Meghan Markle Says Queen Elizabeth II Has Always Been "Wonderful" To Her
"She's always been warm, welcoming, and inviting," Meghan tells Oprah.
It's no surprise to hear that Meghan Markle and her husband, Prince Harry, have had tension with the British royal family. But speaking to Oprah during their two-hour interview special, Markle revealed that her relationship with Queen Elizabeth II has been positive.
"The queen has always been wonderful to me. I've loved being in her company," Markle said, adding that the queen reminds her of her own grandmother. "She's always been warm, welcoming, and inviting."
Markle recalled the first time she met the queen, which occurred soon after she and Harry began dating in July 2016. Markle admitted that she didn't know much about the royal family at the time of their courtship. "I went into it naively. I didn't grow up knowing much about the royal family. It wasn't part of the conversation at home, it wasn't something we followed," she said.
Back then, she had a different understanding of the royal family. She admitted that she didn't quite grasp the distinction between celebrity and royal. "I didn't fully understand what the job was," she said. "As Americans, what do you know about the royals? It's what you read in fairy tales. It's easy to have an image of it that's so far from reality. That's what's been tricky over the last few years. When the perception and the reality are two different things. There's a complete misalignment."
In fact, Markle said she has never looked her husband, arguably one of the most famous people in the world, up online: "I didn't feel a need to. Everything we thought I needed to know he was telling me," Markle said.
Markle illustrated the gap between her "perception" and "reality" of royal life during her first meeting with the queen, which Markle described as fairly impromptu: The couple was near Windsor, where the queen was attending a church ceremony.
On the car ride over, Harry asked Meghan if she knew how to curtsy. She had always assumed that curtsying was a public formality and that she'd simply be meeting her boyfriend's grandmother. "She's my grandmother, and she's the queen," Harry clarified.
Outside of the church, Markle practiced curtsying with Harry and his relatives. "Fergie ran out and asked, are you ready?" she recalled. "I apparently did a very deep curtsy, and then we just sat there and we chatted. It was lovely and easy," she said.
Looking back, Markle is happy that she didn't over research the royal family ahead of that first meeting—otherwise, she would have been nervous. "I think, thank God I hadn't known a lot about the family. Thank God I hadn't researched. I would've been so in my head about it," she said.
