In the weeks following Harry and Meghan’s announcement in January 2020 that they intended to step back from their roles as senior members of the Royal Family, Prince Philip received briefings on the negotiations that were taking place between the Sussexes and the Palace.
He had been aware of the tensions building for some time.
He had made his own assessment of Meghan and of the trajectory of the relationship.
And then, according to reporting by Bored Panda and Woman and Home, he said something to a senior aide that stood out for the complete reversal it represented from his earlier position.
The Duke of Edinburgh, who had warned Harry before the wedding that “one doesn’t marry them,” told the aide in the aftermath of Megxit: “We were wrong about her all along.”
The context of that statement matters considerably.
Philip’s pre-wedding concerns about Meghan had been categorical — rooted in his view about the appropriateness of actresses as royal wives.
His post-Megxit reassessment appears to have been directed at a different question: not whether Meghan was the right kind of person for Harry to have married, but whether the family had handled her correctly once she arrived.
The “wrong” in “we were wrong about her” was not a reversal of his class concerns.
It was, by the accounts that have emerged, an acknowledgement that the institutional management of Meghan’s integration had been a failure — and that the failure had belonged as much to the family as to the Sussexes.
The Bored Panda reporting on Philip’s post-Megxit comments draws on accounts from those close to the Duke at this period of his life.
He was ninety-eight years old when Megxit was announced, and he was not closely involved in the day-to-day management of the negotiations.
But he was lucid, he was briefed, and he was — as he had always been — not shy about forming and expressing opinions about the institution he had served for seven decades.
His assessment that the family had been wrong about Meghan represents the view of a man who had had time to observe the whole arc of the Sussex story and who drew a specific conclusion from it.
The phrase “dereliction of duty” — which Philip used in connection with Harry’s departure, not with Meghan specifically — belongs to a different register from the acknowledgement of error about Meghan.
Philip had a military man’s understanding of institutional obligation, and he applied it without sentiment.
Leaving was, to him, a dereliction.
But the cause of the leaving — the failure of the institution to properly absorb and support the woman Harry had married — appears, in his assessment, to have been the family’s responsibility as much as the Sussexes’.
The Woman and Home account of Philip’s views in this period provides additional texture.
Those close to the Duke describe a man who was, by the end of his life, capable of considerable nuance about the institution he had served.
He was not a simple defender of Palace infallibility.
He had watched the family manage crises — Diana, Andrew, Charles’s marriages — and he understood, from the inside, where the machinery worked well and where it ground people up.
His “wrong about her” assessment fits the pattern of a man who could hold two contradictory positions simultaneously: that leaving was wrong, and that the conditions which produced the leaving were also wrong.
Harry’s account in “Spare” of his relationship with Philip is one of the more complex in the memoir.
He describes genuine love for his grandfather and genuine difficulty with him.
Philip’s remoteness, his abruptness, his inability to engage emotionally in the ways Harry needed — these are all present in Harry’s account.
But so is respect, and a kind of recognition of Philip as a man who had been shaped by forces beyond his control and who had done, within those forces, the best he was equipped to do.
The post-Megxit statement about being wrong, if it is accurately attributed, suggests that Philip was, even at the end, capable of a similar kind of recognition about others.
The specific content of Philip’s acknowledgement — “wrong about her all along” — is important for what it implies about the debate that had taken place within the family.
There had clearly been a view that Meghan was the problem — that the Sussexes’ departure and the subsequent disclosures were primarily her doing, her influence, her direction.
Philip’s statement, if accurate, challenges that view from within the family’s own circle.
The man who had warned Harry before the wedding that actresses were not suitable wives was now saying, in the aftermath of the departure, that the family’s assessment of the woman had been mistaken.
The damage done to the Sussex relationship with the Royal Family by Megxit, and by the Oprah interview and Netflix documentary that followed, is documented and extensive.
Philip did not live to see the documentary or to read “Spare.” He died in April 2021, before the most damaging disclosures were made public.
His assessment of Meghan, made in the immediate aftermath of Megxit, was therefore formed without the knowledge of what was to come.
Whether “wrong about her all along” would have survived exposure to the Oprah interview and “Spare” is a question without an answer.
What the reported statement captures, at minimum, is a moment of institutional self-reflection from the one member of the Royal Family whose position within it was long enough and secure enough to allow for such a thing.
Philip did not depend on the approval of the institution for his status.
He had been its consort for seven decades.
He could afford, at ninety-eight, to say that the machinery had failed.
The question of whether anyone with the power to act on that acknowledgement heard it, and what they did with it, is part of the history that has not yet been written.
The Sussex departure from royal duties remains, as of 2026, unresolved in terms of its long-term implications for the family.
Harry and Meghan remain in California.
Their relationship with the Royal Family has not been publicly repaired.
The specific failures that Philip identified — in whatever form he identified them — have not been publicly acknowledged by the institution or addressed in any formal way.
The old Duke’s statement sits in the historical record as a private assessment from a man who was usually right about institutional things, made at the end of a long life of watching an institution manage itself badly on multiple occasions.
Philip told an aide that the family had been wrong about Meghan.
The aide remembered.
The account survived.
And it stands now as an unlikely kind of vindication — not a vindication of all the Sussexes’ claims or of all the decisions they made after leaving, but a vindication of the specific point that Meghan’s experience inside the Royal Family was shaped as much by institutional failure as by personal incompatibility.
The man who said “one doesn’t marry them” also said, eventually, “we were wrong.” Both statements came from the same person.
Which one came closer to the truth is a question the full historical record will eventually have to answer.
