With every year that goes by, Kate Middleton is becoming more and more popular among the public. The Princess of Wales has been a member of the royal family for more than a decade after tying the knot with Prince William, and today, she is one of the senior royal family members and the future of The Firm.
Meanwhile, her time within the royal sphere has also reportedly been somewhat tumultuous, not least because of the strained relationship with Meghan Markle. The two allegedly weren’t best friends and had problems bonding from the very beginning.
We don’t know how Kate felt when Meghan left royal life with Harry in 2019. However, no matter how bad their relationship might have been, royal expert Jennie Bond now paints a rather sad picture of Kate’s life within The Firm, stating that the princess can’t trust many of those around her.
The royal family has become increasingly smaller in the last decade. With Queen Elizabeth’s death, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle leaving, and disgraced Prince Andrew not having an official role, the number of working royals is most likely at an all-time low.
Meanwhile, as Kate Middleton is now recovering after her abdominal surgery and King Charles has received a devastating cancer diagnosis, there aren’t many royal family members on duty.
Kate Middleton & Meghan Markle’s relationship
Even behind the scenes, it would appear that formality is vital for the Royal Family’s most senior members.
“When Will and Kate came over, and I met her for the first time, they came over for dinner, I remember I was in ripped jeans, and I was barefoot,” Meghan recalled. “I was a hugger. I’ve always been a hugger, I didn’t realize that that is really jarring for a lot of Brits.”
She continued: “I guess I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside. There is a forward-facing way of being, and then you close the door and go ‘You can relax now’, but that formality carries over on both sides. And that was surprising to me.”
Yet, though Meghan and Kate weren’t best friends from the beginning, they were far from enemies.
According to Finding Freedom authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, the reason for Meghan and Kate’s strained relationship was that they didn’t know each other well enough.
“Meghan would agree with the assessment that the Duchesses were not the best of friends,” they wrote. “Their relationship hadn’t progressed much since [Markle] was Harry’s girlfriend.”
Meghan claimed Kate made her cry on her wedding day
Moreover, Durand and Scobie add that Kate didn’t make a significant effort to welcome Markle into the family, at least not in the way people might have expected.
Meghan had hoped that Kate would take her under her wing and guide her through all the new things that someone coming from “outside to the Firm” should know about.
That, the authors claim, never happened.
“Meghan was disappointed that she and Kate hadn’t bonded over the position they shared, but she wasn’t losing sleep over it,” Durand and Scobie wrote in Finding Freedom, adding that “Meghan would far rather have had Kate check in on her during the most difficult times with the press.”
Their relationship then took a turn before Harry and Meghan’s wedding, when things were said to have become heated between the two. Meghan claimed that Kate had made her cry over the flower-girl dresses on her wedding day – a notion that directly contradicted earlier claims by the tabloids.
After leaving the Royal Family, Harry and Meghan spoke candidly about their struggles via interviews, the Netflix documentary, and, more recently, in Harry’s memoir, Spare. The royals were left shocked and upset by their behavior. It should also go without saying that the revelations and claims made by Harry and Meghan did little to assist the fractured relationship between Kate and Meghan.
Even in moments of mourning, it appeared that Kate and Meghan wouldn’t bury the hatchet. At least not in Kate’s case, if we’re to believe author and royal expert Robert Jobson.
Kate felt “resentment” towards Meghan after not getting invited to Balmoral after queen’s death
When news about the queen’s declining health reached the public, Kate Middleton was seen driving to her children’s school to pick them up. Neither she nor Meghan traveled with the rest of the senior royals to Balmoral, and according to royal expert and author Robert Jobson, that was due to a direct order from then-Prince Charles.
In his new tell-all book Our King: Charles III: The Man and the Monarch Revealed, Jobson writes that both Harry and William were asked not to bring their wives.
“Harry was insisting Meghan travel with him to Scotland as the Queen’s life ebbed away, but the King said it was only for the children and grandchildren to be with the Queen,” Jobson wrote.
“Privately, he wanted to say Meghan was not welcome, but he couldn’t say that to Harry, so he personally intervened and asked Kate to stay back so that it was fairer on Meghan.”