The Queen may have modernised many aspects of the monarchy during her 70-year reign, but she could still be a traditionalist from time to time. One such occasion was when the late monarch allegedly expressed her disapproval of Meghan Markle opting to wear a veil at her wedding to Prince Harry in May 2018.
Royal author Tom Bower claimed Her Majesty raised her concerns in his 2022 book Revenge, writing: ‘The Queen also questioned why Meghan needed a veil for the wedding, given it was to be her second marriage.’
The late Queen was also allegedly taken aback at the divorcee’s choice of a white bridal gown, which typically represents virginal purity. Meghan had previously been married to Hollywood film producer Trevor Engelson between 2011 and 2013. Queen Camilla, who had previously been married to Andrew Parker Bowles between 1973 and 1995, stuck with tradition and opted not to wear a veil for her wedding to Charles in 2005.
But Meghan forwent subtlety when it came to her veil for the grand service in the historic St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. The 16ft-long piece of material was trimmed with lace depicting flora from each of the 53 Commonwealth countries.
The late Queen observes Meghan during her wedding to Prince Harry at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, on May 19, 2018
Fashion designer Clare Waight Keller, then of Givenchy, who worked alongside Meghan on the £100,000 dress said she wanted to create a ‘timeless piece’ but also ‘convey modernity’. She said: ‘In contrast, the delicate floral beauty of the veil was a vision Meghan and I shared, a special gesture embracing the commonwealth flora, ascending the circumference of the silk tulle.’
The gown and veil were created after 3,900 hours of work by 50 people, with the dressmakers having to regularly wash their hands to avoid discolouring the material. The veil was held in place by Queen Mary’s diamond bandeau tiara, which was made in 1932 and lent to Meghan by the late Queen.
But the decision to wear such an eye-catching veil for her second wedding appeared to raise eyebrows with the more traditional royals. The practice of brides wearing veils is said to go back to ancient Greeks and Romans, who wore them to disguise themselves from any evil spirits who wanted to stand in the way of their happiness.
Over the centuries many cultures have embraced the garment and it is now often associated with aspects of bridal virtue like modesty and chastity. Recalling the dress for a Windsor Castle exhibition on the wedding, Meghan said: ‘I had a very clear vision of what I wanted for the day and what I wanted the dress to look like.
‘So what was amazing in working with Clare [Waight Keller] is that sometimes you’ll find designers try to push you in a different direction. But she just completely respected what I wanted to see for the day, and she wanted to bring that to life for me.’
But the elaborate veil was not the only controversy that arose from Meghan’s choices for her bridal gown. The late Queen never voiced her true opinion about the duchess to anyone except her very closest confidantes, including Lady Elizabeth Anson. Known as Liza to her friends, she was a cousin of the Queen, and used to speak on the telephone to the monarch on a daily basis.
Lady Elizabeth told royal author Ingrid Seward that the Queen had made only one remark to her about Meghan and Harry’s wedding, which was that the bride’s Givenchy wedding gown was ‘too white’.
She wrote in her February 2024 book My Mother and I: ‘In the monarch’s view, it was not appropriate for a divorcee getting remarried in church to look quite so flamboyantly virginal.’ Her husband, Prince Phillip, would also go on to make comparisons between Meghan and Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee who Edward VIII abdicated to marry. Seward claims he was ‘one of the few wary’ of being charmed by Meghan and thought it was ‘uncanny’ how much she reminded him of the socialite Simpson.
Although twice-divorced Simpson did not opt to wear white when she married Edward in 1937, instead choosing pale blue. Katie Nicholl, in her book The New Royals, also reported a similar concern from the late Queen after she was told by a source that the decision to wear white had left her ‘surprised’. She wrote: ‘Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but she believes if you’ve been married before, you wear off-white on your wedding day, which is what the Duchess of Cornwall [Camilla] did.’
As well as the controversy surrounding the dress veil and colour, the person who walked Meghan down the aisle while she was wearing it also became an issue. Instead of the traditional father of the bride, Thomas Markle, handing her over to the groom, it was decided on short notice that Prince Charles would do the honours.
