Would the Queen have forgiven Prince Harry for his betrayal? Inside the late monarch’s response to another damaging scandal 30 years before Megxit that hints at a bleak outcome…

Through her role as the head of the Church of England, the late Queen Elizabeth II regularly mentioned Jesus’ example of forgiveness and reconciliation. 

However, one question that has puzzled royal experts since her death in September 2022 is whether she would have extended that Christian teaching to her disillusioned grandson Prince Harry.

Although she did not live to see his most hurtful accusations, which were made just months after her death in his blockbuster Netflix ‘docuseries’ and the tell-all memoir Spare, she did see the beginning of his fall from grace. 

Her Majesty witnessed him inflict great reputational damage on the institution she had spent her life building when he accused the family of racism in his devastating interview with Oprah in March 2021.

The row over the episode caused the Queen to issue the now well-known response ‘recollections may vary’. 

It was viewed at the time as one thing for Harry to decide to step down from the Royal Family, but another thing entirely for him to attack the members of the family who had decided to stay.

Some royal experts claim the Queen would never have forgiven him for the betrayal, but the truth is no one really knows.

However there are some who believe there is a historical precedent that gives the best clue as to how the deceased sovereign would have responded if she were still alive.

As around 30 years before Megxit, the monarch was faced with another young royal who thought they knew better and went to the press to raise their complaints publicly.

It led her to be dubbed the ‘Royal Rebel’ after she provokingly posed in a rubber outfit for a fetish magazine while wearing a crown, surrounded by corgis.

Here MailOnline looks back at the story of the Royal Family’s falling out with Marina Ogilvy – and why it might reveal if the Queen would have forgiven Prince Harry. 

Marina Ogilvy was born at the royal residence of Thatched House Lodge in Richmond Park in 1966.

And although the Royal Family has a plethora of minor royals living at various grace and favour dwellings on their land, Marina was not just another distant relation to the Queen.

Her mother Princess Alexandra Ogilvy was one of the Queen’s closest friends and is regarded by some as the ‘unsung heroine’ of the Royal Family.

It was in Alexandra’s back garden that the young Prince Philip, an unpolished sailor not yet accepted by George VI as suitable marriage material for his eldest daughter — and certainly not allowed any unchaperoned contact with her — used to secretly court the young Princess Elizabeth. 

Once Cupid had done his work, Alexandra was rewarded with an invitation to be one of the bridesmaids at their 1947 royal wedding. 

Alexandra’s brothers are Princes Edward and Michael of Kent; the three siblings were first cousins of the Queen. 

Over the years, the ‘girls’ — Queen and Princess — deliberately matched their diamonds, pearls and even the colour and material of their outfits; the hidden message being ‘tonight we’re equals’. 

The Queen was so close with Princess Alexandra, now 88, that her son Prince Charles, then just 18, was chosen to be Marina’s godfather when she was born. 

But as Marina grew up, she became a problem for The Firm after falling in love with the wrong person.

When she was 23 in 1989, she embarked on a relationship with 26-year-old Paul Mowatt, a freelance photographer of whom, unfortunately, her parents did not approve.

She fell pregnant out of wedlock – and abandoned a place to study at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music to move in with her lover.

Writing about the scandal in her 2024 biography of Elizabeth and King Charles III, My Mother and I, royal author Ingrid Seward claimed ‘Marina’s parents were furious when confronted with the news’.

‘Their disappointment in their talented daughter was heightened by the worry of what effect Marina’s behaviour would have on the Royal Family.

‘According to Marina, her mother told her to have an abortion or get married.’

Instead, wrote Seward, Marina sold her story and made a number of ‘hysterical’ accusations, including that she had been cut off by her parents and thrown out of her home.

She sold her story to the tabloid Today newspaper for a rumoured £250,000, which was a huge amount of money in 1989. 

The interview was unprecedented in history, containing a number of damaging claims surrounding the private affairs of the Royal Family – although Prince Harry would do something similar decades later. 

Marina made the explosive claim to the newspaper that she did not dare return to her parent’s home in case she was kept against her will. 

She even claimed detectives had warned Mr Mowatt that he would be arrested if he were seen near Alexandra and Angus’ royal residence in Richmond Park.

But perhaps the most damaging accusation was that her parents had tried to force her into marrying her boyfriend immediately or get an abortion.

When describing the furious confrontation with her mother and father, she quoted Alexandra as saying: ‘You have got two options — either you get it aborted straight away or we arrange for you to get married this week by special license.’ 

However, the headstrong young royal insisted that she did not want to marry Mr Mowatt until after the baby was born. 

When she turned down both options presented to her by her parents, they allegedly disowned her and cut off her funds — a trust fund (believed to be approximately £130,000) and her monthly allowance (believed to be approximately £350).

She even claimed that her parents had tried to trick her into getting an abortion during a doctor’s appointment, telling Today: ‘We [Marina and Paul] are sure that the surgery tried to fix an abortion and pretend it was a routine examination.’ 

Marina said: ‘Dad said ‘there hadn’t been an illegitimate birth in the royal family for 150 years’. 

‘When I said to him: ‘Look, I am your daughter, what comes first, queen and country or your daughter?’ he said: ‘Queen and country’.’ 

Things were then escalated when Marina revealed she had written to Queen Elizabeth II because ‘I know she is a wise and caring woman. I just hope she can help my parents see sense.’ 

