It was intended as a symbol of coming together in a time of mourning two days after Queen Elizabeth’s death—and to counter reports of disunity with a stunning visual. But respected royal chronicler Robert Jobson claims in his new book, Our King—extracted in the Daily Mail—that the Windsor walkabout undertaken by Prince William, Kate Middleton, Prince Harry, and Meghan Markle was an “illusion” of togetherness, which Middleton considered “one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do,” given the “ill feeling” between the two couples.

It had been William’s idea to project an image of unity, but Jobson writes: “Catherine later admitted to a senior royal that, such was the ill feeling between the two couples, the joint walkabout was one of the hardest things she'd ever had to do.” Jobson continues: “Bear in mind this was before Prince Harry published Spare, the autobiography that not only revealed family secrets but laid bare his resentment of his brother. It was before the cloying Netflix documentary series he did with Meghan, and the succession of TV interviews in which he criticized the royal institution. If Catherine found it almost unbearable before all this to share a walkabout with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, then how—one has to wonder—do she and William feel about them now?”