The royal family’s most distinguished unofficial biographer shared a glimpse behind the scenes of one of the family’s most dramatic internal disputes: “Tiara Gate.”
Appearing on the latest episode of The Royalist podcast, journalist and royal expert Robert Hardman told host Tom Sykes about the late Queen Elizabeth II’s feelings over Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s tiara selection before their 2018 wedding.
“I think [the Queen], with... Meghan... they were a couple who were going to do things differently. And then Harry had, sort of, made that clear, really, from the start,” Hardman, 61, said.
“So when the time came for Meghan to go and choose a tiara—and this is a sort of ritual, if you like, that the Queen loved doing with royal brides... as one of her staff put it to me, you know, this was a sort of bonding moment with her and a royal bride, particularly if it’s a bride from outside the family,“ he continued. ”So it’s not one of her own, you know, grandchildren, or whatever. It’s someone she doesn’t know that well and it’s a very nice way of, sort of, just getting to know.”
“And so she loved the whole business of picking out, because she has probably—well, did have—the most extensive tiara collection in the world and had quite a lot to choose from, so she’d pick a sort of handful, maybe five or six, and then be ‘Well, these would suit X or Y,’ and they’d all be laid out,” he added. “And the bride-to-be would come around and they’d have a very happy morning or afternoon going through them all and trying them all.”
However, the author of Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. The Inside Story said, the future Duke and Duchess of Sussex threw a wrench into the queen’s tradition.
“Where this one was different from the start was, Meghan turned up—she turned up with Harry,” he said. “So immediately, that sort of intimacy wasn’t there, and Harry... half acknowledges that in his book.”
“Meghan chose the one she wanted and that was fine. And then a few weeks later, there was this sort of demand, a sudden demand, ‘We need the tiara now,’” Hardman continued. “The world’s busiest hairdresser was sort of flying in for a hair rehearsal—I didn’t know such things existed—and needs this tiara. ‘Where is it? We’ve got to have it. Come on, come on.’”
Hardman noted that the tiara’s transport was a particular obstacle, as it was not “a simple case of sticking it on a dispatch rider’s bike” or sending it through the mail. “There are forms to fill, insurance stuff to sort out,” he said.
The royal expert explained that another issue with the tiara, Queen Mary’s Diamond Bandeau, was its origin.
“What was particularly worrying—and this is something that never really used to be of any great concern in the past, but it has become lately—is the provenance of all these pieces,” Hardman explained. “What are the diamonds in this thing? Could some of them have come from somewhere that turns into a scandal? Are there going to be any accusations of, sort of, colonial loot?”
“No one’s ever going to wear, I think, the Koh-i-Noor diamond ever again, because it’s just so diplomatically, politically toxic. You’ve got about six nations all claiming it belongs to them. It’s got a pretty unfortunate imperial backstory,” he said. “They just wanted to check it out, check out all the various parts of it because it was a sort of tiara that had come from two different sets of diamonds. And that took a bit of time. So anyway, eventually the thing was given the green light and it was ready.”
“But by then, there’d been a lot of shouting,” Hardman continued. “Harry—and it was always Harry doing the shouting, interestingly. Never Meghan. She obviously got him to do this, and he’d been ringing around the house, shouting at people, saying, ‘Where is this tiara? I must have it. We need it. We’re having this hair rehearsal.’“
Hardman said that, finally, the queen’s dresser, Angela Kelly, arrived at Kensington Palace with the tiara, leading to a standoff between her and the prince.
“Harry writes about this in his book. I mean, he acknowledges that this argument happened. But as he recalls it... he got a sort of earful from Angela, and that it was all very scary,” Hardman explained. “And as other people recall it—Angela’s never spoken about it—but I mean, other people recall that actually, you know, it was Harry doing the shouting.”
“The bottom line was there was a lot of wedding, pre-wedding nerves, pre-wedding tensions,” he concluded. “But it was just an unfortunate episode that hadn’t happened with any other royal wedding. Simple as that. What should have been a happy bonding moment turned into a sort of stress point.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment. A rep for the Sussexes declined to comment.
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