While I rarely read or cover Air Mail’s royal coverage, I did chance upon a recent piece by Craig Brown. Usually, Air Mail gets the dregs of the royal rota to write their Sussex-centered and Sussex-bashing royal pieces, but Brown is more of an old-school royal biographer. His piece is called “The Strange Afterlife of Queen Elizabeth II,” and it was published to mark what would have been QEII’s 100th birthday. He also wanted to talk about how quickly everyone moved on, including some fascinating observations about King Charles. But the biggest headline? One of QEII’s courtiers told Brown that she, the queen, believed that Harry and Meghan’s marriage would end in divorce.
Everyone moved on from QEII’s death quickly: After the lying-in-state, with its ten-mile queue, and the funeral, life in Britain returned to normal with an almost indecent haste. A year on, I visited Sandringham, and was surprised by quite how speedily the new King had changed things. The garden next to the house had been replanted for a looser, more relaxed and informal look. Unfortunately the King’s new topiary had failed to catch: half the hedges were looking miserable, and a laborious re-re-planting process was under way.
Everything’s about Charles & Camilla: Indoors, the drink coasters in the sitting room now bore the King’s cipher. With so much else on his mind, Charles had found time to bin his mother’s old coasters and replace them with his own. And the Sandringham gift shop was now full of Charles and Camilla books and memorabilia, with products bearing the image of the late Queen relegated to the lower shelves. The Queen is dead! Long live the King!
Muted 100th birthday celebrations: So unshowy in life, so discreet in death, Elizabeth seemed to have tiptoed out of the collective memory, quietly shutting the door behind her. For some time after her death, when her subjects spoke of “the Queen”, they meant her. But gradually that changed. Nowadays, when they talk of the Queen they mean Camilla. Events held for the 100th anniversary of Elizabeth’s birth on Tuesday seemed curiously muted: a Palace reception for centenarians; a visit by the King to the British Museum to look at the design for her memorial.
QEII spoke about a potential Sussex divorce. Those who respected her privacy when she was alive are now happy to talk of the more interesting and forceful woman they remember. A year or two ago a well-respected figure in public life, a regular at the Palace, told me that during the Megxit period talk around the table had turned to the Harry and Meghan marriage, and if it would end in divorce. “It’s not a matter of if,” the Queen chipped in, “it’s a matter of when.”
QEII thought Donald Trump was rude. As I was writing my book A Voyage Around the Queen, I was told by someone who had sat next to her at lunch that she called President Trump “very rude”. My informant also said the Queen had suggested that Trump must have “some sort of arrangement” with his wife, Melania. Some doubted what I wrote, not least Donald Trump himself, who called me a sleazebag and a phony. “Totally false,” he told reporters. “In fact, I heard always the opposite. I heard I was her favorite president. She would say it to a lot of people, she said it to friends of mine that ‘President Trump was my favorite president’ … We had an unbelievable relationship.” Ahem. But recently, Barack Obama agreed Queen Elizabeth had been no fan of Trump: she was, he said, “baffled” by his rise. “Why is this person so close to running your country?” she asked Obama in 2016.
All of the lies about QEII sort of blend together at this point, because royal biographers continue to insist that QEII was not some dutiful granny, but really a sharp-tongued bigot with dangerously poor judgment. But this feels new, right? We’ve heard endless stories about QEII bitching about Harry & Meghan naming their daughter after her, or something something TIARA, but have we ever heard her prediction that the Sussexes would divorce? Personally, I think this is less about someone quoting QEII and more likely it’s just some well-heeled courtier projecting the belief and desire of everyone within the royal establishment: they all WANTED Harry and Meghan to divorce, and they tried to do anything and everything to make it happen. There are still commentators openly fantasizing about Harry abandoning his wife and children and marrying an “English rose.” What’s crazy is that all of the fussing over the Sussex marriage was likely a distraction for the actual trainwreck in plain view: the Wales marriage.
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- Royal Ascot, Portrait of HRH Queen Elizabeth the Second behind TRH Harry the Duke of Sussex and TRH Meghan the Duchess of Sussex,Image: 536132583, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: Sorge / Andreas Bastian (Caro) / Avalon
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- Royal Ascot, Portrait of TRH Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and TRH Meghan the Duchess of Sussex in front of HRH Queen Elizabeth the Second
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- Queen Elizabeth II with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex during a group photo at the Queen’s Young Leaders Awards Ceremony at Buckingham Palace, London. The Queen’s Young Leaders Programme, now in its fourth and final year, celebrates the achievements of young people from across the Commonwealth working to improve the lives of people across a diverse range of issues including supporting people living with mental health problems, access to education, promoting gender equality, food scarcity and climate change .
