The King’s foibles? Prince Andrew’s tantrums? Meghan’s demands? No one knows the Firm better than the courtiers and servants who live within the royal bubble. Tom Quinn talks to insiders

The Duchess of Sussex in Widnes in 2018 with Samantha Cohen, private secretary to the duchess and Prince Harry at the time

Meghan Markle had a typically American view of the royal family before she joined it — for her, life was all about castles, glittering balls and limitless wealth and ease. As one royal staff member put it, “She expected a billionaire and she got a millionaire.”

Given Meghan came from an American background, that assumption was perfectly understandable. Above all the modern royal family is a celebrity family, albeit one with a strangely 18th-century lifestyle — the palaces and the carriages, the enormous wealth — all underpinned by hierarchies, tradition and vast teams of staff from every social class.

My mother was a kitchen maid in the Forties in a big house in Ireland. Much of the work was backbreaking and tedious, but she also spoke of the fun and great gossip they had. It’s no different for servants of the royals — who can resist life in a great palace, where so often even a humble kitchen maid becomes privy to the secrets of one of the most famous families in the world?

King Charles and Queen Camilla, at the time the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, sheltered by a royal protection officer
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I have spoken to numerous royal staff on the strict understanding that informants’ identities are protected. What emerges is a glimpse into the hidden lives of the royal family, along with the complexities of being royal in a modern world.

When Meghan discovered that Harry was only worth about £20 million, she realised she needed to reassess other assumptions she’d made about this strange new family. Harry, it seemed, had spent little time explaining exactly how strange and demanding his family really are. But then, having everything done for you throughout your life by staff gives you a complacent air, something several of Harry’s former Kensington Palace advisers have noted.

King Charles once confessed to a member of staff that if you grow up having everything done for you, a mindset takes over in which you are permanently terrified that if you had to do it yourself, you’d be completely lost. He said, “It’s the only benefit of being Prince of Wales [as Charles then was] 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.”

Prince Harry’s protection officer removes his boots after a polo match in Tetbury
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The King is helped on with his coat, Luton, 2022
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One member of staff told me that at one point, Camilla hated the idea of being queen and would regularly say to Charles, “Can’t we get away from all this protocol? It’s all bollocks.” Charles, who hates swearing, would demurely reply, “You’re doing it [becoming queen] for me, darling.”

Protocol means suits must be pressed and laid out after a period of consultation the night before; shoes must be polished, ties chosen. Baths must be run at precisely the same time each day and both King Charles and the Prince of Wales, Prince William, are prone to tantrums if things are not done to their liking. “They both get irritated very quickly,” one former member of staff said. “They are very picky. It comes naturally to them.”

The source added, “I don’t know where William would be without Kate — she hasn’t had everything done for her throughout her life, so she calms him down when he gets a bit fractious. She said he sometimes has to be treated as her fourth child.”

Any new arrival in the royal family finds a curious mix. There are staff to carry out most menial tasks, but the public-facing work of the royals is decided by the courtiers and senior staff and senior royals. “Meghan really disliked the hierarchy,” a member of her former team said. “Many of the rules do seem pretty pointless and exist only so that the relative status of each senior royal is protected. And the senior royals are such a sensitive bunch — if one gets a gold pen or a new car, they all want one. Meghan thought they behaved like babies.”

It’s true that some royals can display acts of ill temper. One former servant recalled how Prince Andrew insisted on a member of staff being transferred because he disliked a mole on the man’s face. Another spoke of a time Andrew moved a man to other duties for wearing a nylon tie. And, according to a now retired member of the Buckingham Palace staff, Prince Edward once tore a strip off his driver for looking too often in his rear-view mirror.

Harry, though generally “one of the easiest and nicest” to work for, according to one staffer, was prone to flashes of irritation too. One of the prince’s former servants said, “I remember once in his private apartments I’d muddled something — some of his papers on the desk or something. He was immediately angry and it was out of proportion to the problem, or at least I thought it was.

“We thought it was a bit rich complaining about me being muddled, given that Harry was probably the most muddled of all the royals of his generation. The joke used to be that Harry was very much like the Prince Regent in the Blackadder television series. People used to say that without a servant, Harry would take two weeks to put on his own trousers.”

