For years, we’ve heard a frenetic back-and-forth about the Duchess of Edinburgh and the Duchess of Sussex. This back-and-forth is coming entirely from Sophie and various royal camps – Prince Harry barely even mentioned the Wessexes, as they were at that time, in Spare, and Meghan has never said either way whether she considered Sophie an ally, mentor or enemy. Still, we were told variations of: Sophie tried to mentor Meghan but Evil Meg rejected her; Sophie did mentor Meghan but quickly understood that Meg “had her own agenda;” that Sophie was jealous of Meghan’s title and Sophie is relieved to finally have her own duchess title. Well, we’re getting a new version of all of that post-Endgame. Enjoy:
The Duchess of Edinburgh is furious at being drawn into the royal racism row reignited by Omid Scobie’s book, which claims she did little to support Meghan Markle when she was struggling to adjust to her new life as a member of the royal family. Friends of Sophie (who was then the Countess of Wessex) say that it is also “blatantly untrue” that according to Scobie she ignored Meghan as she was leaving a church service in Windsor. The author also accuses Sophie of being “casually bigoted”.
But Sophie’s allies point out that she went out of her way to befriend Meghan in the early months of her marriage to Prince Harry, inviting her to tea at her Surrey home, Bagshot Park.
“It was just the two of them at and they talked for hours,“ says a senior Royal source. “Meghan had so many questions and Sophie, who knows what it’s like navigating your way through the early days of transition from a commoner to a royal, gave freely of her advice. Sophie found Meghan likeable and engaging and told her that she could call her any time when she needed advice about dealing with some of the trickier royals.
“She was quite surprised when that was the last she heard from Meghan. As she noted, it would’ve been nice to receive a return invitation to Frogmore Cottage (where Meghan was then living with Harry and is less than half an hour from Bagshot).”
It was the late Queen who first suggested that Sophie could mentor the royal newcomer. Gyles Brandreth in his book, Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait, wrote: “The Queen (who, of course, had seen it all before) understood that Harry’s girl might find adjusting to royal life ‘challenging to begin with’ (as she put it). ‘It is very jolty, but you soon get used to it’ – that was Her Majesty’s experience going back many years.
“To help Meghan, the Queen suggested that her daughter-in-law, Sophie Wessex, would be an ideal mentor. ‘Sophie can help show you the ropes,’ said the Queen. “But Meghan made it clear that she did not feel she needed Sophie’s help. She had Harry.”
So which is it? Do we believe the royal sources who now claim that Sophie and Meghan had a perfectly pleasant chat session at Bagshot and Sophie was offended to never receive an invitation to Frogmore? Or do we believe Gyles Brandreth’s royal sources, which is that Meghan refused Sophie’s mentorship? What I’ve always believed about Meghan and the offers of “mentorship” is that she wasn’t offered much, but she did meet with whoever was offered to her. Probably Susan Hussey and QEII’s Black equerry.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
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- Sophie Countess of Wessex and Forfar wipes away a tear as she is driven away from the Queen’s funeral service this afternoon.,Image: 724177361, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: -, Model Release: no, Credit line: Steve Bainbridge / Avalon
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- Funeral of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey, London. Meghan Duchess of Sussex, Camilla Queen Consort, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, Princess of Wales and Sophie Countess of Wessex.,Image: 724195093, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: -, Model Release: no, Credit line: Adam Gerrard / Avalon
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- Duchess of Sussex, Queen Consort Camilla, Princess of Wales, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, Countess of Wessex At the State Funeral of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II,Image: 724230983, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: Camera Press Rota, Model Release: no, Credit line: Mark Stewart / Avalon
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- LONDON, ENGLAND – NOVEMBER 11: Sophie, Countess of Wessex attends The Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance at Royal Albert Hall on November 11, 2023 in London, England.,Image: 821399183, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: *** NO UK USE FOR 48 HRS ***, Model Release: no, Credit line: Chris Jackson / Avalon
