She continued: “I guess I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside. That there is a forward-facing way of being, and then you close the door and you go, ‘Oh, great. Okay, we can relax now.’ But that formality carries over on both sides, and that was surprising to me.”

In his controversial 2023 memoir, Spare, Harry expanded on Meghan’s account of her first meeting with Kate, describing how both she and William had seemed to like his future wife after introducing them at dinner.

“We’d had them over for dinner during one of Meg’s visits, and Meg cooked, and everything was good,” he wrote. “Willy had a cold: he was sneezing and coughing, and Meg ran upstairs to get him some of her homeopathic cure-alls. Oregano oil, turmeric.

He seemed charmed, moved, though Kate announced to the table that he’d never take such unconventional remedies.” Harry added: “The only possibly discordant note I could think of was the marked difference in how the two women dressed, which both of them seemed to notice,” he said. “Meg: ripped jeans, barefoot. Kate: done up to the nines. No big deal, I thought.”