Everyone's had a meeting that should have been an email,
but in Prince Harry's case, that meeting was with the queen,
and things didn't pan out. Here's how Harry's exit from the royal family went so wrong.
When the Duke of Sussex, Prince Harry, and his wife Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex,
chose to leave the royal family, many were shocked and bewildered.
"It brings me great sadness that it has come to this."
The New Yorker reported that the British public's reaction to the
couple leaving the United Kingdom for the United States — and conducting a
shocking interview with Oprah Winfrey — was far from pleasant. While the public
took a bit of time to come to terms with the accusations made during the Oprah interview,
the royal family struggled the most with the information shared by the duke and duchess.
"Were you silent or were you silenced?"
"The latter."
Buckingham Palace released an official statement that read in part,
"The whole family is saddened to learn the full
extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan."
However, fans of the royal family did not see all of the drama that went down behind
the scenes following Meghan and Harry's exit. Now, thanks to a new book by a royal expert,
we are getting an inside look at what the final moments between Queen Elizabeth II
and Prince Harry looked like as he prepared to leave royal life behind.
Valentine Low, the royal correspondent for the United Kingdom's publication The Times,
has published a new book about the inner workings of the royal family. There were many interesting
facts revealed in the book, which is titled Courtiers: The Hidden Power Behind the Crown,
including that King Charles III is a demanding boss and the drama between members of the staff
gets in the way of their jobs. However, it was the struggle between Prince Harry and his grandmother,
Queen Elizabeth, before his departure for the United States, that has royal fans talking.
When it came to fixing things with the queen before Harry left his royal duties,
Harry assumed that he and Meghan could sort everything out by email,
according to an excerpt of Low's book. However, Harry would soon learn that
the matter required meeting in person to settle his affairs. Sadly, Harry was told
he could not meet with his grandmother until late January of 2020. Low claims:
"Either way, from the Sussex point of view, this went down incredibly badly. It fed into
the narrative that they were not being taken seriously by the palace machinery, or by the
rest of the family. The message was conveyed to him that the queen [...] was no longer available."
In the book, it's alleged that Queen Elizabeth's staff did not want a private
meeting to occur between the queen and Prince Harry. According to Low,
"Harry was incensed, because it was not true: the courtiers had got in the way,
it seemed, because they saw the meeting with the Queen as an attempt to pick
the Queen off before Harry started talks with the rest of the family."
In addition, Low quoted a source as saying,
"There was a danger that a private conversation could
be interpreted very differently by two people."
However, once the duke and duchess of Sussex made their announcement on January 8th, 2020,
a face-to-face meeting occurred quickly. As USA Today reported at the time,
the next day Elizabeth told senior royals the conflict needed to be resolved in a
matter of "days not weeks." The queen, Harry, then-Prince Charles, and Prince William all
met at the royal estate at Sandringham on January 13th, 2020, to discuss the matter.
The queen was sad and frustrated that a solution could not be reached with Harry.
According to Vanity Fair, a source told Katie Nicholl, author of The New Royals,
"She was very hurt and told me, 'I don't know,
I don't care, and I don't want to think about it anymore."
Even so, Elizabeth and Harry shared a close relationship. Historian
and royal author Robert Hardman told People:
"[Elizabeth] adored Harry right to the end, and Harry adored her. [I]t would
have been one of her dearest wishes that [the family] patch things up."