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- USA Rights Only – London, UK -20191110- Royals attend the 2019 Armistice Day Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph memorial in Whitehall. -PICTURED: Countess of Wessex, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex -PHOTO by: Doug Peters/PA Images/INSTARimages.com -48231183.jpg This is an editorial, rights-managed image. Please contact Instar Images LLC for licensing fee and rights information at sales@instarimages.com or call +1 212 414 0207 This image may not be published in any way that is, or might be deemed to be, defamatory, libelous, pornographic, or obscene. Please consult our sales department for any clarification needed prior to publication and use. Instar Images LLC reserves the right to pursue unauthorized users of this material. If you are in violation of our intellectual property rights or copyright you may be liable for damages, loss of income, any profits you derive from the unauthorized use of this material and, where appropriate, the cost of collection and/or any statutory damages awarded Featuring: Countess of Wessex, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex Where: London, England, United Kingdom When: 10 Nov 2019 Credit: Doug Peters/PA Images/INSTARimages.com **USA Rights Only**
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- State Funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, held at Westminster Abbey, London. Featuring: Meghan Duchess of Sussex and Sophie Countess of Wessex Where: London, England, United Kingdom When: 19 Sep 2022 Credit: PA Images/INSTARimages.com/Cover Images **North America Rights Only**
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- State Funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, held at Westminster Abbey, London. Featuring: Sophie Countess of Wessex and Meghan Duchess of Sussex Where: London, England, United Kingdom When: 19 Sep 2022 Credit: PA Images/INSTARimages.com/Cover Images **North America Rights Only**
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- The State Funeral of HM Queen Elizabeth II Featuring: Sophie, Countess of Wessex, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle Where: London, United Kingdom When: 19 Sep 2022 Credit: Sadak Souici/Le Pictorium/Cover Images **ONLY AVAILABLE FOR PUBLICATION IN THE UK**
Sophie doth protest too much. I don’t believe she offered or helped in any way. Just look at how she looked at Meg during QEII funeral. That is the true Sophie. A royal bitch.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, at this point what difference does it make – except that Sophie’s name couldn’t get two lines in the press unless Meghan’s name was attached to it.
Really, they all just need to give it a rest already with all this bs about who mentored Meghan. Obviously, if anyone did, they did a lousy job since she eventually became suicidal.
And no one helped!
Exactly, I don’t understand why anyone is trying to take credit for this. It didn’t a lick of good.
Eurydice, this—100%.
None of them can get any attention at all without slagging Meghan. It is an almost perfect irony in which they’ll be trapped for the rest of their lives.
Imagine Sophie at 80 dragging her wrinkled carcass to the mic: “I did so mentor Meghan!”
Or Kate, looking like a deaths head in 40 years: “Meghan made me cry!!”
Or Old King William, finally on the throne after Charles dies at 130 – “I hate Meghan, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate…*cough*..*cough*…where’s my soup?”
Eurydice!! “Where’s my soup?” 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I’m currently on the floor with intense back pain… and this just made me burst out laughing!! Thank you for this!
@Keke Swan & @Eurydice, you guys made me laugh so hard! Too funny! 🤣🤣🤣
Please, she hasn’t been pulled into anything. This is her attempt to be be part of it and get some attention for herself.
I’m wondering if she was pulled out by BRF to attempt to drive comments away from C & C, and the Wales. The tea for hours likely did happen. What does Sophie know about being American or biracial? Even this attempt shows how out of touch this family is with unconscious bias and generational racism. Whatever they talked about, I believe Meghan was intelligent enough to glean as much as she could, but really only trusted Harry, her mom, & her friends after she endured. Thank goodness they left! Thank goodness for Tyler Perry. No one needs that toxic wasteland, no matter how pretty the jewels are! They’re hate-filled monsters. Today, I saw a clip of Archie belly laughing. He was maybe late 2s early 3s. It was joyous-and his Daddy was the one making him giggle so hard. They’re FREE.
If Sophie actually was sent to help Meghan, please remember that this woman was very public about her very close relationship with the queen. And that the queen very quickly formed a fairly close relationship to Meghan. I think that would have been seen as a threat to Sophie. Plus, Sophie’s reaction to the Oprah interview was “Oprah who?”
Meghan did well not to choose her, if this is even true.
