Steve Parsons/PA Wire/Pool via Reuters
Queen Elizabeth was so angry that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had named their daughter Lilibet—the late queen’s pet name, used by those closest to her—that she told aides: “I don’t own the palaces, I don’t own the paintings, the only thing I own is my name. And now they’ve taken that.”
The Daily Mail’s Royal Editor Rebecca English revealed the anguished quote after her colleague Robert Hardman, in his new book, Charles III: New King, New Court. The Inside Story (published as The Making of a King: King Charles III and the Modern Monarchy in the US), wrote that Lilibet’s naming had so infuriated the late monarch that one source described her as being “as angry as I’d ever seen her” as a result.
English wrote that Harry and Meghan “would not have intended to cause her grief—over this, at any rate. Barricaded in their Californian cocoon, blanketed by the cosy schmaltz of their new showbiz life, it simply wouldn’t have occurred to the couple that such a gesture would cause offense.”