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- The Duke and duchess of Sussex arrive at Westminster abbey for the commonwealth day ceremony.
Sure sure. They’re just trying to reframe what she actually said about w&k and pretend she said it about Harry and Meghan.
‘It will all end in tears’ QEII on william and Kate’s relationship.
The Queen’s favorite son allegedly committed multiple acts of treason. In addition to decades of sexual abuse and rape of trafficked women and children.
The Queen helped pay one of her favorite son’s victims settlement.
Sorry if I don’t put the slightest amount of weight behind any of her post mortem declarations. During her life, her views were horrifically distorted by privilege and entitlement. She seems to have fallen further after death.
The late Queen did not believe in divorce. It was not her go-to option. Even considering the train wreck that was Charles & Diana’s marriage, she avoided divorce for as long as humanly possible. This is something someone else attributed to her. She had a certain sense of fatalism, but that was more to do with her embrace of free will and personal accountablity. As she told Harry, “Your father does exactly what he wants to do,” in other words, don’t believe a word he says.
Funny how the dead queen keeps saying exactly what these people want to write about the Sussex’s..
Well if she was using her two sons as patterns…….
And her daughter.
And her sister and her other grandson.
For me – and most folk I know – when we say ‘The Queen’, we still mean Liz. Camilla is ‘a’ Queen, not ‘The’ Queen.
I use Camilla for Camilla and the late Queen for QEII
So the rota held another seance with the queen?
I just think about how when meghan and harry brought the kids to meet the queen she was impressed/surprised they were polite? and I assume this is because not only the (insane) assumptions they all make about americans being uncouth, but also because ppl had been talking in her ear for 2 years about how horrible meghan is. But in the beginning, I think they got alone just fine. Meghan truly was happy to do anything for them from sewing the commonwealth countries into her veil.
I think these courtiers are overestimating the ” goodwill” that QEII is going to still be afforded to get out all of their hateful thoughts and opinions about the Sussexes. They seem to think that if they pretend that she’s the one that thought it and said it, the world will just think oh it must be true because that nice old lady thought it.
The problem is this nice old lady is now being called into question about her ridiculous protection of her criminal child. Especially in comparison to how her hard-working grandson was thrown to the wolves along with his wife and children.
This isn’t going to get them the reaction they think it will, it just reinforces all of the negative thoughts and opinions that people are now having regarding QEII. Rather than thinking oh well the Sussexes must truly have been terrible, and their marriage is going to crash and burn, people are thinking man what a sh**ty family.
A lot of that goodwill was based on her public silence. Now that she’s dead and chatty if half of what she supposedly said is true she’s lucky she kept her thoughts to herself while she was alive.
“Dead and chatty” – I cackled! 😀 What an absolutely apt description!
I agree with all of this, Dee(2).
These writers continue to make QEII look terrible with these afterlife revelations. Predicting that the Sussexes would divorce would make her a royal b*tch and a lousy grandmother.
Agreed, and I would also add @SarahCS in there too because this corpse has been doing so much talking post-mortem that she seems truly like a horrible person to me.
Unfortunately that is not the opinion of most DM readers, they think that H and M are awful and the late Queen is still telling the truth, I’m not sure how.
Well of course most DM readers would believe this about the late Queen because they have the same hateful views and lack the ability to make rational decisions or form opinions rooted in reality. She had constant Zoom calls with the Sussexes, allowed them to keep Frogmore Cottage, requested they keep their security in her statement to the courts and would host the Sussexes without the others knowing about it. She also shared her blanket with Meghan during their first solo engagement together and invited them to her a jubilee where she provided them with her security. She’s the only royal family member that we know for certain met Lili, with exception of Eugenie. More signs show that she had a close relationship with them and only the words of unnamed people who have lied in the past and have a vendetta against the Sussexes says otherwise.
“I hate the same people as the Queen did! My hate is so regal and elevated!”
Yes, these articles just make Elizabeth look like an ass. Is that what they want? Because it became clear that she WAS always protecting a rapist, she accepted expensive gifts from shady Saudis, she allowed her other son (the non-rapist, that we know of) to be besties with two child molesters. I mean, at this point, was Elizabeth any better than the rest, or did she simply benefit from the press’s protection of her image?