From the words Meghan used in the Oprah interview and the Netflix documentary, as well as from the accounts of Spare, i think we can all conclude nobody except Harry was there to navigate Meghan through royal life.
This.
Sophie really, really needs to sit this one out. She needs to stop kissing up to Will and Kate and she needs to stop injecting herself into this silly storyline. Meghan barely knows she exists. And frankly, neither does Harry. Come on.
Yeah William will drop her and Edward immediately. No getting grand-fathered in like the Gloucesters, they’re done.
Timeline makes no sense. H&M were married about a year before moving into FC. It was not long before she had Archie. So was Sophie expecting an invite from the woman about to go into labor any day or the one who had a newborn? And didn’t Sophie claim that she was one of the first to visit Archie after he was born? These people need to keep better track of their lies. I imagine, Sophie’s advice was the same as the rest: “suck it up. We all have gotten bad press.”
This is exactly what I came to say. The timeline doesn’t fit the narrative, so this is just another line of bs. They all need to stop trying to rewrite their own sh*tty history and keep H&M’s name out of their mouths.
That stood out to me too – they didnt move to Frogmore Cottage until almost a year into their marriage.
this is just another example of the Windsors trying to cover their tracks when it comes to their treatment of Meghan. We saw how sophie behaved to her at the funeral and at the commonwealth service in 2020.
Right? If she visited baby Archie then she did in fact have an invitation to FC.
Exactly.
Two things can be true. Perhaps they did meet over tea and both suspected each had an agenda. Mutual suspicions.
My guess is that she did have Meghan to tea at some point early on. However, I would also guess as it was readily apparent to us on the outside, and must have been CRYSTAL clear to the family-William and Kate did not like Meghan from the beginning. Sophie is totally beholden to them now and especially down the road once Charles dies-she is always going to fall in line with what they say and do.
Sure they had tea. And Sophie was likely perfectly awful to her.
Sophie “gave freely of her advice” – which probably came across as patronizing and condescending, as it does the way it’s described here.
I’m really curious about how this mentoring works. Is it explicit “The Queen has asked (name) to help you as you join the family to learn the ropes.” Or is it unsaid and you get a call.put of the blue to come for tea and don’t know why and don’t think anything more of it.
Meghan said some people advised her to stay at home for a few days in order to prevent bad headlines while Meghan didn’t leave home for months. I am betting, Sophie is one of those people. She thinks that’s mentoring, probably. “Remember how I said Meghan shouldn’t leave home!”
Meghan moves into Frogmore toward the end of her pregnancy with Archie, right? Why would anyone expect a person in the late stages of pregnancy to host them. Meghan should have been nesting. And I’m not even sure they had been in the servants’ quarters for that long. (I’ll never forget that broke down cottage was had been employee housing.)
Also, I can see Meghan turning down Sophie’s mentoring. Meghan comes off as someone very particular about what she wants from people and what she wants to do herself. If she wanted advice on how to successfully pursue the ideas she had, how to get her staff to work, she probably didn’t want to hear anything else. If Sophie advised her slow down and go with the low (to the effect of just lay low, let the media madness pass, stay out of the spotlight, don’t edit Vogue, cut back on expectations of staff, etc.) I can see Meghan deciding to pass on any future insight. Why? Because Meghan is a doer. She’s proactive. She pursues her own agenda. And that’s perfectly fine.
But that’s one of the reasons she didn’t belong in that institution. Doers aren’t welcomed. And given that the members of that family are very stupid, it’s appropriate that they not be doers, but do as they are told. (Plus, they are supposed to be puppets anyway.)
Lastly, like everyone else in that institution, Sophie is a racist. They all are. It’s the environment. It’s their culture. Meghan saw it.
I always thought Sophie was the one who advised Meghan to be 50 percent less.
@Onthisday, you are absolutely correct on all points. What I have learned of Meghan is that she does her homework. She probably read up on Sophie to learn more about her, if she indeed spent any time with her at all and I’m also sure Harry would have warned her about who she should trust. Although, I do think Harry was completely blindsided on how they would treat Meghan. He probably thought, they’ll warm up to her eventually or we don’t all have to be best friends. He never expected that his family would be this cruel, abusive & racist toward Meghan and now he knows for sure how they treated his mum.
