I’ve just realized why there are suddenly all of these new “biographies” of Queen Elizabeth II – April 21st would have been her 100th birthday. So why not repackage a million old stories about QEII with a Sussex-forward slant? That’s what Hugo Vickers has done, and that’s what Robert Hardman has done as well. Hardman, like Vickers, wrote a book called Elizabeth II, and like Vickers, all of the early excerpts are about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Y’all, would you believe it if I told you that there was yet another tiara-story variant? I honestly think that seeing Meghan in a diamond tiara on her wedding day broke every royalist’s brain. It’s been eight years of screaming, crying and throwing up about Meghan borrowing a fakakta tiara from the queen. The stories keep changing too! I’ve lost count of how many variations we’ve gotten. Just going from memory, these are some variants: Meghan demanded a different tiara but was bitched out by QEII; Meghan bullied a reluctant QEII into giving her a tiara in the first place; Meghan demanded everything and Angela Kelly had no choice but to bitch out Harry; Harry made Angela Kelly cry, which was obviously Meghan’s fault; Meghan demanded that the tiara be brought to her immediately for a hair trial only for a palace SWAT team to be called in; Meghan kicked a corgi as she yanked the tiara off QEII’s head!! Well, here are some highlights from Hardman’s version of tiara events:
Meghan & Kate both cried, you guys: The couple had asked Princess Charlotte to be a bridesmaid, but tensions between Meghan and the Duchess of Cambridge over the bridesmaids’ dresses would reduce both women to tears.
QEII loved helping royal brides select a wedding tiara: ‘Her Majesty would pick out a small selection which she thought would suit that bride and ask her round to try them on and choose one,’ said a former staffer. ‘It was her lovely way of bonding with the bride. She did it with Sophie [Rhys-Jones] and with Catherine [Middleton]. But there wasn’t that bonding with Meghan because she turned up with Prince Harry.’ No one was entirely sure why the Prince had to come, too. His memoir suggests that it was a joint invitation; insiders say otherwise.
Wanting to borrow Queen Mary’s diamond bandeau before the wedding: The mood turned sour nearer the wedding when the couple rang the Palace to ask the Queen’s dresser and curator, Angela Kelly, to send over the tiara. Meghan wished to practise putting it on…Matters came to a head when Meghan’s hairdresser flew in for a ‘hair trial’. ‘People were frustrated – and confused. Why was it so hard to set up a time for Meghan to try the tiara with her hairdresser?’ wrote Scobie and Durand, adding that Harry was forced to go directly to the Queen as a result. The Prince, in his account, said that he did not. ‘I considered going to Granny, but that would probably mean sparking an all-out confrontation,’ he wrote, ‘and I wasn’t quite sure with whom Granny would side.’
QEII took Angela Kelly’s side: Insiders have now revealed that word did, indeed, reach the Queen, who took the side of her dresser. She was not pleased that the Prince had been calling around the Royal Household demanding that the tiara be dispatched forthwith. As the monarch told one of them: ‘It’s not a toy.’ She even recalled that, ahead of the 2011 royal wedding, Catherine Middleton’s hairdresser had practised using a plastic tiara from the accessory chain, Claire’s. Why could Meghan and her hairdresser not do the same? She told Kelly to ignore the phone calls.
Why QEII ignored the Sussexes’ calls: There were also two reasons, said the insiders, why the tiara was not simply produced at the click of a finger to suit a visiting hairdresser (quite apart from the less-than-straightforward protocols for transporting royal gems). First, it was Easter Court, with the Queen and her staff based at Windsor and also preoccupied with guests for the Royal Windsor Horse Show. Second, and of greater importance, was the question of provenance. The diamond bandeau tiara had very little known history, beyond the fact that Queen Mary had commissioned it in 1932, using a diamond brooch – a wedding present from the county of Lincolnshire – as its centrepiece. It had seldom been seen in public since.
Verifying the provenance: Angela Kelly and her team had been trying to verify that it had no awkward backstory – like the Timur ruby (alleged imperial loot) or the Cambridge emeralds (reclaimed at vast expense from Queen Mary’s dead brother’s mistress). Every centrepiece of a royal wedding is subject to forensic global scrutiny. Even if the tiara had only a few offcuts from South Africa’s mighty Cullinan diamond, that could be enough to generate furious headlines about colonial theft. ‘Can you imagine how that would have gone down on the wedding day?’ asked one member of staff.
Harry was abrupt with Angela: It had taken a great deal of research. Once due diligence had been done, there was great relief around the Palace. ‘Harry had been on to everyone about this. We thought Angela was like the fairy godmother who had delivered,’ said a source. ‘But when she called Kensington Palace, she was put through to Prince Harry who just said, “Get it here now”. And that was the end of the conversation.’ Harry later wrote that ‘Angela appeared out of thin air’ and asked him to sign a release for the tiara. He said that he thanked her but also added that ‘it would’ve made our lives so much easier to have had it sooner’. Whereupon, according to his memoir: ‘Her eyes were fire. She started having a go at me.’ He had replied: ‘Angela, you really want to do this now? Really? Now?’
Recollections may vary: As would be the case with much of the Harry and Meghan story, recollections would vary. As one staffer recalled: ‘There was already an atmosphere before Angela arrived. Meghan was nowhere to be seen. Harry poked the box and said “Is that it?” Then he stood over Angela and said he did not like her whining to his grandmother. ‘Angela gave it straight back. She said that she did not like him getting all these people to push her when she was just doing her job. She tried to tell him about the history and how it was for their own sake, but he walked out. She decided to put it down to pre-wedding nerves. All Angela did,’ said a former colleague, ‘was to try to protect them’.
It’s clear that Angela Kelly remains one of the favorite sources of many royal biographers and royal reporters. Those same biographers and reporters never question why Kelly’s story has changed a million times in the past eight years, starting with the original leaks that Meghan demanded a different tiara and QEII personally bitched out both Meghan and Harry. The stories have morphed in recent years because many people believed Harry’s story about the tiara, which he wrote about in Spare. So all of the tiara lies from 2018 through 2022 have now been manipulated into this final boss tiara-gate story, where Angela Kelly still somehow comes across like a world-class bitch. Why would she even present a tiara to a royal bride when she, Kelly, the keeper of the royal jewels, didn’t know the provenance? Why did QEII order Kelly to not answer Harry’s calls, only for Kelly to relent at the last minute and provide the tiara for the hair trial, along with armed escorts? Why did anyone think it was appropriate to tell a royal bride to “practice” with a Spencers Gifts tiara?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
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