Prince Harry isn’t afraid to include receipts in his memoirs, Spare, officially released today.
Previously leaked excerpts from the book reveal the tense exchange between Catherine, Princess of Wales, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex days before the Sussexes’ wedding in 2018, claiming Kate made Meghan cry after demanding that “all dresses “for the flower girls be redone. In the end, Harry even includes the actual text messages of their fight in his book.
“Charlotte’s dress is too big, too long, too baggy,” Kate reportedly wrote to Meghan, referring to Princess Charlotte’s bridesmaid dress. Harry notes in the book that the dresses were made from measurements obtained from a previous fitting. “She cried when she tried it on at home,” Kate writes.
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Meghan reminds Kate that a tailor who can do alterations was already at Kensington Palace, writing: “Good, and I told you the tailor has been here since 8am. Here. At KP. Can you take you to Charlotte to have her touched up, like other mums do?”
Still, Kate demands that “all dresses be redone.” She allegedly cites advice from her own wedding dress designer, Alexander McQueen’s Sarah Burton, who agrees with her.
Meghan then asks Kate if she knows about the stress she is under due to the drama surrounding her father, Thomas Markle.
“Meg asked if Kate knew what was going on right now. With her dad,” Harry reportedly wrote. “Kate said she was well aware, but the dresses. And the wedding is in four days!
Meghan replies: “Yes, Kate, I know…”.
Harry adds that Kate was “troubled with the way Meg was planning her wedding. Something about a party for the page boys? It came and went.”
Meghan reportedly texted the Princess of Wales: “I don’t know what else to say. If the dress doesn’t fit, please take Charlotte to see Ajay. He’s been waiting all day.”
“Good,” Kate replies.
Harry writes that when he got home he found his future wife “sobbing” on the floor.
When the tabloids reported that Meghan had made Kate cry months later, the two couples had a secret meeting at Meghan and Harry’s house at Nottingham Cottage on December 10, 2018. Together, the four discovered that King Charles III was possibly be the source of the leaked story. .
“We all got together in our little annex before, and this time there was no chatter: Kate immediately set things in motion by acknowledging that the stories in the papers that Meg made her cry were totally untrue,” Harry wrote. He adds that Kate allegedly said, “I know, Meghan, it was me who made you cry.”
When it came to taking action to set the record straight, Kate became “pissed off” while William gave “escapes of support”. When they realized no action would be taken, the Sussexes decided to focus on who leaked the story to the tabloids.
“We’ve been around and around,” Harry continues. “The list of suspects got extremely small. Finally, finally, Willy leaned back and admitted that, um, while we were touring Australia, he and Kate went out to dinner with Pa [King Charles III] and Camille. And, alas, he said coyly that he “might have” let it go and that there had been some conflict between the two couples.”
The admission shocked Meghan and Harry. “I put my hand to my face. Meg froze. A heavy silence fell. So now we knew,” he wrote. “I told you Willy everything people should have known. He nodded. He knew. No more silence. It was time for them to leave.”
Meghan opened up about the incident during a 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which she rebutted the tabloid’s story.
“I don’t think it’s fair for her to go into the details of [the fight], because she apologized. And I forgave him. What was hard to overcome was being blamed for something that I not only didn’t do but happened to me,” the Duchess said at the time, saying: ‘I know that didn’t happen.'”
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As Associate Editor of HarpersBAZAAR.com, Chelsey keeps tabs on all the celebrity news. She also writes about social movements, connecting with activists leading the fight for workers’ rights, climate justice, and more. Offline, she’s probably spending too much time on TikTok, rewatching Emma (the 2020 version, of course) or shopping for yet another corset.
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