Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Won’t Get Coronation Invites if They Slam Royals,

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King Charles likely won’t invite Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to his coronation if Harry damagingly attacks wife Camilla, the Queen Consort, in his forthcoming book, a friend of the new queen has told The Daily Beast.

“Almost everything Charles has done over the past twenty years has, in one way or another, been about getting Camilla accepted by the public,” the friend said, “He loves her. He is incredibly protective of her and he couldn’t do it without her. Even the queen finally accepted that. It is one thing for Harry to attack Charles, he can take it on the chin, but if Harry forces him to choose, by laying into Camilla in his book, I have no doubt he will choose Camilla.”

The palace declined to comment to The Daily Beast for this story. Sources in the palace say simply that the question of the guest list is on the “tbc” pile, pointedly leaving the door open for Harry and Meghan to get the call up—or be excluded.

Given that Harry has promised his still-scheduled memoir will be an “entirely honest” account of his life, it seems impossible to imagine it won’t include a blow-by-blow account of the collapse of Charles and Diana’s marriage, caused in part, as Diana herself clearly said, by Charles’ ongoing affair with Camilla.

Diana made it clear to Andrew Morton, for his book Diana, Her True Story, that she considered Camilla far from an innocent bystander, and that she was just as responsible for the continuation of the affair as Charles.

In one memorable encounter that Morton related in Diana: In Her Own Words, he said that Camilla invited Diana to lunch before her wedding and asked Diana whether she would go hunting with Charles after they were married. Diana said she wouldn’t.

“Diana later realized that Camilla saw Charles’ love of hunting as a conduit to maintaining her own relationship with him,” Morton wrote.

The Daily Beast understands that there is tremendous nervousness in Charles’ circle about what the book might reveal, not least because a full throated attack on Camilla’s character would be devastating to Charles.

While Harry has not yet rounded on Camilla in the same way as he has attacked his father—whom he has accused of cutting him off financially, not taking his phone calls and being indifferent to his suffering among many other alleged cruelties—he has notably failed to salute her elevation to queen.

Katie Nicholl, author of The New Royals and Vanity Fair’s royal correspondent told The Daily Beast: “There is no doubt that Charles would like Harry and Meghan to be at his coronation. And to be fair to Charles, he has been magnanimous in terms of extending, very publicly, olive branches to the Sussexes, not only in his televised accession address but also putting them front and center at the funeral events.

“But he does expect respect in return, and a problem is going to arise if, between now and then, Harry repays him by attacking him, Camilla or the institution. He is not going to put up with inaccurate and unfair attacks.

“The queen was ruthless when it came to protecting the institution, and Charles will be too, and we are possibly seeing that in the lack of urgency around naming Archie and Lilibet prince and princess. My understanding is that Charles is not averse to granting them titles, but he expects to see respect from the Sussexes in return.

“The ball is in the Sussexes’ court. The royals, just like the rest of us, are waiting to see what they will do next.”

David Rose/Pool/AFP via Getty

The question of what the Sussexes intend to do—how deep they will dish, how painful and damaging will be the secrets they reveal in their next salvos —is the great “known unknown” preventing any true reconciliation, or a sense of arriving at a new, stable accommodation, however uneasy, between the two sides.

While the queen was alive, the ambiguity, while not helpful, was something both sides could just about live with. In one version of events, Harry and Meghan intended to publish the book and stream their films this year—and then spend next year rebuilding burned bridges.

The death of Queen Elizabeth blew the feasibility of such a strategy completely out of the water.

But Windsor obstinacy is a powerful thing, and there has been no sign that Harry and Meghan even attempted to reconcile in any meaningful way while they were in the U.K. for the queen’s funerary rites.

Despite a handful of carefully choreographed joint events with William, Harry was said to have been infuriated by a series of perceived sleights which included being seated in the…