The Queen reportedly wanted to help with Meghan Markle's family

As if the situation wasn't already complicated...

The saga of Meghan Markle and her estranged family has dominated the news cycle this year, painting a picture of a sad and toxic situation where nobody seems to be a winner. Between her half siblings Samantha and Thomas Jr. as well as her father’s confusing and attention-seeking chats with the media and that whole wedding debacle, it sounds like it’s been a nightmare for the Duchess of Sussex and the Palace’s press team. However according to Vanity Fair, the Queen allegedly had a plan to put a pin in the whole thing but it sadly never came to fruition.

Vanity Fair spoke with a source who claimed that the royals ‘didn’t need another busted-up fairy tale’ and the Queen wanted to help Meghan keep the fracas from getting any worse. They said, ‘[The Queen] was very concerned that it was spiralling out of control, which it was. Buckingham Palace wanted to be able to do something and be proactive and make the situation go away. It was a direction from the Queen, so her courtiers were under strict instructions to sort it out.’

However, it turns out that Kensington Palace’s team weren’t playing ball. The source continued, ‘Kensington Palace was not singing from the same hymn sheet, and that was because the message was coming from Meghan. She didn’t want to engage and thought that she could handle it on her own.’

We get it, TBH. She was probably hoping that she’d be able to talk things through privately with her family. As we now know though, that’s not exactly how things played out. It eventually was alleged that her father worked with a paparazzo to stage photographs in the lead up to her wedding, which led to him eventually withdrawing altogether from the grand occasion following reports of a heart attack. (Prince Charles took his place and walked her down the aisle.) Her sister, Samantha Markle, has also announced via the Evening Standard that she would be publishing a tell-all book called In the Shadows of the Duchess about their life growing up.

The source explained, ‘There was a lot of tension between courtiers within the two royal households, and I think it just got to a point where it was stalemate and, you know, neither could move...This is her family, and no one at the palace would make a move without her.’

There’s been a lot of crucifying of Meghan in the media lately and the last thing we want to do is pile on. It honestly sounds here like Meghan really, genuinely believed she could get through to her family and talk things out, as any of us would hope we could with the people who love us. Even though she might have had the fairy tale wedding, real life is much messier than stories of princess and princes however and we just hope she’s okay.