The late Queen was “as angry as I’d ever seen her” after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex claimed they had her blessing to call their daughter Lilibet, a royal aide said.
Royal author Robert Hardman, in his new biography of the King, tells how a member of staff recounted Elizabeth II’s fury following Harry and Meghan’s announcement in 2021 over the use of her childhood family nickname.
The BBC later reported that a Palace source said the Queen was not asked by the Sussexes whether they could use Lilibet.
But the Sussexes’ lawyers fired off legal letters to the broadcaster and other publishers, saying the claim was false and defamatory.
A spokesperson for Harry and Meghan insisted at the time that the duke spoke to his grandmother in advance and would not have used the name had the monarch not been supportive.
Hardman wrote however: “One privately recalled that Elizabeth II had been ‘as angry as I’d ever seen her’ in 2021 after the Sussexes announced that she had given them her blessing to call their baby daughter ‘Lilibet’, the Queen’s childhood nickname.”
He added Buckingham Palace “rebuffed” attempts by Harry and Meghan to confirm their version of events.
“When the Sussexes tried to co-opt the palace into propping up their version of events, they were rebuffed,” he wrote.
It was once again a case of “recollections may vary”, a nod to the late Queen’s response to the couple’s allegations in their Oprah Winfrey interview, Hardman said in his book Charles III, which is being serialised in the Daily Mail.
The naming of Lilibet did not feature in Harry’s controversial memoir Spare.
Other revelations in Hardman’s book include how the Prince of Wales saw Harry’s remarks in his Netflix documentary that male members of the family can be tempted to marry someone who fits the mould rather than someone they are destined to be with as “the lowest of the low”.
William viewed it as “Harry making a blatant attack” on his wife the Princess of Wales.
Lilibet was first used when Princess Elizabeth was just a toddler and unable to pronounce her own name properly.
Her grandfather King George V would affectionately call her Lilibet imitating her own attempts to say Elizabeth.
The sweet nickname stuck and she became Lilibet to her family from then on.
Harry and Meghan’s youngest child, now a princess following the accession of her grandfather, was born in California on June 4 2021.
She arrived two months after the death of Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh and in the wake of controversial claims levelled at the monarchy by the Sussexes in their bombshell Oprah interview.
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