The Moment Queen Elizabeth ‘Stopped Worrying’ About Prince Harry — Biography
Precisely when Queen Elizabeth II set aside her worries about Prince Harry can, per a new biography, be pinpointed to an exact date. According to Ingrid Seward’s My Mother and I, a book about the late monarch and King Charles III, the queen “no longer saw any point in worrying” about the Duke of Sussex in 2021.
Queen Elizabeth stopped ‘worrying about Harry’ after the 2021 Oprah interview
March 7, 2021. That’s the date Harry and Meghan Markle’s Oprah interview aired. Also it’s when Queen Elizabeth apparently stopped worrying about Harry. Quoting Lady Elizabeth Anson, cousin to the queen, in My Mother and I, out Feb. 15, 2024, Seward claimed the monarch was done occupying her mind with concerns about her grandson.
“Then came the couple’s infamous interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which Harry said his father was ‘trapped’ and heavily implied that the Royal Family were racist,” the author wrote in an excerpt published by the Daily Mail. “The Queen was upset by his attitude, said Lady Elizabeth.”
“However much she loved Harry — and she did — she couldn’t condone the way he was speaking about the institution of the monarchy she’d spent 70 years preserving.”
“At that point the Queen decided there was no longer any point in worrying about Harry as he wasn’t going to take notice of anyone but his wife.”
The TV special prompted a response from the British royal family. From it came the memorable quote to which Kate Middleton was later credited: “Recollections may vary.”
Their relationship had already been damaged by the royal wedding, exit before Queen Elizabeth saw ‘no point’ in worrying
By the time of the Oprah interview, Harry and the queen’s relationship had already taken two major hits. First, as Anson told Seward, was the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s 2018 nuptials.
The queen had been “dismayed by Harry’s high-handed attitude both before and after the wedding. And their relationship was” in Anson’s words, “‘quite badly damaged by it all.’”
”It was even more damaged when Harry decided to give up being a working royal and leave the country. A decision, said Lady Elizabeth, that the Queen never truly understood,” Seward wrote.
Harry himself told Good Morning America interview ahead of Spare’s release that he and Queen Elizabeth “had a very good relationship.” When he shared the news of his and Meghan’s early 2020 exit from life as senior working royals, she was “sad.”
The decision, Harry said, “was never a surprise to anybody, least of all her.” Queen Elizabeth “knew what was going on, she knew how hard it was. She never said to me that she was angry. I think she was sad that it had got to that point.”
Prince Harry’s last conversation with Queen Elizabeth
In Spare, Harry detailed the last conversation he had with his grandmother. He replayed it in his thoughts while flying to Balmoral the day the queen died.
“Four days earlier, long chat on the phone,” Harry wrote. The pair had “touched on many topics,” including the queen’s “health, of course,” and the “turmoil at Number 10.”
Later, Harry recalled the “difficult” moment he saw the monarch’s body shortly after he arrived at Balmoral.
“I stood, frozen, staring. I stared and stared,” he wrote. “It was difficult, but I kept on, thinking how I’d regretted not seeing my mother at the end. Years of lamenting that lack of proof, postponing my grief for want of proof. Now I thought: Proof. Careful what you wish for.”
