Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s royal wedding appeared to the world as a fairy-tale happy ending for the couple. However, according to the resurfaced claims from one of the late Queen Elizabeth II’s closest confidantes, the months leading up to the ceremony were marked by tension, hurt feelings, and growing concern behind palace walls. The revelations paint a picture of mounting strain during the run-up to Harry and Meghan’s nuptials eight years ago.According to royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith, Lady Elizabeth Anson, a cousin and trusted confidante of the queen, shared recollections that suggest significant friction between the grandson and grandmother during wedding preparations. Anson, who passed away at 79 in 2020, provides Smith with detailed accounts of disagreements and miscommunications that upset the monarch. Smith reports these recollections in her Royals Extra Substack column in June 2025, which is excerpted in The Times of London.
Prince Harry and Queen Elizabeth II’s tense exchange
Lady Elizabeth Anson recounts to Smith that Harry had become involved in a tense 10-minute exchange with his grandmother over wedding arrangements. “Harry has blown his relationship with his grandmother,” Anson tells Smith. “She said she was really upset. I was shocked when the queen told me this, how she was so saddened. I had no idea about the conversation, that he was rude to her for 10 minutes.”
The claim re-entered the spotlight in a report from RadarOnline. com that also cites a royal source who alleged Harry had a “10-minute meltdown about his wedding arrangements in a tense meeting with his grandmother.” According to that source, the monarch does “not tolerate those sorts of histrionics well at all” and sees that kind of behaviour “as a sign of weakness.”
Wedding planning became a source of friction
Anson told Smith there were several issues that left the monarch feeling excluded from the wedding-planning process. One source of frustration was Harry’s decision to ask the Archbishop of Canterbury to officiate the wedding at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle without first obtaining approval from the Dean of Windsor.
“Harry seems to think the queen can do what she wants, but she can’t,” Anson said to Smith. Though the monarch is the ceremonial head of the Church of England, “on the religious side, it is the Dean of Windsor’s jurisdiction,” Anson explained. Anson also claims the queen is disappointed by a lack of communication surrounding other aspects of the ceremony. “She was trying to find out about the wedding dress, and Meghan wouldn’t tell her,” Anson recalls to Smith.
Relations between Prince Harry and Queen Elizabeth II improved
Toward the end of April 2018, with just weeks to go before the ceremony—relations between grandson and grandmother improved, Anson told Smith. “The queen and Harry have patched things up,” Anson says. “He came to her on his own. She said she felt very left out, so he wrote her a letter about what was happening.”Even so, Anson suggested doubts remained about the marriage. “The Number One Lady says the jury is out on whether she likes Meghan,” Anson recalled, using her nickname for the queen. Anson also claimed the monarch has concerns about dynamics within the younger generation of royals, particularly between Meghan and Prince William and Kate Middleton. Looking back, Anson believed tensions surrounding the wedding foreshadowed future problems for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, expressing concerns about whether Meghan is the right match for Harry.