It was also later revealed that the six-page letter was written to ‘Dear Cousin Lilibet’ and delivered by hand to Buckingham Palace – but the Queen had not replied.

For several days of the newspaper’s serialisation of her story, the revelations about life at Thatched House Lodge, the Ogilvy home in Richmond Park, continued to spill out.

Royal expert Christopher Wilson wrote that a friend said the damage from the media storm caused Marina’s parents to ‘age before our very eyes’.

For her part, the Queen went into meltdown, said her biographer Sarah Bradford, who explained: ‘One of the few times she was ever seen to explode with rage was at these scathing revelations.’

However, Marina’s public war on her family got even worse when she decided to pose for a fetish magazine wearing a rubber jumpsuit and a crown while surrounded by corgis.

She also appeared on television begging her parents to get in touch with her.

‘This,’ she claimed at one point, ‘is the dark side of the royal family we are experiencing now. The other side of the postcard is just for tourists.’

Her bad behaviour led her to be dubbed the ‘Royal Rebel’ and allegedly prompted her parents to freeze a £100,000 trust fund set up in her name. 

But Marina did seem to eventually get her way, marrying her initially forbidden lover and father of her unborn baby, Mr Mowatt, in February 1990.

However at the ceremony, the heavily pregnant Marina wore a black wedding dress instead of white, and a red velvet bolero with gold trim and black hat. 

The turbulence that Marina had caused her family caused great upset to the Queen, with Seward writing she ‘made no secret of her displeasure’ at her actions. 

And because, as per tradition, the monarch had to give her consent to a marriage within the family, there had to be a handwritten approval document addressed to ‘My trusty and well-beloved cousin’. 

For more than 200 years, every bride and groom from The Firm has needed this document before any churchman can perform the wedding ceremony.

However for Marina there was a small, but significant, difference.

The Queen did indeed give her consent, however, when sending the vellum to the Crown Office in the Lord Chancellor’s department for the final inscription, she gave the order that ‘My trusty and well-beloved cousin’ should be removed.

It seemed the Queen may have been a strong believer in forgiveness, but she did not forget. 

Several years after the marriage, despite still being close to her mother Alexandra, the Queen remembered how Marina denigrated her family. 

Seward recently wrote about an occasion that when going through the Queen’s Christmas card list, they came to Marina’s name.

‘I think not,’ the Queen said, and put a line through it.

As Seward puts it, Marina’s youthful defiance had ‘echoes of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex some 30 years later’.

And although the late monarch seemed outwardly unmoved by the turmoil of Megxit and her grandson’s criticisms of the Royal Family, perhaps under the surface, she had hardened her heart.

The Queen had seen it all before, after all. 

And in the case of Marina at least, the Queen had also seen how it ended.

Marina and Paul divorced in 1997 after seven years of marriage amid claims of spiralling debts and violent rows, with two children from the union – Zenouska and Christian.

Life became hard for Marina – by royal standards, at least.

At one point it was revealed she was relying on £120 per week state benefits, including help with the rent for her grace-and-favour cottage in Windsor Great Park.

Marina became a full-time student, and her finances were so desperate that she intended to move her daughter from a private school to a comprehensive.

If the plans went ahead, it would make her the first royal to ever be educated in the state system. 

Concerns about her straitened circumstances were raised after she was the apparent victim of a confidence trickster who made off with a number of family heirlooms.

Royal officials were told that her family had been ‘bailing her out for years’.

Upon hearing her plight, Charles interrupted a holiday in Romania in 2003 to send a supportive message to Marina’s parents to try to resolve the situation and get her ‘serious professional advice’, according to Daily Mail royal expert Richard Kay.

It seems that in comparison with his mother, Charles has always been the most forgiving of all the royals.

There were even reports last year that the ‘very devout’ Christian, perhaps reflecting on his own mortality after his cancer diagnosis, was listening to advice from the Church of England on welcoming Harry back into the royal fold.

However when it came to Marina’s estrangement from The Firm, the Queen seemed to be unsympathetic, despite the tragic circumstances over what happened.

Speaking about Mr Mowatt, one of Marina’s school friends told the Telegraph in 2003: ‘The moment she met that creep everything started going wrong. 

The friend added: ‘There were fights, sometimes physical ones, between husband and wife. On one occasion Paul was ordered to leave the home by police.’

‘After all the acrimony, she wanted to show her parents she could make it work.

‘Seeing their relationship play out was like watching a car crash happening.’

But eventually, the storm passed following the divorce, and Marina was once again allowed back on to the famous balcony at Buckingham Palace for royal events.

Over the years, however, Marina had to work hard to repair her relationships and reverted to her maiden name, and today, at 58, she works as a teacher and musician. 

A talented pianist, she now writes music scores and lives quietly in a cottage in Windsor Great Park, despite being around 62nd in line to the throne.

She was present with the other royals, seated on the front row alongside her mother, at the memorial service for the late King Constantine of Greece in February 2024. 

Both of her children, Zenouska, 34, and Christian, 31, seemed to have landed on their feet, despite their turbulent upbringing, and now have successful careers.

Despite the years of estrangement, will the Royal Family welcome Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s family back into the fold like Marina?

At the moment there is no way to know, but if history is anything to go by, the Queen might have wanted to keep them at a distance.