‘Meghan thought they behaved like babies’: Here’s the one thing Meghan ‘disliked’ about the Royal Family most of all

When it comes to marriage, it’s mandatory to get some sort of line on how well you gel with your beloved’s family. A good rule of thumb is that the more normal they appear, the more dastardly the secret they’re all hiding together.

The British royal family generally does not try to appear normal, so it’s only natural that they wear their more pitiful vices on their sleeves. Nevertheless, Meghan Markle was not fully prepared for what lay beyond the palace doors, and was reportedly none too impressed with what she saw in her first days as a royal-by-marriage.

In his upcoming book Yes Ma’am: The Secret Life of Royal Servants, author Tom Quinn relays revelations from royal staffers, and one of them — excerpted in The Times — made note of Markle’s apparent disdain for the culture of hierarchy and entitlement back when she was first getting her feet wet in royal life.

‘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.’

No one can speak for Markle except Markle herself, but if the picture painted by this unnamed source is accurate, few would blame her for getting annoyed at such a thing. Indeed, it’s one thing when someone yearns for a vapid indicator of status to convince themselves that they’re important when they’re empty inside, but it’s quite another when the person in question fully believes it’s their God-given right to have those indicators of status.

Quinn’s book paints a firm picture of a family that’s drunk on entitlement, and it hardly ends at everyone getting a gold pen or a new car lest someone gets grumpy. Another excerpt from the book details how Kate Middleton, the wife of Prince William, often found herself needing to manage her husband’s emotions whenever he was in the middle of a tantrum, with one of Quinn’s sources suggesting that William sometimes had to be treated as Kate’s fourth child.

That’s already an unflattering intellectualization of one’s marriage, but it gets even worse when you consider that those tantrums emerged whenever royal protocol deviate even slightly from what the royals expect. Royal protocol, in this specific case, includes shined shoes and a bath that’s run at precisely the same time each day. In other words, if William’s bath time is behind schedule, he apparently loses his mind.

It’s kind of amazing when you think about it. Human beings are capable of such feats as putting a man on the moon, stripping away the Berlin Wall, and making the choice to radically love one another. And yet, we still find the time and energy to financially and culturally prop up a family whose claim to fame is some combination of an archaic notion of nobility, and a zero-tolerance policy on late bath-times. I don’t blame the aliens for not interfering; we’re probably putting on quite the show!