A friend of Queen Elizabeth II has questioned Prince Harry’s “special relationship” with the late queen and denounced his fervent claims that he and his wife Meghan Markle were a great source of delight and comfort to her in the last two years of her life.
The opposite is true, the unnamed friend has explained in a new interview with the Daily Beast. The renegade Duke of Sussex caused his 96-year-old grandmother anguish when she was dying and in physical pain, mostly because of the way that he and his American wife decided to go public with their various grievances against certain members of the royal family and the institution she had represented for 70 years.
If Harry truly was close to his grandmother or cared for her well-being, he should have been sensitive to the fact that she was in “a lot of pain” in the last years of her life, particularly after the April 2021 death of her husband, Prince Philip, the friend suggested to the Daily Beast’s royal reporter Tom Sykes.
During that period, the queen had to issue her famous “recollections may vary” statement in response to the couple’s explosive allegations to Oprah Winfrey that the royal family was insensitive, dysfunctional and harbored a family member who said something racist about the color of their son’s skin. She also knew that her grandson was finalizing his memoir, “Spare,” which would prove to be his best-selling vehicle for spilling royal secrets and criticizing his father, King Charles, his brother, Prince William, and stepmother, Queen Camilla.
“In the final months, of course, it got very much worse,” the friend told Sykes. By the time of the Platinum Jubilee in June 2022, the queen’s health had declined to the point that “she couldn’t see very much, she couldn’t hear very much, and she was easily confused,” the friend said.
“That was the time for Harry and Meghan to bite their tongue,” the friend told the Daily Beast. “Instead they produced this unending stream of incredibly hurtful films and interviews attacking her life’s work. For Harry to announce he was writing a memoir when his grandmother was not just recently widowed but actually dying herself, as he must have known she was — well, the cruelty of it takes the breath away.”
This friend’s comments, offering “rare insight” into “the closely guarded circumstances” of Elizabeth’s death, come in response to a report by the U.K. tabloid The Sun, saying that Harry and Meghan are supposedly going to stop dishing dirt and trying to monetize on their connections to the royal family, the Daily Beast said. The friend said the couple should have kept quiet much earlier, when it was clear that the queen was dying and in pain.
Buckingham Palace had refused to elaborate on the queen’s declining health, other than to say that she increasingly missed public engagements because she was suffering from “episodic mobility problems,” the Daily Beast said. Her death certificate said she died in September of “old age,” but her friend Gyles Brandreth subsequently reported in his book, “Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait,” that she was suffering from bone marrow cancer, which is known to cause severe, chronic pain. Such a diagnosis could have been the cause of her “mobility problems,” the Daily Beast also said. There are reports that she he had begun to use a wheelchair to get around the palace, though she was never photographed using one.
Harry seemed to be aware of his grandmother’s failing health when he told the “Today” show’s Hoda Kotb in April 2022 that he and Meghan had stopped off in the U.K. to visit her when they were in Netherlands for the Invictus games. He reportedly aggravated family members when he suggested that he was the only family member who was truly looking out for the queen’s welfare.
He told Kotb: “I’m just making sure she’s, you know, protected, and got the right people around her.” Members of the family thought his remarks were tone-deaf, given that his and Meghan’s interview with Winfrey and their other actions had caused the queen “a great deal of unhappiness and stress,” the Daily Beast said.
It’s well known that the queen was disappointed that Harry and Meghan opted to step away from royal life and leave the U.K. in 2020. She was “mystified” by the decision, felt it was a “missed opportunity” and believed her grandson’s love for Meghan “clouded his judgement,” according to the book “Our King,” by veteran royal reporter Robert Jobson. Still, her “affection” for Harry led her to hope that he and his wife would “find peace and happiness” in the United States, Jobson also said.
Harry always sought to portray his relationship with his “Granny” as extremely close. In “Spare” and in interviews, he also sought to make it clear that she wasn’t the target of his complaints.
In early 2021, Harry told his friend James Corden on “The Late Late Show” that his grandparents participated in friendly Zoom calls with him and Meghan, during which they were able to see their son Archie, then nearly 2, running around their home in Montecito, California. He told Corden that she asked what Archie wanted for Christmas, and Meghan told her a waffle maker. “She sent us a waffle maker for Archie. So breakfast now, Meg makes up a beautiful organic mix in the waffle maker,” Harry told Corden.
In “Spare,” Harry wrote about how he and his grandmother shared “little secrets” and could communicate with just “a glance.” “Special relationship, that’s what they said about us,” Harry wrote about her after she died. “And now I couldn’t stop thinking about the specialness that would no longer be. The visits that wouldn’t take place.”
But other accounts align with the unnamed friend’s view that the queen was feeling worn down by Harry’s behavior. In Jobson’s book, the author said that the queen’s regard for Harry was severely tested by his ongoing complaints and behavior.
“Even the queen, who had always had great affection for him, eventually tired of his outbursts,” Jobson wrote. “First, she had wearied of the volatile exchanges between Harry and his brother (Prince William), which sometimes took place in her presence. Then Harry and Meghan had started publicly criticizing both the monarchy and members of the royal family. At that point, the queen was frankly mystified by the couple’s behavior, describing it as ‘quite mad.’”
Another friend of the late queen told the Daily Telegraph in January, just before the publication of “Spare,” that Harry and Meghan’s “ambushing” of the family “had an impact” on the queen’s health. The prospect of his memoir had played “on her mind in her final months,” this other unnamed friend said.
The friend told the Telegraph: “This stuff was shoved in her face on an almost weekly basis. It had an impact. She had lost Prince Philip, and then the constant ambushing of the royal family by a much-loved grandson did take its toll. At that stage in your life and your reign, you just don’t need that on top of everything else.”
