The Queen bravely sat alone at Prince Philip’s socially distanced funeral… after Meghan and Harry ditched The Firm

AS EVER, the Queen summed it up in one telling sentence.

Referring to her grandson Prince Harry’s £18million wedding to Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle, she said simply: “The dress was far too white.”

According to royal expert Ingrid Seward: “In just six words, she expressed her doubts about the suitability of Meghan for life as a royal.”

Ingrid added: “The Queen could always capture everything in a pithy sentence.

“She didn’t say, ‘I thought the dress was far too white’. Her worries about Meghan were there, encapsulated in the wedding gown that the Queen felt was too white to be worn by a divorcee with a past.

“History had made the Queen very wary of divorced American women joining the Royal Family and the events that followed Harry and Meghan’s wedding proved she was right to be worried.”

Windsor Castle, the Queen’s favourite home, was to play a major part in the latter years of her life. It was her safe haven during the Covid pandemic and the final resting place of her beloved husband.

But it was also where law officers tried to serve legal papers on her favourite son Prince Andrew during the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

And it was where the seeds of the Megxit crisis were sown — a crisis that would haunt the royals right up to the Queen’s death.

Ingrid Seward said: “When you look back at the Queen’s life, it had never been a smooth ride — but the real tragedy for her was Prince Andrew. He was the person she thought she could rely on to the end of her days, but he was not able to fulfil a royal role.”

Harry and Meghan moved into Windsor’s Frogmore Cottage in April 2019, after spending their first year of married life at Kensington Palace.

The first signs of serious fractures in their relationship with the family came soon after — although there had been problems since their wedding at Windsor Castle in 2018.

It was a celebrity-packed bash, with Meghan’s mum Doria the only relative she invited to attend the service.

Ingrid Seward said: “Before Meghan started being destructive to the family, which I think was probably around the time of the wedding, I believe the Queen liked her.

“The Queen took Meghan on a few engagements and I think she had high hopes for her, as she did for Diana.

“She really, really tried because the Queen thought Harry and Meghan would be perfect ambassadors for the Commonwealth.

“The Queen was very astute and she must have been worried because Meghan was an American divorcee and Prince Philip kept saying, ‘It’s the Duchess of Windsor all over again’.”

By the time of the wedding, Harry and Meghan were barely on speaking terms with William and Kate — the beginning of a feud that would go on for years.

Ingrid said: “I think the christening of their son Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor at the private chapel in Windsor in July 2019 was when things really began to sour.

When Archie was born, his parents didn’t want to pose for any photographs and in the end pictures were taken at Windsor.

“But when they refused to name his godparents after Archie’s christening, the Queen found that very unusual.”

A month later, Harry and Meghan shunned the Queen’s invitation for them and Archie to stay with her and Philip during the annual summer family holiday at Balmoral, Aberdeenshire. The official excuse was Archie, three months, was, “too young for air travel”.

But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex did manage to travel with their baby to Menorca for a week in August before heading to the south of France to stay with Elton John.

One former courtier sniped: “The Cote D’Azur with Elton but no Balmoral with Granny? They seem to have got their queens mixed up.”

Harry’s brother William, his father Prince Charles and the Queen came to feel the honeymoon was over with Meghan and Harry.

But for Harry, the split had been a long time coming. Former Sun Royal Editor Duncan Larcombe said: “From the moment Diana died, Harry wanted to throw in the towel. He didn’t want to be a royal, he rebelled against it.

“The Queen was deeply concerned about Harry because she was always incredibly fond of him but I’m not sure she really knew what to do.”

The Queen certainly did know how to respond when Harry and Meghan sabotaged an otherwise acclaimed visit to southern Africa in September 2019 by moaning about their lot in life to Tom Bradby in an ITV documentary and launching three lawsuits against the British media.

Author Robert Lacey said: “The absence of a single Sussex from the photographs surrounding the Queen in her Christmas broadcast in 2019 reflected a deliberate decision on her part.”

For Harry and Meghan, the Queen’s choice of Christmas pictures was, “yet another sign they needed to consider their own path”.

By that stage, the couple had fled from Frogmore Cottage — where a £2.4million taxpayer-funded refurbishment had sparked a public backlash — to a four-acre estate at Vancouver Island, Canada.

The idea was for them to take time out to make a decision on their next move.

Over Christmas, Harry spoke on the phone to both the Queen and Prince Charles about his plans for the future. He and Meghan could work for the Commonwealth while living in Canada, he suggested.

Both senior royals seemed open to talk about it further, but when Harry phoned their offices to set up a date, he was told the Queen would not be available for another month.

Instead of waiting, he and Meghan decided to pull the plug on their lives in The Firm.

When The Sun broke the news of what became known as Megxit on January 8, 2020, the Queen’s dream for the couple to become key members of the modern Royal Family lay in tatters.

Harry and Meghan made their last appearance with the Queen at the Commonwealth Day Service in Westminster Abbey in early March 2020.

