A royal biographer claims Queen Elizabeth II’s great-grandchildren granted her final wish in the months before her death.
The late monarch passed away in September 2022, age 96, following a record-breaking 70 years on the throne.
According to author Robert Hardman, earlier that year, she’d told her loved ones she had one final hope for her family, following several years of tension between some senior royals.
Two years prior to her death, her grandson, Prince Harry, and his wife, Meghan Markle, sensationally resigned from their official duties and fled the UK, setting up shop in Montecito, California, where they’ve remained ever since.
The couple claimed at the time that the decision had largely been spurred by mistreatment they’d endured by some of Harry’s family members.
As well as accusing his brother, Prince William, and sister-in-law, Kate Middleton, of ‘bullying’ Meghan during the build-up to their 2018 wedding, Harry claimed a senior royal had raised concerns regarding the skin colour of their son, Prince Archie.
The pair’s damning allegations were made during a bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey, and repeated several times in their titular Netflix exposé, as well as in high-profile interviews with select members of the press.
Harry, 41, also accused his stepmother, Queen Camilla, of having leaked stories about his family to the tabloid media in a bid to improve her image.
“I had complex feelings about gaining a step-parent who I thought had recently sacrificed me on her personal PR altar,” he wrote.
Royal author, Hardman, now alleges that, having remained in the loop with her family’s fallout, the late Queen had expressed a desire for her grandchildren to come together in the summer of 2022.
At the time, the mother-of-four had retired to Balmoral Castle in Scotland for her traditional respite.
“The Queen wanted all the great-grandchildren to come up to Balmoral at some point over that summer, even if the Sussexes might not be able to make it,” Hardman writes in Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. The Inside Story, released tomorrow (9 Apr).
At the time, she was also great-grandmother to William and Kate’s three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, Princess Beatrice’s eldest daughter, Sienna, and Princess Eugenie’s son, August.
Since her passing, Beatrice has welcomed another daughter, Athena, and Eugenie has welcomed a second son, Ernest.
Thankfully for the Queen, what became one of her final wishes was granted, and in June of that year, Meghan and Harry flew back to the UK.
The couple attended her Platinum Jubilee celebration in London, bringing Archie along, too.
Meghan, 44, had been pregnant with Princess Lilibet at the time.
“She wanted to make sure that they all had a really happy memory of her,” Hardman added.
