shabby new light come out to be swiftly followed by the UK’s commentariat getting on their high horses and going for a good long gallop?

But we’re in new waters today, waters where the late Queen was so upset by the Sussexes that she was ‘pushed over the edge’ and new waters where a woman famed for her reserve and for being an enigmatic, emotional black hole was left “infuriated” and “as angry as [her staff had] ever seen her’.

Woah nelly.

The late Queen was said to be so upset by a Sussex move that she was ‘pushed over the edge’. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

This is all a bit like finding out that Mother Teresa was once so peeved that she bollocked a whole class of novitiates using a series of choice four-letter words or that the Dalai Lama occasionally chucks china at the wall in a rage.

So what had the late Queen in such a tizzy?

At heart of all of this is Lilibet – Her late Majesty’s childhood nickname and the sobriquet that the Sussexes picked for their daughter in 2021.

Here’s how things played out.

Baby Lili was born on June 4, 2021 and on June 6 an Archewell spokesperson revealed her surprising name, with a spokesperson for the couple telling the UK Telegraph: “The Duke spoke with his family in advance of the announcement, in fact his grandmother was the first family member he called.

“During that conversation, he shared their hope of naming their daughter Lilibet in her honour. Had she not been supportive, they would not have used the name.”

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their children Archie and Lilibet in their 2021 Christmas card.

Except then, five days later the BBC’s royal correspondent Jonny Dymond popped up to report that despite the Sussexes’ claim, the Queen had not, in fact, been asked about having her private name co-opted by the couple. Crucially, Buckingham Palace did not deny this.

However within hours of Dymond’s reporting coming out, legal letters from the Sussex’s go-to law firm Schillings (it really says something when you have a favourite firm for legal argy-bargy) were being sent to publishers and broadcasters saying that reports that Harry and Meghan had not asked the Queen’s permission were “false and defamatory”.

Curiously, since then the duke and duchess have not taken any further action.

The story is not over yet.

Later in June 2021, it was revealed that days before Princess Lilibet’s birth, that is, before they had gotten the late Queen’s okay to use ‘Lilibet’, the domain names lilidiana.com and lilibetdiana.com had been purchased by the couple.

Then this story died away with about 877 other Harry and Meghan hurly-burly ding-dongs and royal family disagreements having emerged since then.

However, then came this week’s Hardman Charles III serialisations which have raised new and hair raising details about what he says happened in those days in June 2021.

He writes that one of Her late Majesty’s staffers “privately recalled that Elizabeth II had been ‘as angry as I’d ever seen her’ in 2021 after the Sussexes announced that she had given them her blessing to call their baby daughter ‘Lilibet’.”

The Queen was reported to be ‘as angry as I’ve seen her’ about Meghan and Harry naming their daughter Lilibet. Picture: John Stillwell – WPA Pool/Getty Images

The Mail’s royal editor Rebecca English followed that up by reporting that “the Queen was so upset by the Sussexes’ decision that 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.’”

Ingrid Seward, longtime editor of Majesty magazine, has written: “It took a lot to push the Queen over the edge.”

It’s a shocking, strange image of the late Queen, whose sphinxlike impenetrability, a woman who never, ever gave away what was going on inside. (Unless of course one of her horses won.)

One thing you need to keep in mind about those events of June 2021 is the timing. That phone call, when Harry spoke to his grandmother, came only three months after their blistering Oprah Winfrey interview and their claims of bias, which represented one of the biggest crises to have buffeted Buckingham Palace in decades.

Only a month after Oprah, the late Queen lost her husband of 74-years, a man who she had known since she was 13. Forevermore one of the most iconic and moving images of the late monarch is the shot of her small figure, isolated, grieving and alone inside St George’s Chapel at Windsor.

Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat during the funeral of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle on April 17, 2021. Picture: Jonathan Brady – WPA Pool/Getty Images

Which is to say, when the duke called the late Queen, when one would have to imagine emotions were still very raw and the late Queen was still suffering from such extraordinary heartbreak.

While the Duke and Duchess of Sussex might have meant the choice of ‘Lilibet’ as a tender show of deep affection and respect, instead their selection, according to Hardman, only inflamed and upset the monarch.

Still, the end result was that a recently bereaved 95-year-old who was still working full-time (and whose health would only months later start to precipitously decline) was left “infuriated” and having lost “the only thing” she truly owned of her own.

One thing that The Crown achieved was to make audiences see the late monarch as a human being, as an actual person and not just to see her as a distract, wooden figurehead of nationhood.

Queen Elizabeth II was a remote symbol of the state but Lilibet? She was a woman who was truly loved by her parents and who for more than 70 years was adored by her husband. A woman who reportedly liked Jammy Dodgers, loved all things on four legs and which you could put a bet on and spent the 2020 lockdown bingeing Line of Duty.

And she was a woman we now know, at least according to Hardman, who in her final years was left deeply upset by the myopia of her grandson and granddaughter-in-law.

To understand why the use of this pet name was so emotional a thing then look no further than an image from Prince Philip’s April 2021 funeral. Atop his funeral was a handwritten note signed ‘Lilibet’. I know, we all need a tissue right here.

For the Sussexes, these Hardman claims are damaging stuff. No matter where many people might stand on the question of Harry and Meghan, by and large the late Queen is a figure who earned huge global respect for her unerring duty and dedication. It reflects pretty abysmally on them that they unintentionally reportedly caused such an esteemed trooper of a nonagenarian distress in her final years.

But, it could be worse. Imagine how much more attention this all would be getting if Frederik had not suddenly become King and Australians had not rediscovered their obsession with Our Mary. The duke and duchess should really send the new King and Queen a quick note saying ‘tak’ – thank you – though leave off the vegan oat latte gift basket. They’ve got enough going wrong already.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.