Meghan was a moderniser by nature. She was someone who wanted to get things done and change the status quo. She was actually very good at persuading some of the staff, even the junior staff, to be on her side. According to my sources, Meghan became especially friendly and close to one particular member of staff, who was really quite junior, and this was seen as inappropriate by the senior royals.

A former member of the Kensington Palace staff said, “When someone arrives from the United States and tries to change things, the old guard really don’t like it. And the old guard are terrific snobs. They have to be less obviously snobbish today, but it’s still there.

Terry Pendry, stud groom, assists Elizabeth II, 2018
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“I can tell you that if William had wanted to marry Meghan Markle, it would’ve been a step too far… [But] Harry was never going to be king. The courtiers and ladies-in-waiting and communications teams thought Meghan would keep Harry out of trouble; give him something to focus on.”

One of Meghan’s former staff recalled the awkwardness and hilarity of early meetings with the new duchess at Kensington Palace. “It was extraordinary because she was so confident that you could see she wanted to run the meeting rather than learn about the royal family through the meeting. I think this was typical of what happened throughout her time at Kensington Palace and then Windsor. She was a great believer in grabbing the bull by the horns — except the royal family is not really a bull.”

It’s easy to forget that when Harry first started dating Meghan, both William and Kate found her delightful — “They thought she was a breath of fresh air,” one staffer remembered. A junior member of staff explained that in the early days when the Fab Four were still getting along, she once came across Meghan and William doing a jokey parody of Fifties jiving together. William was apparently very good at it.

But problems began to arise fairly early on. Tension developed between William and Harry as a result of Meghan’s warm, friendly, hug-everyone approach. Kate, William and Charles tended to flinch when she moved in for a hug. Meghan was understandably hurt, as everyone apparently hugs everyone in California. Meghan even tried to hug a singularly stiff Old Etonian equerry. He too flinched as if she’d tried to poke him in the eye, as another member of staff put it.

This tactile manner made William uncomfortable because Meghan hugged him virtually every time they bumped into each other; the hugging and cheek-kissing fuelled gossip among the staff that Meghan was flirting with William, which she was obviously not, but the tense atmosphere caused by all the touchy-feeliness (and the resultant gossip) deepened the rift between the brothers.

In fact, William’s rather awkward, even inhibited personality — an inheritance from his father — was baffling for the more spontaneous Meghan. A member of staff once recalled Meghan asking, “ ‘Why do William and Charles sound so serious all the time?’ She used to make jokes about Harry not having the same parents as William as, she insisted, ‘Harry isn’t pompous at all. He’s chill.’ ”

Kate inevitably sees a different side of William and enjoys ribbing him about his family. She insists that as he gets older, William looks more like his great-great-great-grandfather Edward VII and she likes teasing him about the fact that his stepmother, Camilla, is descended from Edward VII’s favourite mistress. (Both Harry and William could be cruel about Camilla. Their nicknames for her included Lady Macbeth, Cruella de Vil and the Witch of the West.)

Charles and Camilla en route to the coronation in May 2023, with royal footmen in attendance
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According to one of William’s advisers, the prince is more than capable of getting his own back. “Before Kate realised that as a senior royal you have to dress carefully, having taken advice, she once bought an outfit that William considered inappropriate. He told Kate she looked as if she’d just run through a charity shop covered in superglue. Everyone thought this was very funny, including, to her credit, Kate,” he said.

But William has his needier side. A particularly poignant story comes from a former Kensington Palace maid. “Kate had to explain many of the things that parents outside the royal family do with their children as a matter of course.”

Meghan’s experience of growing up was totally different. “She spotted immediately that Harry wasn’t quite as central to things as his brother, William,” said a member of the comms team who was particularly close to the duchess.

“I don’t think Harry had even thought much about the fact that he was a spare until well into his marriage. I think she was oversensitive on Harry’s behalf and convinced herself he was being treated as completely unimportant.”

Prince Harry and Meghan after their wedding in St George’s Chapel, Windsor
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The strongly held view among current and former royal staff is that Meghan felt she was standing up for her husband, telling “her truth” and encouraging him to tell his, but this was seen as deeply disruptive.

