- Before her royal wedding to Prince Harry, Meghan Markle asked to wear a different tiara than the one she ended up donning for the big event, but was told no by the Queen.
- According to royal historian Robert Lacey, the Queen had a very good reason for rejecting the first request.
- The emerald tiara that Meghan reportedly wanted to wear apparently has problematic history and the Queen didn't want her to wear a tiara associated with scandal at her wedding.
The story of Meghan Markle's wedding tiara is infamous, as royal wedding lore goes anyway. Different versions of the story have been told, but some basic facts have remained fairly consistent. Basically, Meghan originally wanted to wear a different tiara than the one we all saw adorning her head during the royal wedding, but Queen Elizabeth vetoed her first pick.
Now, in his new book Battle of Brothers: William and Harry The Inside Story of a Family in Tumult, royal biographer and historian Robert Lacey has given royal fans some new insight into the Tiaragate saga—specifically, the reason the Queen said no to Meghan's first choice. And, TBH, her reason was a good one.
In an excerpt from the book published by the Mirror, Lacey writes:
"Unconfirmed by the palace - but not denied - we were told that the Queen felt that she had to say 'no' to Meghan's first choice, a beautiful emerald headdress that was said 'to have come from Russia.'
"This was code for a sensitive origin, meaning that the treasure was one of those that had found its way into Windsor hands through 'undefined' not to say dodgy channels—and for an undisclosed price—in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
There was scandal attached. For this reason, the emerald tiara was seldom, if ever, put on public display and it would suit neither the palace nor Meghan herself that spring if newspapers started speculating about which Tsrist princess had worn the tiara and how she had been assassinated."
According to Lacey, however, Prince Harry was not aware of the tiara's problematic history and, as a result, pretty much freaked out (or "flew into a rage" as Lacey put it) when Meghan was told she couldn't wear it.
"Unfortunately, Harry's ignorance of both history and family tradition meant that he had no understanding of this subtlety," Lacey writes.
And so, the Tiaragate plot continues to thicken.
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