Casually heading to a party hosted by Queen Elizabeth—or even getting the chance to meet her in person—wasn't something most people got to experience. But as the sister of the future queen, Princess Kate, James Middleton has been in the privileged position of being able to hobnob with the monarch on numerous occasions. Although he had met Queen Elizabeth before, the youngest Middleton sibling shared a hilarious encounter that left him "flustered" in his recent memoir, Meet Ella: The Dog Who Saved My Life.
In the book, Middleton details his struggle with depression and how his late dog Ella, and his other animals, helped him through, but he also shares some royal stories in the memoir. One such incident happened on Princess Kate's birthday, when James and sister Pippa Middleton were running home from a trip to France to make the party on time.
"Pippa and I were late for Catherine’s birthday party, which in the normal run of things wouldn’t have mattered too much, but this time the Queen had kindly offered to host the teatime gathering at Sandringham," he wrote. "We’d been on a late-night flight to Gatwick from France and arrived bleary-eyed and sleepless at the airport, then I’d driven us both to Bucklebury so we could pack."
The brother/sister duo left their parents' Bucklebury, England home for Sandringham, and he said the last-minute packing was just slightly stressful knowing that they were going to be meeting with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.
"I was fretting about the standard of my ironing—my shirt was rumpled and creased in all the wrong places—and I could only find one cufflink," Middleton wrote. "'Come on James, we’ve got to go now,' urged Pippa as I filled up Ella’s water bottle for the journey."
Luckily, the siblings arrived safely, although they had little time to spare. "We arrived breathless and flustered with barely time to run upstairs and change," he wrote. James was in such a rush he "bounded downstairs two at a time" and ran into the room, "almost running smack into Her Majesty."
“She and Prince Philip had got up to leave just as I blundered in with Pippa behind me," Middleton penned. He admitted that during his three-hour-plus drive up to Sandringham House in Norfolk, he had been practicing how to address the late Queen and Prince Philip, even "muttering: 'Your Majesty' for the Queen; 'Your Royal Highness' for the Duke of Edinburgh."
However, in his "blind panic," Middleton instead "blurted: 'I’m so sorry we’re late, Your Royal Majesty.'" James then wrote that he "heard a snort of laughter" (although the royal sibling kindly didn't note who it was) and "looked past the Queen to see everyone in the room stifling their giggles."
Her Majesty, however, took it all in stride. "'Oh, how lovely to see you, James,'" she replied with a smile. "I’d met her several times, notably at my sister’s wedding, and she was always welcoming," Middleton concluded. He even revealed that he used to do jigsaw puzzles with the late monarch, adding that she filled "a granny-sized void in my life."