According to numerous palace sources, William couldn’t understand why Harry had changed so much. When they were growing up, they both enjoyed polo, pheasant shooting and other country sports and there was no sense when Harry turned up at any of these events that he was treated differently from his brother. One source said, “When you have teams of servants looking after you, you’re driven wherever you want to go at whatever time you want to go and you have no money worries, it never occurs to you that you’re not a very special person. And that was Harry’s position before his marriage.”

Moving into Nottingham Cottage in 2017 compounded the tension — “Meghan felt it was so small that it must be a reflection on how the royal family were belittling her husband. She just didn’t understand that real royals don’t care much about houses and material possessions because, having always had them, they take them for granted,” said one member of staff who helped out regularly at Nottingham Cottage.

A rather beautiful house in the grounds of a famous palace hardly seemed to Harry the equivalent to being forced to live in a shed at the end of the garden. But for Meghan things were more complex. She saw Kate and William living just a few yards away in Kensington Palace itself.

She also undoubtedly felt constrained by protocol. “Meghan quite rightly hated the fact that when she was in Nottingham Cottage, she had to agree well in advance what time she might leave for an appointment or an event and she had to make sure she didn’t leave at the same time as, or clash in any way with, a more senior royal leaving the palace,” a former Kensington Palace staffer said.

Another problem was the servants: Meghan both loved having everything done for her by the domestic staff and also hated it. As one former staffer said, “Through absolutely no fault of her own, Meghan wasn’t always great with her staff — she just wasn’t used to it as Harry was. So, one minute she would be really friendly, perhaps overfriendly, hugging staff and trying to make friends with them, and the next she would be irritated by the fact they wouldn’t respond instantly at all times of the day and night. At times it got so bad that I heard one of the senior staff mumble that Meghan should really have been employed in the palace kitchens.

“It’s true that her nickname for a while was the Duchess of Difficult, but she had other, friendlier nicknames, including Mystic Meg, which came about because she was so new agey, so woke, about so many things. She could be difficult because she was finding life difficult — trying to feel her way and work out the intricacies of a positively medieval, labyrinthine system. She couldn’t understand why Charles, for example, was so formal with his mother. She once said, ‘But they’re mother and son — why are they so completely stiff with each other?’ ”

Meghan felt that Harry was too deferential both to his family and to the people who worked for them as a couple. She didn’t like the fact that Harry tended to ask staff if they would mind tidying up or bringing something to him. With her American background, she felt when you pay people to do something, you just issue commands, and that Harry should just issue commands as she did.

For all the criticisms, Meghan had her supporters. Many of the ordinary staff liked the fact that she was feisty and wanted to change things for the better. “She was very straightforward and matter-of-fact,” said a former member of the Kensington Palace communications team. But the old guard was against her. One source said, “They [the older, public school-educated advisers] really had it in for Meghan and, to be fair to her, she really stood up to them. But, of course,if you make waves in the royal family, the senior royals will always back the courtiers, because in many cases the senior royals have been friends with the courtiers since childhood.”

Cleaning one of the state rooms at Buckingham Palace
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A footman checks the tables ahead of a state banquet at Buckingham Palace last December
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One of the more interesting things about entitled courtiers is that they are deeply intolerant of other people behaving as if they are entitled. When Meghan insisted on wearing a particular tiara for her wedding to Prince Harry, for example, it was the courtiers (who often feel more protective of the royal family than the members of that family themselves) who were up in arms. Harry was enraged when Meghan’s request to be allowed to wear a particular tiara from Elizabeth II’s collection was turned down by the Queen’s staff. He no doubt believed that (as he famously put it), “What Meghan wants, Meghan gets.” On this occasion the Queen herself intervened to explain gently and in person that, “Meghan cannot have whatever she wants.” This was by no means the first time the Queen had supported a decision made by her staff in the face of tantrums from her children or grandchildren.

Had Meghan been an English aristocrat, the problem with the tiara (and much else besides) might not have arisen, as the old guard at the palace might have been more willing to accommodate an aristocrat’s wishes.