Again. Meghan wouldn’t have refused help. She was an outsider, a foreigner. She would have welcomed any help as to not embarrass the Firm. They, Sofiesta included, thought she’d be a temporary relationship and therefore, they didn’t need to waste their time on her. Once Sophie realized William didn’t like her and wanted her gone, she stopped pretending and let her true bitch out.
Gosh, so many mentors, so little time!,, Sophie can’t stand it if her name isn’t in the press at least once a week. No, she was never a friend or mentor to Megan, she was part of Kates mean girl group, brown nosing her way up the ladder. We all SAW her snubbing Megan and giving her a filthy look so please, stop trying to gas light us.
The fact that this belly crawling, subservient, tool got zero mention in anything Harry and Meghan have done since they left, is all we need to know about what they think of her.
From the moment of the Sussexit announcement, Sophie began publicly promoting herself as Meghan’s replacement. And I suspect that her private campaign began before Meghan left. I think she was equally as jealous of Meghan’s success as Kate, or even more so. Sophie had been in that family for decades before Meghan’s arrival, but had nothing to show for it other than two spawns and a taped scandal. But within a few months of Meghan’s arrival she had a highly success cookbook.
In fact, Sophie put her true feelings about Meghan on full public display at the commonwealth service, and at the Queen’s funeral. Is that how a true mentor treats a protoghe? Also, these fools can’t keep their story straight. Yesterday it was the black horseman mentor, today it’s mean girl Ford Fiesta. I guess tomorrow will be Carol(E) Middleton?
Other than protocol. Which we see changes all the time. What would Meghan need a mentor for? She had been a working actress for years. And had even spoken at the UN. Before all of this. She should have been mentoring Kate and Sophie. On how to do actual work and meet people.
The BRF mentoring program seriously needs an overhaul. It ain’t working. And can you imagine? Meghan standing in front of the ladies sitting in a semi-circle, instructing them on how to prepare for a meeting, how to do small talk, Kate with her little notebook labeled ‘notebook’ taking notes?
Why would a second-tier royal with a lackluster professional background think she was fit to be a mentor? Meghan far outclassed her from day one and obviously knew that the lot of them were actually terrible at their jobs and certainly had little to offer.
Meghan looked so modern and fresh at the funeral compared to the rest of them. Also the only one looking as though actually mourning a loss.
Horsesh*t. They lie as easily as they breathe.
I don’t believe Meghan refused help from anybody. I think the truth is nobody including Sophie offered to help her.
Sophie is desperate to be included in the narrative involving the Sussex’s so much I think she would be ok with being outed as the one who said racist shit about Meghan and Archie . Sophie is so bland and basic no one even outside of royalist even know who she is.
Meghan is exceedingly polite — too nice, as Serena Williams put it. I’m sure that Meghan listened politely to whatever Sophie had to say.
It was Sophie who turned on Meghan to win the Waleses’ favor. Sophie is such a try-hard.
Late to the party but – Meghan has a degree in International Studies and interned at a US embassy, whereas Sofiesta not only failed spectacularly with her PR agency and ran up a massive debt that QEII had to bail her out of, but actively betrayed the RF in her interview with the fake sheikh.
Meghan wasn’t some young ingénue or a naive country bumpkin alone in a big city for the first time, but an accomplished, successful and moderately wealthy woman.
So I don’t think there’s anything Meghan could have learned from Ms Wessex about tricky royals that Harry couldn’t have told her, or that she could have gauged on her own.
And Meghan knew Eugenie before the public became aware of Harry and her, so there’s another source of court-related intel. Plus Meghan said Fergie taught her to curtsey, so it seems Harry was closer to some Yorks than to any Wessexes.
I think in this case we can see that “mentoring” simply means put up and shut up, don’t dress in bright colours, keep your eyes down, and dim your light and intelligence.
It sure sounds like Sophie invents many stories in her head and just pass them onto the tabloid press to see what sticks.
I’ve always felt with Sophie it’s a simple case of thinking ahead to the future, both her own and that of her daughter & son, and keeping in with W accordingly. At any price.