Meghan Markle Had a 'Fundamental Misunderstanding' About How Queen Elizabeth and the Monarchy 'Worked'

Before Meghan Markle left the royal family in 2020, she apparently didn't understand how the monarch worked.

"The Queen never really was concerned about whether or not people bowed or curtsied to her or not," Michael Cole told an outlet. “Cherie Blaire, former Prime Minister’s wife, apparently didn’t curtsy and, OK, so who cares, the late Queen had too good manners to care.”

Although Meghan quickly had to follow protocol during her first meeting with Elizabeth, Cole believes Her Majesty wouldn't have reacted if the Suits star decided not to bow.

“The Queen was too well-mannered to notice, even if people wanted to be discourteous," Cole added. "She would have not even noticed it."

OK! previously reported Elizabeth's friend Lady Glenconner admitted the former actress was unprepared for her new reality.

“I think the thing about Meghan was, she had no idea what was expected of her really,” Glenconner said on the “Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth” podcast in 2023.

“I think she just thought it was sort of like being another actress, you know," she added.

The royal confidant later stated that working for The Crown is “extremely boring" because you're “meeting hundreds of thousands of people that you’re never going to meet again."

“I think it was very sad, and I feel very sad for Harry,” she noted.

Aside from Meghan's inability to adjust to the royal lifestyle, an insider claimed Meghan and Harry's constant tell-alls caused Elizabeth emotional distress.

“For the last years of her life, certainly from when her husband [Prince Philip] died, the Queen was in a lot of pain,” an anonymous pal told an outlet.

“That was the time for Harry and Meghan to bite their tongue,” the source explained. “Instead they produced this unending stream of incredibly hurtful films and interviews attacking her life’s work."

Although Spare was released after Elizabeth's passing, the book's promotion occurred while the monarch was alive and mourning her husband.

“For Harry to announce he was writing a memoir when his grandmother was not just recently widowed but actually dying herself, as he must have known she was — well, the cruelty of it takes the breath away," the source noted.

In 2021, Meghan blamed her ignorance on growing up in the U.S.

"I would say I went into it naively because I didn’t grow up knowing much about the royal family," the mom-of-two told Oprah Winfrey. "It wasn’t part of something that was part of [the] conversation at home."

"It wasn’t something that we followed. My mom even said to me a couple of months ago, ‘Did Diana ever do an interview?’ Now I can say. ‘Yes, a very famous one,' but my mom does know that," she added.