Prince Harry and Meghan Markle celebrated their sixth wedding anniversary this month. But their fairytale day proved to be at the centre of a major dispute between the Sussexes and the Prince and Princess of Wales.
Harry opened up about the saga in his 2023 tell-all memoir Spare. He shared his side of events as he spoke about the breakdown in the relationship between the former ‘Fab Four’. The Duke said he felt sad that his brother and sister-in-law hadn’t bonded with his wife in the way he had hoped – and as such, the two couples decided to sit down to hash out their differences. One particular sticking point was the fact that William and Kate had reportedly switched name cards at his wedding.
Writing about one meeting, which took place in Kensington Palace in June 2018, Harry said: “For our part, we chipped in that we weren’t too pleased when Willy and Kate switched place cards and changed seats at our wedding. We’d followed the American tradition, placing couples next to each other, but Willy and Kate didn’t like that tradition, so their table was the only one where spouses were apart.
“They insisted it wasn’t them, it was someone else. And they said we’d done the same thing at Pippa’s wedding. We hadn’t. Much as we’d wanted to. We’d been separated by a huge flower arrangement between us, and though we’d desperately wanted to sit together, we hadn’t done a thing about it. None of this airing of grievances was doing us any good, I felt. We weren’t getting anywhere.”
Tensions had been building for some time between the two couples. Elsewhere is his book, Harry tried to set the story straight on the much-reported fallout over bridesmaid dresses between Meghan and Kate. It was initially reported that a disagreement between the bride and her future sister-in-law ended with Kate in tears. But during Meghan and Harry’s interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, Meghan claimed that she was the one who wept.
According to Harry, the pre-wedding fights kicked into high gear when the two women were discussing wedding day rehearsals, and Kate forgot some insignificant aspect of the nuptial plans. Meghan suggested that the detail slipped Kate’s mind because she had “baby brain”. Kate had given birth to Prince Louis on April 23, 2018, 28 days before Harry and Meghan got married at Windsor Castle and Harry wrote that she was offended by the comment.
Then, four days before the wedding, Kate’s daughter Princess Charlotte tried on her bridesmaids’ dress and found it was far too big. Harry claimed that Kate asked that the dress be completely remade, while Meghan countered that her tailor could alter the ill-fitting frock. Harry said that after the argument over the dress, he returned home to find Meghan on the floor sobbing. He added that Kate visited the next day with flowers and a card to apologise, a detail that Meghan herself described in the Oprah interview.
The two couples met for a reconciliation tea at Kensington Palace after Meghan and Harry’s honeymoon. Harry claims that Kate confronted Meghan about the “baby brain” comment, saying, “You talked about my hormones. We are not close enough for you to talk about my hormones.”
According to Harry, his wife looked confused by Kate’s comments and insisted that that was the way she spoke to her friends. He alleged that William then pointed at Meghan, called her ‘rude’, and said this wasn’t the way people in Britain behaved. Meghan, in turn, told William to “take your finger out of my face”, Harry recalled.