Is the queen is speaking from the dead again? How disrespectful to attribute to the queen smears and criticism of the Sussexes. These journalists now have a new ruse to spew their own hateful comments– I didn’t make it up for money– the queen herself said it, I swear. I think they’ve just found a new cottage industry for the abuse of the Sussexes. What has Prince Philip said about them recently? And does Queen Victoria have any thoughts?
Queen Victoria’s Grandmother was a bit mixed, She might have been sympatric
Whether they will ever divorced does not and won’t change how poorly they were reated. And divorce for the Royals is so common it shouldnt even matter .
Of course everything was switched over, that’s how monarchy works. The minute her last breath was done he became King and it was all about him. This isn’t that same as hanging onto a dining table because the deceased relative loved it and you have family memories associated with it, Charles was not rushing from room to room switching out the coasters himself.
The nonsense these people fill the world with never ceases to amaze me.
I’m more laughing at the way Charles fucked the garden and replaced the coasters.
craig Brown’s biography on Princess Margaret is really good. Actually one of the better royal biographies I’ve ever read. He still comes across as a royalist but he did a good job of presenting Margaret’s strengths and weaknesses, her issues with her role and her marriage, her drinking, etc.
Anyway, he’s right here. They did move on really fast from QEII. And while yes thats monarchy and its not like Charles is changing the coasters himself – it does feel a little unseemly.
As for the divorce comment – I absolutely believe that someone told him she said that. But either that person is making it up (maybe wishful thinking) or the queen said that because all of her courtiers and Charles and William were assuring her they would get divorced.
Either way, its been 6 years since they left and almost 4 years since the queen died, so……
Scooter wanted the divorce the most. Charles wanted Meghan to go back to work which meant she’d spend less time in the UK and Harry “would come to his senses.” These are dreadful people.
I subscribed to Air Mail for a while but when I saw two Sussex-bashing pieces in quick succession, I cancelled.
Did you tell them why?
This is the issue with her quiet, stoic, unreactionary persona, and never complain never explain.
Nobody actually knows who the Queen really was or what she thought and her whole legacy is being written and sourced by people with their own motivations.
That’s why they moved on so fast – she was nothing but a literal figurehead with nothing else to hold onto. She didn’t do or say anything of consequence besides live as long as she did in her position.
Sigh. It’s Dead Woman Talking again.
The Queen is writing a libelous bestseller from the grave!
So the same Queen who threw a fit about Meghan wearing white at her wedding because she was so repulsed by the concept of divorce, the same Queen who was the only person who overruled all the naysayers in the family and gave her blessing to the Sussex marriage is the same Queen who is playing divorce bingo behind the scenes?
Whether it’s God, the late Queen, Dr. Martin Luther King, or the Founding Fathers, people put their own thoughts into the mouths of saintly entities that can’t speak for themselves.
Maybe George Washington could comment about the Sussexes.
I find this…unbelievable. Every photo of Meghan and the Queen together showed a connection and sense of humor. I especially love the one where they are giggling together. I think the Q really liked Meghan and her work ethic. Too bad she didn’t step in when it would have mattered.
To me this is not a black issue, although for some it is, but a Princess Di remake. Meghan had a work ethic, could articulate, had a passion for the duty the Firm says they want, and they ended up with another non-Royal, an American actress to boot, that put the heir & his inarticulate, lazy wife in the shade. It was bad enough when Diana did it, but too many entitled fuddy duddies to take it.
I don’t believe any of what this man is writing. If the Queen was that much against the marriage she would not have given Harry approval to marry Meghan in the first place. She witheld approval from her own sister, so she could very easily have said no to Harry’s choice. It’s not like she hadn’t done it before. I think she and Meg got along well and the old crusty royalists are trying to change the narrative after the fact- from beyond the grave.
Actually, the queen is reported to have given her sister her consent to the marriage after discussions with government officials, pleading Margaret’s case. It was Margaret’s decision NOT to wed the man she loved, because though she would retain her title, she would lose other privileges, which she wanted to keep.
Remember the Queen driving with Meghan’s dog in the back seat in the run up to the wedding? Or how fast she took Meghan on a professional function? Or the Zoom calls after the Sussexes moved to sunny California?
Elizabeth is making more headlines after her death than she did in life, is that the best the rota can do?
Exactly.
Seance time again! I thought her Majesty disapproved of divorce. Maybe changed her mind in the after life.
Odd. That in her lifetime, the Queen disapproved of Divorce and even did not like the idea of Margaret marrying a divorced man.