Their rift with William and Kate was plain to see at the ceremony, with the couples barely acknowledging each other. Meghan rushed to Heathrow Airport straight after the service to return to Canada, where Harry joined her and Archie a few days later.

Later that month, the family moved to Meghan’s home city of Los Angeles, just as most of the world went into lockdown.

By the time the Queen made her special address to the nation about the pandemic from Windsor on April 5, nearly 5,000 people in the UK had died from Covid.

An astonishing 24million viewers tuned in as the monarch thanked people for following government rules to stay at home and praised those “coming together to help others”.

She also acknowledged key workers, saying: “Every hour of your hard work brings us closer to a return to more normal times.”

Echoing Vera Lynn’s wartime anthem We’ll Meet Again, she said: “We should take comfort that while we may have still more to endure, better days will return. We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again.”

In July, Windsor was the scene of another moment of pandemic history when the Queen knighted 100-year-old Captain Tom Moore, who had raised almost £39million for NHS workers’ charities.

Windsor also provided solace to the monarch during the crisis — time for horse-riding and to be with her beloved animals.

Prince Philip had spent most of his time at the Sandringham estate after retiring from public duties in August 2017, aged 96. But by November 2020, the Duke had moved back to Windsor to spend lockdown with the Queen and the “bubble” of staff who looked after her.

That month, the Queen, 94, and the 99-year-old Duke spent what was to be their last wedding anniversary together.

The third lockdown meant their traditional Sandringham Christmas break was cancelled.

And in her annual broadcast, the Queen told others whose Christmas plans had been cancelled: “You are not alone.”

So it was at Windsor that the Queen saw in one of the toughest years of her life.

Royal expert Duncan Larcombe said: “The Queen called 1992 her annus horribilis, but if you had to pick the year that was the lowest and darkest, it would be 2021.

“The death of Prince Philip, an almighty row between her two grandsons and problems for Prince Andrew, who was the subject of the most serious allegation ever put towards a member of the Royal Family — rape and sexual assault.”

In mid-February 2021, as plans were being finalised for celebrations to mark Prince Philip’s 100th birthday in June, the Duke went into hospital in London.

During his month’s stay, he underwent a heart procedure and received treatment for an infection.

As Philip lay in his sickbed in early March, Harry and Meghan’s shocking interview with Oprah Winfrey aired on TV around the world.

In it, the pair accused the Royal Family of bullying and racism — although they did make it clear neither the Queen nor Prince Philip was responsible for alleged remarks about their son Archie’s skin colour.

In response to the interview, the Queen issued another of her famously succinct summings-up: “Recollections may vary.”

Only a month after the Oprah interview, Prince Philip was dead. He passed away at Windsor on April 9, eight weeks short of his 100th birthday.

Ingrid Seward said: “Prince Philip was very frail by the end and his condition deteriorated rapidly in the last ten days, so I think it was a relief for the Queen that he didn’t hang on.

“In many ways because of Covid, the Queen felt that Philip had the send-off he really wanted, small with no fuss.

“It was a beautiful service but no one will forget the pictures from inside St George’s Chapel of the Queen all alone as she mourned the love of her life.”

In autumn 2021, she was seen for the first time using a walking stick. In October, doctors ordered her to rest, forcing her to miss a Northern Ireland trip and the COP26 eco summit in Glasgow.

She was due to make her first public appearance again at the Service of Remembrance at the Cenotaph in November, but missed it after spraining her back.

It was only her seventh absence — four when she was abroad and twice when pregnant. But she continued some of her duties, such as meetings with ambassadors and dignitaries, via video conferencing, which she mastered during Covid.

As she became more infirm, we saw less of Her Majesty in public.

Throughout the spring, she rarely ventured from Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.

In May, she appeared in a golf buggy at Chelsea Flower Show.

It gave hope that she would be well enough for the Platinum Jubilee, but on doctors’ orders the Queen missed her two favourite highlights of the event, Trooping the Colour and the Derby.

But she did appear in front of thousands of her adoring subjects on the Palace balcony for the official fly-past and again at the finale of the four-day celebration to mark her 70 years on the throne.

During the Jubilee, she briefly met Harry and Meghan, who fled home to California before the celebrations had even ended.

But remarkably, after a short rest, the Queen was back among her people as she joined her daughter Princess Anne in a surprise visit to open the new hospice in Maidenhead, Berks.

The Queen also made her first public investiture for two years where she awarded the George Cross to the National Health Service and was even back riding her horse in the grounds at Windsor. As she headed to Scotland for her summer break at Balmoral, the Queen was still able to board the royal helicopter.

But when Harry and Meghan returned to the UK in September they still did not plan to make the journey to Scotland to see the Queen, who had invited them there.

And as the Conservative leadership contest ended with victory for Liz Truss, the Queen stood with the aid of her stick to say farewell to Boris Johnson and meet her 15th Prime Minister.

On Thursday morning, as her close family flew to Balmoral, the remarkable life of Queen Elizabeth II ebbed away.