As it was, Kensington Palace staff split into “for Meghan” and “against Meghan” and the atmosphere was one of swirling rumour, gossip and backbiting. Servant gossip was based around the question: why can’t Harry just be happy with his luxurious playboy life? One of the senior courtiers tried to explain to Harry that he was actually much better off than his brother, because William would never be able to escape the full focus of the media, especially when he became king. But increasingly Harry couldn’t see this.

One of Harry’s senior aides, now retired, said, “We had meetings about events Harry was planning to attend and I increasingly got the feeling his mind was elsewhere… It was as if his job now was not to attend events, which is what the senior royals always do as their core activity; instead he saw his core activity as being with Meghan and increasingly adopting her views of the world. Some people would say he was just being a loyal husband, but the team, the staff, found the whole thing baffling.”

As one former staffer related, “That terrible modern word ‘woke’ has often been used and although I don’t like it, I can see why it is applied to Harry — he did become far more concerned about social issues and the rights of minorities than he’d ever been before Meghan’s arrival. Some of the youngest staff at Kensington Palace would’ve applauded this, no doubt, but the older staff thought he’d become a tree-hugging leftie. They saw it as Harry rejecting the values and traditions of his family. And the really senior staff thought, here we go again — Meghan is Mrs Simpson come back to haunt us.”

Royal footmen in Horse Guards Parade
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According to one of Elizabeth II’s former courtiers, Buckingham Palace grew really worried when they became aware that Meghan had plans for her life as a working royal that were not going to be part of a general strategy agreed with the staff — she just wanted to do her own thing. “But it was never going to be acceptable that Meghan should outshine Princess Anne, Prince Charles [as he then was] and the Queen. Quite rightly, the Queen always had to be the centre and focus of everything the royal family did and I don’t think Meghan understood why that would mean her doing things she didn’t want to do. She didn’t understand that when you join the royal family, you don’t do as you please, you do as you’re told.”

Harry, meanwhile, was delighted by the possibility of freedom, of doing things differently, that Meghan introduced into his life. Senior staff begged him to intervene with Meghan to try to make her toe the line, but by all accounts this was the beginning of what staffers describe as “Harry’s tendency to defend anything and everything Meghan says or does”.

“She really did have a messiah complex,” one of the couple’s former staffers said, pointing out how Meghan was focused on how she could become the best-known and most loved member of the royal family.

“I don’t mean that in a critical way because all her big ideas were about doing good. She once said, ‘What Diana started, I want to finish,’ and we took that to mean she wanted to become a sort of globetrotting champion of the poor and the marginalised. She has managed to do this to some extent, but she really wanted to do it as a princess and with the full backing of the royal family, but on a part-time basis.”

All the royal staff I spoke to agreed that Meghan must have felt she was slightly looked down on by the courtiers. Some people can cope with this — Kate Middleton is perhaps the supreme example — but others try to fight back, which is what Meghan clearly did. “You’ve got to hand it to her,” a former member of her staff said. “She really is a fighter.”

One source said Meghan thought Kate was “just too eager to please, too much a goody-two-shoes girl”. Yet Kate did manage to negotiate difficult matters with staff and family relationships. The answer as to how is summed up neatly by a former member of the Kensington Palace staff.

Prince Harry’s polo manager, Andrew Tucker, cleans his sunglasses, Ascot, 2018
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“Kate is someone who slowly and carefully absorbs the atmosphere of a place, the relationship between people and the rules. She doesn’t jump in straight away and try to change everything to suit her way of thinking. She bides her time and is very intelligent and intuitive about other people, what they do and how they behave. She was also coached — not just by William, who wanted Kate to avoid the problems his mother had encountered, but also by the staff.

“Kate was always happy to accept advice both from the lower staff, with whom she got on very well, and from the courtiers, even though some of them were initially very snooty about her.

“It was the same kind of backbiting gossipy criticism that Meghan had to put up with, but Kate is actually a much stronger person than Meghan in many ways. Yet what Meghan saw as Kate being pushed around, Kate saw as an essential part of being a member of the royal family.”

They added, “Kate’s view of Meghan was always implied rather than spoken, I think. It was that Meghan thought she knew better than an institution that had been in business for 1,000 years and more. Kate was never going to buy that.”

The irony, given all that has been written about Harry being the “spare”, is that at Kensington Palace, it was clearly Meghan who felt she could not find her place; she too was a spare.