Meghan Markle Naively Assumed Prince Andrew Was Queen Elizabeth's 'Assistant'

Meghan Markle was open about not knowing much about the British royal family before marrying into it, but the Duchess of Sussex innocently assumed Prince Andrew was a palace staffer. In Prince Harry's memoir, Spare, the Duke of Sussex wanted fans and critics to know just how little Meghan studied the monarchy.

Harry claimed that the Duchess of Sussex was excited to meet his paternal grandmother, Queen Elizabeth.

"Fun. I love grandma's," Meghan told Harry.

“Just whatever you do, don't talk over her,” Andrew and Sarah Ferguson told the actress.

“After a moment, Meg asked me something about the Queen's assistant," Harry recalled. “That man holding the purse. The man who walked her to the door. That wasn't her assistant. That was her second son, Andrew. She definitely hadn't Googled us.”

During the Sussexes' 2021 tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey, Meghan blamed her ignorance on being American.

"I would say I went into it naively because I didn’t grow up knowing much about the royal family," the Suits star admitted. "It wasn’t part of something that was part of [the] conversation at home."

"It wasn’t something that we followed. My mum 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.

Due to her lack of exposure to British history, Meghan was ill-equipped for the responsibilities that came with joining The Firm.

"We thought a lot about what we thought it might be. I didn’t fully understand what the job was: What does it mean to be a working royal? What do you do? What does that mean? He and I were very aligned on our cause-driven work, that was part of our initial connection," the mom-of-two explained.

"But there was no way to understand what the day-to-day was going to be like, and it’s so different because I didn’t romanticize any element of it," she noted.

Meghan doubled down on her American identity to excuse her confusion.

"But I think, as Americans especially, what you do know about the royals is what you read in fairytales, and you think is what you know about the royals," she shared.

"It’s easy to have an image that is so far from reality, and that’s what was so tricky over those past few years, when the perception and the reality are two different things and you’re being judged on the perception but you’re living the reality of it," she continued. "There’s a complete misalignment and there’s no way to explain that to people."

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In the 2022 docuseries Harry & Meghan, the children's book author once again stressed to viewers how naive she was.

"I guess I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside," Meghan said. "That there is a forward-facing way of being and then you close the door and 'phew I can relax now' but that formality carries over on both sides. And that was surprising to me."