The quote is one of the most revealing I’ve come across about the emotional cost to the late Queen Elizabeth of Prince Harry and Meghan’s departure from royal life.
‘She was really upset,’ Lady Elizabeth Anson confided to the biographer Sally Bedell Smith. ‘I was shocked when the Queen told me this, how she was so saddened.’
For years, there has been speculation and spin about how the late Queen felt about ‘Megxit’.
But now, thanks to Bedell Smith’s quietly explosive new disclosures on her Royals Extra Substack blog, it is part of the public record.
This isn’t embellished tittle tattle. Bedell Smith is a rigorous royal biographer with decades of access to top sources, a biographer who exercises considerable restraint about what she publishes.
And Lady Elizabeth? She was the late Queen’s cousin – born at Windsor Castle in 1941 and the granddaughter of the late Queen Mother‘s brother. She was also King George VI‘s goddaughter.
She moved easily through Queen Elizabeth’s inner circle. She was part of her private world, a trusted aide and sounding board. The late Queen affectionately called her ‘Number One Lady’. Lady Elizabeth, in turn, called her ‘Jemima’ for reasons she never explained.
Lady Elizabeth was also a party planner and when the late Queen needed a gala organised, she called ‘Liza.’ When she needed to speak her mind, she called her too.
Lady Elizabeth Anson was the late Queen’s cousin as well as the goddaughter of George VI
Lady Elizabeth died in November 2020, aged 79. But in her final years, she documented the private conversations she’d had with the Queen. Her notes now reveal a deeply personal portrait of a monarch shaken and quietly wounded.
Her telling observations shed an extraordinary new light on the late Queen’s views on Harry and Meghan. ‘She said she was not at all content,’ wrote Anson at one point.
‘Harry was rude to her for ten minutes,’ at another.
‘Meghan wouldn’t tell her about the wedding dress,’ Lady Elizabeth revealed.
‘The jury is out on whether she likes Meghan,’ she declared.
And perhaps most tellingly: ‘My Jemima is very worried.’
These were the words of a grandmother hurt, confused and heartbroken rather than those of a sovereign. As a monarch she knew exactly what to do, as a grandmother she found it all very painful.
Having reported on the royals for well over three decades, I can say with confidence that Lady Elizabeth notes mirrored what many in the palace were saying at the time.
While the couple’s departure was wrapped in carefully managed press statements, behind the scenes the late Queen felt isolated, excluded.
The Queen found the chaos around Harry and Meghan’s wedding baffling, writes Robert Jobson
She didn’t understand Meghan’s obsession with fame, or Harry’s rash choices – especially when they lacked the ballast of service and duty. And she worried that Harry, once so cheerful and grounded, had ‘lost his way’.
‘She has blown his relationship with his grandmother,’ Lady Elizabeth wrote about Meghan. A line that still cuts like a shard of glass. Spot on.
The late Queen found the chaos around the wedding baffling. Tantrums about tiaras, the insistence of having a veil when she had already been divorced.
She had hoped that Harry and Meghan’s wedding in May 2018 would be a moment of family unity. Instead, there were rumblings of discord from the start. Protocol was sidestepped, staff were distressed, and the Queen’s efforts at connecting with the bride-to-be, particularly around the choice of wedding dress, were apparently rebuffed.
‘She was trying to find out about the wedding dress,’ Lady Elizabeth noted, ‘and Meghan wouldn’t tell her.’
It wasn’t just about the dress. It was about inclusion. It was about tradition. In the Queen’s eyes, it was about respect.
Lady Elizabeth was blunt in her assessment of Meghan. ‘We hope but don’t quite think she is in love. We think she engineered it all.’
And of Harry: ‘The problem, bless his heart, is that Harry is neither bright nor strong, and she is both.’
Lady Elizabeth was also a party planner and when the late Queen needed a gala organised, she called ‘Liza’. When she needed to speak her mind, she called her too, says Jobson
This wasn’t idle family gossip. It was an unvarnished view from someone who had known the late Queen since girlhood and knew the dynamics of the Royal family better than most.
What makes these revelations so powerful is their intimacy. There was no palace PR behind them. No agenda. Just the quiet grief of a monarch who had spent her life serving others suddenly being rejected by a grandson she had always cherished.
The years that followed only deepened the divide: explosive interviews, headlines, memoirs and lawsuits. Lady Elizabeth didn’t live to witness the full fallout. But the Queen did experience some of it. She carried the hurt silently.
In early 2019, not long after the wedding, a senior courtier shared something that has stayed with me ever since. ‘The Boss is not happy,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t get all the celebrity stuff. She thinks Harry is throwing it all away, for what?’
The Queen’s values were clear. She had given her whole life to the Crown. And she expected, if not complete devotion to duty and it, at least respect from those she loved most.
She didn’t view Harry and Meghan as revolutionaries. She saw them as absentees, rejecting not only their roles, but her as well.
‘She said she was so saddened,’ Lady Elizabeth wrote.
Queen Elizabeth had led Britain through crisis after crisis, she endured personal loss, family scandal, constitutional challenge and still just carried on, without complaint. Her Majesty had always kept her poise. But this time, the pain broke through.
The Crown often hides its cracks. But now we know just how deep these ones went.
This was the final fracture – between a Queen who believed in duty and a grandson who rejected it and walked away from it and her.
Robert Jobson is a royal correspondent and number one best-selling author of Catherine: The Princess of Wales – The Biography.
