Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton reportedly often didn’t see eye to eye during their time as duchesses together, and a new book claims Meghan thought Kate was “too eager to please”
Meghan Markle makes Valentine’s Day special for Archie and Lilibet
As sisters-in-law marrying into the British Royal Family from comparably ‘ordinary’ backgrounds, one might have expected Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and Catherine, Princess of Wales, to have plenty to bond over.
It would appear, however, that the two women didn’t always agree on certain things. As detailed in Prince Harry’s explosive 2023 memoir Spare, there were a few heated moments between the pair behind palace doors, including the infamous “baby brain” spat.
Now a Royal author has shed some light on what Meghan, 43, really thought about Kate, 43, revealing that she viewed the mother-of-three as “too much a goody-two-shoes girl”.
In his new book Yes Ma’am: The Secret Life of Royal Servants, which was serialised in The Times, Tom Quinn claimed Meghan thought Kate was “just too eager to please”.
The royal writer explained: “All the royal staff I spoke to agreed that Meghan must have felt she was slightly looked down on by the courtiers.
“Some people can cope with this — Kate Middleton is perhaps the supreme example — but others try to fight back, which is what Meghan clearly did. ‘You’ve got to hand it to her,’ a former member of her staff said. ‘She really is a fighter.’”
According to Mr Quinn, Kate has managed to “negotiate difficult matters with staff and family relationships”, due to what one former Kensington Palace staff member puts down to her ability to “slowly and carefully absorbs the atmosphere of a place”.
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The former employee claimed: “She doesn’t jump in straight away and try to change everything to suit her way of thinking. She bides her time and is very intelligent and intuitive about other people, what they do and how they behave.
“She was also coached — not just by William, who wanted Kate to avoid the problems his mother had encountered, but also by the staff.”
In Spare, which detailed some of the difficulties the Sussexes had experienced as senior working royals, Prince Harry opened up about how things became tense between the sisters-in-law after Meghan remarked that Kate had “baby brain”.
This occurred when Kate forgot a minor detail while discussing rehearsal plans for Meghan and Harry’s May 2018 wedding, leading Meghan to conclude that she must have been suffering from “baby brain because of her hormones.”
Kate gave birth to her and Prince William’s youngest child, Prince Louis, on Aprill, 23, 2018, just one month before Harry and Meghan’s big day, and she apparantly wasn’t happy about her hormones being discussed.
In the days before the wedding, Meghan and Kate were at odds again over Princess Charlotte’s flower girl dress. It turned out to be too big for her and, while Kate wanted it completely remade, Meghan advised that her tailor would sort it out.
An argument ensued, and Harry claimed he had returned home to find Meghan sobbing on the floor. The following day, Kate visited with flowers and a card to apologise. Recalling this apology in the couple’s bombshell Oprah interview in March 2021, Meghan corrected the narrative that she had been the one to make Kate cry, as had previously been widely believed.
Meghan revealed: “It was a really hard week of the wedding, and she was upset about something. But she owned it, and she apologised, and she brought me flowers and a note apologising. She did what I would do if I knew that I hurt someone, to just take accountability for it.”
After Harry and Meghan returned from their Cyprus honeymoon, the two couples met up to discuss what had gone on, and Kate was apparently intent on getting an apology. In Spare, Harry recounted: “Meg said: ‘Oh yes! I remember: You couldn’t remember something, and I said it’s not a big deal, it’s baby brain. Because you’d just had a baby. It’s hormones.
“Kate’s eyes widened: ‘Yes. You talked about my hormones. We’re not close enough for you to talk about my hormones!’. Meg’s eyes got wide too. She looked genuinely confused. ‘I’m sorry I talked about your hormones. That’s just how I talk with my girlfriends’.”
It was at this point that Prince William reportedly “pointed at Meg”, telling her: “‘It’s rude, Meghan. It’s not what’s done here in Britain’.” In response, Meghan told ‘Willy’: “’Kindly take your finger out of my face’.” Harry wrote: “Was this really happening? Had it actually come to this? Shouting at each other about place cards and hormones?
“Meg said she’d never intentionally do anything to hurt Kate, and if she ever did, she asked Kate to please just let her know so it wouldn’t happen again.”
In another chapter, Harry recalled an “awkward moment” when Meghan asked if she could borrow some of Kate’s lip gloss. He remembered: “Kate, taken aback, went into her handbag and reluctantly pulled out a small tube. Meg squeezed some onto her finger and applied it to her lips. Kate grimaced.”
Yes Ma’am: The Secret Life of Royal Servants by Tom Quinn will be published on February 18.
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