So here was another profound reason for the rift that would divide William and Harry and come close to shattering the House of Windsor within two years. Ms Meghan Markle didn’t just want to do good in the world – she wanted to change the world.
In the early months of 2018, however, even the campaigning Ms Markle was willing to set politics aside. She had a wedding to organise, and as with every good wedding, temperatures rose over what the bridesmaids should wear.
‘It was a hot day,’ recalled a friend of Kate’s to Anna Pasternak, describing a rehearsal a few weeks before the May 2018 marriage. ‘Apparently there was a row over whether the bridesmaids should wear tights or not.’
Kate, who had brought her three-year-old daughter Charlotte to the run-through, is said to have assumed that protocol should be followed. Meghan thought the girls should be bare-legged – and photographs of the big day suggest that Meghan got her way.
But the bride did not fare so well when it came to her tiara. Sometime early in 2018 Meghan went to Buckingham Palace to review what many experts consider the most fabulous and expensive collection of personal jewellery in the world, to be shown round by its owner – the Queen. As so often, there are differing versions of what happened next.
Unconfirmed by the palace – but not denied – we are told that the Queen felt that she had to say ‘no’ to Meghan’s first choice, a beautiful emerald headdress that was said ‘to have come from Russia’. This was code for a sensitive origin, meaning that the treasure was one of those that had found its way into Windsor hands through ‘undefined’ not to say dodgy channels – and for an undisclosed price – in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. There was scandal attached. For this reason, the emerald tiara was seldom, if ever, put on public display, and it would suit neither the palace nor Meghan herself that spring if newspapers started speculating about precisely which Tsarist princess had worn the tiara and how she had been assassinated.
Unfortunately Harry’s ignorance of both history and family tradition meant that he had no understanding of this subtlety. Not for the first time, nor sadly the last, the word ‘no’ pushed a button inside him, and he flew into a rage. There were dressers and flunkies present, guarding and organising the jewels, so it was inevitable that his now-famous exclamation should find its way to the outside world – ‘What Meghan wants, Meghan gets!’
Her Majesty did not approve.
‘Meghan cannot have whatever she wants,’ she was reported to have replied. ‘She gets the tiara that she’s given by me.’ Meghan had arrived expecting a starring role and discovered that in terms of royal precedence she had been allotted a walk-on part.
Accounts differ as to whether the exchange took place in the presence of the sparkling tiara itself, plus Meghan, or whether Her Majesty administered her reproof to her grandson later. The official outcome, however, was another beautiful headdress of safer and more respectable provenance for Meghan to wear on her wedding day – Queen Mary’s classic art deco Diamond Bandeau featuring no fewer than eleven sections of glittering diamonds and platinum.
Queen Mary (1867–1953) – ‘May’ to her intimates – had been Elizabeth II’s stern grandmother, the first ever queen of the House of Windsor after its creation in 1917. Upright and unbending in posture and family life, her older courtiers and relatives saw unmistakable echoes of ‘May’ in the style that Elizabeth II would adopt whenever she wanted to look inscrutable – ‘She’s having a “Queen Mary” day.’
With its central brooch of diamond flowers, Queen Mary’s tiara would make Meghan look literally dazzling as she walked down the aisle – definitely a queen for the day.
The challenge would be getting her there, since aisle-duty lay in the hands of her father Thomas, whose behaviour to date had appeared exemplary.
‘I think it’s wonderful,’ Thomas Markle had told the press when news of the couple’s engagement had been announced in November 2017. ‘I think they’re [a] very good match, I’m very happy for them, Meghan and Harry … I love my daughter very much. Harry’s a gentleman.’
Meghan had kept her father well-informed about her developing relationship, speaking to him quite regularly and introducing him to Harry over the phone. But life had not been kind to the Emmy-winning lighting director of Married … with Children. Money troubles had driven him south of the border to the modest seaside resort of Rosarito in north-west Mexico, where he had been surviving with some difficulty on his savings, and subsidies from his daughter – Meghan had propped up her father to the tune of some $20,000–$30,000 from her earnings by one estimate. In 2016 Thomas Markle had filed for bankruptcy.
The money worries of the heavy-set seventy-three-year-old made him vulnerable to the wiles of the tabloid paparazzi – and in the spring of 2018 one duly came calling in the form of Jeff Rayner, forty-four, a successful British-born photographer who had driven to Rosarito in his Porsche from Los Angeles. Rayner offered Thomas a cut from the syndicated sales of some staged pre-wedding photographs he proposed to take of Markle getting ready for his big day as father of the bride – being measured for his wedding suit, for example, browsing a book of British landmarks while drinking a coffee in Starbucks, and working out with weights to get in shape for his walk down the aisle. The deal would be worth as much as £100,000 by later estimates and