If Margaret had married the divorced man she was going to be taken out of the succession. It was considered so wicked. Not that it would have made any difference, by that time the late Queen had a couple of healthy children. Mind you that was more than 60 years ago.
No she wasn’t. Letters found in the Royal Archive prove:
– she would keep her titles
– she’d keep her royal role, her massive housing, her royal stiped, her royal duties
– she would stay in the line of succession. Her children would not be in the succession because she was marrying a divorce man. Who was a grooming pedophile who groomed margaret from a young age, slept with her on royal tours when she was 16, and ended up marrying someone he groomed from the age of 13.
My knowledge of what was going on goes back to when I was a child. Teach me to believe what I read in the papers at the time. I understood that she had given up the idea because she wanted to be in the succession.
She wanted her children in the succession, that was very important to her.
The letters in the archive were only revealed in the last few years.
This Elizabeth is very talkative after her death 🤣
I wonder how many pounds this courtier received for putting that line into the Queen’s mouth.
This is why Elizabeth’s legacy has disappeared. Harry talked about the divorce doomsayers in one of his interviews. He basically says they’re full of sh*t. These people will be saying the same nonsense and watching their marriage, their pockets and their projects hoping for failure. Then they get irrationally angry when the Sussexes go about their lives and thrive. They put in the work to have the life they have. They honestly think Harry will revert to his pre-Meghan self and obscure his achievements if she wasn’t there. This constant barrage of wanting divorce is because they haven’t been able to unalive his wife, so will settle for this. Sick people.
If the Queen was so opposed to Meghan why did she give Harry permission to marry her? Did she believe that if she had refused Harry would leave the Royal Family? Anyway I’m with Kaiser nobody in the Royal Family or Household wanted Meghan to marry Harry and they did everything they could to make them divorce.
Derangers have claimed for years she didn’t give permission. ie. The staff faked it because of fears of backlash (from Meghan of course), QEII was never given a choice, the official fancy approval document was faked, and so on.
They’re still debating this on one of the royal forums, whether Harry and their children should be removed from the succession as a result. Or they should be removed because Meghan is ‘no longer in communion’ with the Church of England if she isn’t going to X church and the kids aren’t being raised in X religion. As long as no one is Catholic, it is irrelevant but don’t tell the derangers.
Since 2013 they are allowed to Marry a catholic but a catholic still can’t become King, It still seems antiquated to me.
If the children were raised catholic they’d be out of the line.
The entire church was made up in a break from Rome over a randy King. They aren’t going to let people be catholic and head up CoE.
I mean we all know the palace wanted a divorce. Remember the degree wife comment. People like Ingrid Seward have said that they expected Meghan to go back to the us but didn’t expect Harry to leave with her. And during the one year review there were articles about how it was too late for Meghan in the uk but Harry would be welcomed back. So I can believe that those in royal circles told people like this biographer that people were expecting a divorce.
But I don’t believe that Elizabeth who was allegedly all about her Christian faith was going around telling people this. I think she’s just being used as a tool to say what others in royal circles and in the press believe. It’s giving Elizabeth hated her too so we are right to be so hateful towards Meghan.
The bar is in hell and this doesn’t excuse the smear campaign and lack of protection that happened on Elizabeth’s watch, but compared to others in the family she seemed most supportive of Meghan. We saw her with Meghan’s dog pre the wedding and she took Meghan on an engagement within a month of the wedding. Meghan was the first person outside of Philip to accompany her on the royal train. Elizabeth gave Meghan two of her high profile patronages one of which Camilla reportedly wanted and appointed her VP of the QCT.Elizabeth and Philip seemed most visibly happy to meet Archie in that famous photo. When they split with KP & moved to BP she helped part fund their office.
After they stepped back Elizabeth wrote letter confirming they needed security. When they left royal duties it was said by Tom Bradby that Harry & Meghan thought Elizabeth & Philip were the only ones who were friendly to them & they were only ones cleared by the couple over the skin tone concerns comments on Oprah.
When they moved to California Elizabeth (and Philip) kept up with H&M on zoom. Meghan said on Oprah how she was able to call up Elizabeth after learning of Philip’s poor health. After Oprah it was reported that Elizabeth was the one who pushed back against William & Charles who allegedly wanted a harsher response. Elizabeth arranged security for H&M to come to the jubilee with the kids & gave them that procession at St Paul’s. She snuck in a meeting with them in the uk before the invictus games in The Hague. This doesn’t really give the actions of what these royal authors are trying to project of Elizabeth’s views of Meghan and of Harry’s marriage.