Thomas had decided not to come to the wedding when he became embroiled in a scandal after it was discovered by The Mail on Sunday that he had staged photographs with paparazzi for cash. But the late Queen reportedly felt regret that the bride had not made up with her estranged father before the paparazzi drama unfolded. According to Nicholl, the fact that Harry had not yet met Thomas and that Meghan was still not speaking to her father concerned the Queen, and while she rarely intervened, she made a point of speaking to Harry and Meghan about the situation.
‘It was the Queen’s feeling that Meghan should sort things out with her father and that Harry should have met Thomas before the wedding,’ a family friend told the author. ‘She thought the whole thing could have been better handled.’Â But once the deceit of his actions around the photographs was revealed, the duchess’s relationship with her 80-year-old father broke down, and it seems they still don’t speak.
Although Meghan was not alone in choosing to forgo tradition for her wedding, as her husband-to-be Harry also wanted to carve out his own image for the big day. When he was about to get married, he went to see the Queen to ask permission to keep his beard on his wedding day. Long-standing protocol in the British Army states beards are forbidden, and since Harry was going to be married in military dress uniform, his would have to go.
But in an effort to save his ginger fuzz, the prince did the only thing he could think of to get around the rules – begging his grandmother to make an exception for him. Harry later recounted in his tell-all memoir Spare that he ‘desperately wanted to hang on’ to his beard as it had become an ‘effective check on my anxiety’.
He claimed it helped ‘therapy, and meditation, and a few other things’ to calm his nerves. When he gave all his reasons to the Queen, which also included concerns he didn’t want Meghan to see a ‘total stranger’ at the alter, she permitted him. Harry later recounted a conversation he had with William, who got married clean shaven, about his beard pass, writing his brother said: ‘You put her in an uncomfortable position, Harold! She had no choice but to say yes.
He replied: ‘No choice? She’s the Queen! If she didn’t want me to have a beard I think she can speak for herself.’ Meanwhile, although the Queen was concerned about Meghan’s choice of veil and white dress, perhaps the biggest pre-wedding concerns came from the tiara. She had offered Meghan access to her collection of tiaras and, during what Harry later described as an ‘extraordinary morning’, allowed her to try them on in front of her, her devoted dresser Angela Kelly and a royal jewellery expert in her private dressing room.
Something later went badly wrong, however, when Meghan tried to arrange a fitting with Kelly, who, it seems, did not like the manner in which the bride and groom were treating her, according to Daily Mail diary editor Richard Eden. Perhaps accustomed to ordering around underlings on a television shoot, Meghan may not have been used to dealing with someone such as Kelly, who – although a servant – was also a confidante and friend of the Queen.
Harry denied in his memoirs that he angrily told Kelly, ‘What Meghan wants, Meghan gets.’ He did, however, admit they had been exasperated by the dresser, who ‘fixed me with a look that made me shiver’. He added: ‘I could read in her face a clear warning. This isn’t over.’ On the day of the wedding, royal watchers noticed the Queen’s face looked stern as she looked across at Meghan in her wedding dress.
In the years following the wedding, the Sussexes continued to grow more distant from the Royal Family as they clashed with the strict order of things within the institution. They eventually made the decision to leave the Firm and move to the US in 2020, later attacking the family in an interview with Oprah Winfrey the following year. The Queen was reportedly saddened at their choice, allegedly confiding to a close friend that she was exhausted by the turmoil of it all.
The source told Nicholl: ‘The Queen was very hurt and told me, “I don’t know, I don’t care, and I don’t want to think about it any more”.’ Seward wrote of the situation: ‘At that point the Queen decided there was no longer any point in worrying about Harry as he wasn’t going to take notice of anyone but his wife. ‘However much she loved Harry – and she did – she couldn’t condone the way he was speaking about the institution of the monarchy she’d spent 70 years preserving.’
