Princess Anne has long been known as being tough as nails, and apparently it was she who laid down the hammer and pushed older brother King Charles to evict Prince Harry and Meghan Markle from their U.K. home of Frogmore Cottage earlier this year.
This revelation comes from the pages of Omid Scobie’s latest book Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy’s Fight for Survival, where he writes that Anne was “at the forefront of the supporters of the firm approach” taken with Harry and Meghan, who stepped back as working members of the royal family in early 2020. Scobie writes that Anne “is said to have persuaded Charles to withdraw the use of Frogmore Cottage” from the Sussexes, which was given to them as a wedding present from the late Queen Elizabeth upon their nuptials in 2018.
Not long after the release of Harry’s explosive memoir, Spare, this past January, Sir Michael John Stevens, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, sent a letter to the couple’s team pushing them to complete their exit from the Windsor property, The Independent reports. “The letter stated that because the Duke and Duchess were no longer working members of the royal family and lived abroad, they should return the keys to Frogmore Cottage,” the outlet reports. They vacated the property by early summer, and in June, Stevens confirmed their exit at the annual Sovereign Grant account briefing on royal finances.
“Safe to say that, as has previously been stated, the Duke and Duchess have paid for the expenditure incurred by the Sovereign Grant in relation to the renovation of Frogmore Cottage, thus leaving the Crown with a greatly enhanced asset,” he said. Harry and Meghan privately paid £2.4 million to cover renovations to the home, which they lived in until they relocated to the U.S. and have only stayed in a few times thereafter.
Anne, who is the only daughter of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip and is the second born of their four children, has always been known to be the most outspoken and blunt child of Her late Majesty and the former Duke of Edinburgh. Interestingly, Prince Edward—the couple’s youngest child—supported Harry and Meghan staying in Frogmore, and Scobie writes that the current Duke of Edinburgh was “uneasy” about what the decision would mean for the Sussexes, The Mirror reports.
