Who Introduced Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to Each Other?
Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry are one of the most-talked about couples this past week. The pair made headlines everywhere after they sat down with Oprah Winfrey for an exclusive interview where they divulged information about their royal life.
As conversations about Meghan and Harry ramp up, some people might be wondering more about their past. How did they meet and who introduced them to each other?
Who introduced Prince Harry and Meghan Markle?
During their engagement interview in 2017, Meghan and Harry revealed that they were set up by a mutual friend. The couple went on their first date at Soho House’s Dean Street Townhouse in London.
They did not share the identity of the friend who introduced them, though they did mention that it was a person who uses the pronoun “she.”
In 2018, E! News reported that the person the mutual friend in question was Harry’s childhood friend Violet von Westenholz.
However, according to the 2020 biography Finding Freedom by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, which received some input from Meghan via a friend, the people who connected Meghan and Harry were fashion designer Misha Nonoo and Soho House’s global membership director Markus Anderson.
Meghan Markle apparently knew another royal before meeting Prince Harry
Another interesting tidbit about Meghan and Harry’s relationship is that Meghan apparently knew another royal before meeting her future husband.
During her recent Oprah interview, Meghan revealed that her first time meeting Queen Elizabeth was not extremely uncomfortable because Harry’s cousin Princess Eugenie was there.
“We were going for lunch at Royal Lodge, which is where some other members of the family live, specifically Andrew and Fergie, and Eugenie and Beatrice would spend a lot of time there,” she shared. “Eugenie and I had known each other before I knew Harry, so that was comfortable and it turned out the Queen was finishing a church service in Windsor and so she was going to be at the house.”
Eugenie and Harry are also known to be close, but it is not clear what Meghan and Eugenie’s relationship is like. Meghan received a lot of backlash in 2018 after she seemingly announced her pregnancy at Eugenie’s wedding, though Eugenie has not publicly commented on that situation.
Princess Eugenie introduced Prince Harry to one of his ex-girlfriends
While it does not seem like Eugenie did anything to initially connect Meghan and Harry together, Eugenie was allegedly responsible for setting Harry up with one of his ex-girlfriends.
Harry’s ex-girlfriend Cressida Bonas is an actor from an aristocratic family. She and Eugenie were friends, and Eugenie allegedly introduced them to each other. Harry and Cressida dated from 2012 to 2014. They broke up because she reportedly did not want to live with the press attention of being in a relationship with a royal.
“A rising actress, Cressida did not enjoy the critical remarks that she could hear people making behind her back when she walked down the street in London – she felt that the fame of her relationship put her ‘in a box,’” royal author Robert Lacey wrote in his book Battle of Brothers, as reported by the Daily Star.
