For the better part of a month, the royal reporters have been obsessed with the late Lady Liza Anson, who died in 2019. Anson was Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin and friend, and Anson was a favorite gossip source for many royal reporters, as it turns out. She was “a source close to QEII” or perhaps just a “royal source.” In her last years, Anson had a major grudge against the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The Sussexes didn’t hire her to plan any part of their wedding (Anson was a party planner) and so, as punishment, Anson told lots of reporters about QEII’s fury with Harry and Meghan. According to Anson, QEII had to “give up her solitude” in a 1,000-room Norman castle when she rented Frogmore Cottage to the Sussexes. Anson was especially pissed about everything involving the Sussexes’ wedding, and she claimed that QEII was as well. QEII was allegedly big mad that Meghan A) wore a veil, B) wore white, and C) refused to tell QEII about every single part of the wedding planning.

At no point during all of this third-hand hearsay and gossip-mongering has anyone over there acknowledged that, actually, the queen was in the wrong. If Anson’s gossip is correct, QEII was throwing a tantrum over her grandson’s wife-to-be wearing a white gown to a globally-televised royal wedding. No one has said “well, Meghan had the right to do whatever she wanted, it was her wedding after all.” Then, weirdly, the Daily Mail’s Richard Eden put this item in his column:

Meghan Markle’s choice of dress for her second wedding, to Prince Harry, is said to have caused Queen Elizabeth to raise an eyebrow. The late Queen is reported to have thought her gown was ‘too white’ for a divorcee.

Prince William’s cousin has, however, defended Meghan’s choice and explained why she, too, wore an ivory gown for her own second wedding.

Maddison May Brudenell – whose great-grandfather was King Charles’s beloved great-uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma – exchanged vows with Canadian welder Bret Kapetanov last November. And Maddison reveals that she had to overcome the opposition of her mother, Edwina Hicks.

The model, 31, says: ‘In the monarch’s view, it was not appropriate for a divorcee getting remarried in church to look quite so flamboyantly virginal. My mother, our late Queen’s goddaughter, had said exactly the same to me, and that other family members would agree.’

Maddison, who previously ran off to be secretly married to a DJ, Olaoluwa Modupe-Ojo, wore a bespoke white dress by Laura Green, of Modern Bride, for her wedding to Kapetanov.

Of her frank conversation with her mother, she says: ‘I was sad to think about the painful past during what I wanted to be a joyful, future-focused time of my life. But I understood the notion. My mum was speaking out of love. I didn’t let my feelings overcome me – we talked about it.’

‘However, as I told my mother, we may as well splash muddy water, drip some blood, sweat and tears on it for good measure. As it happens, my dress did have a lot of unique components, but these were because of what I chose and not in any way what I felt I must choose. My mother listened to my wisdom and respected my style.’

[From The Daily Mail]

This is actually completely normal – an older relative has super-conservative opinions about weddings, and the bride says “okay, granny, but I’m still going to do what I want because it’s my wedding,” and the granny just has to deal. As I’ve said this whole time, I can understand why a woman of QEII’s generation would have thoughts and opinions about “which brides can wear white.” It’s the weaponization of those opinions which bugs me, and using a dead queen’s memory to bash Meghan for “making her own choices for her wedding.” There were literally dozens of royal reporters writing ghastly sh-t about Meghan in the past month, all because one dead woman said another dead woman was “furious, confused and HURT” by Meghan’s choice to wear white SEVEN YEARS AGO.

PS… if we’re getting into conservative wedding rules about who can and cannot wear white, I find it remarkable that QEII seemingly had no opinion about the then-Duchess of Cambridge wearing white to another woman’s wedding.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.