Meghan Markle may now be aware of what Palace life entails, however the duchess had previously claimed that she was once oblivious to what being in the Royal Family would be like.

Since quitting life as a senior royal along with her husband, Prince Harry, in 2020, less than two years after the couple married, Meghan has made various claims and revelations about her short time in the British Royal Family.

However, while Meghan, 43, always insisted she did not research her royal husband before dating him, not everyone believes the duchess’ version of events, including biographer Omid Scobie.

Talking to Oprah about the Royal Family in a bombshell interview in 2021, Meghan initially said: “Well, I didn’t do any research about what that would mean… I’d never looked up my husband online.

“I just didn’t feel a need to because everything that I needed to know, he was sharing with me, right? Everything that he thought I needed to know, he was telling me.”

Harry also backed this up in his 2023 memoir Spare, in which he said Meghan “definitely hadn’t googled us” as he recalled a moment when she did not recognise who his uncle Prince Andrew was.

While Meghan and Harry, who have lived in Montecito since 2020, claim the Duchess of Sussex really did not know much about the Royal Family before dating the prince, authors Carolyn Durand and Omid Scobie stated otherwise in their unauthorised biography of the pair, titled Finding Freedom.

When writing about Harry and Meghan’s first date at Dean Street Townhouse in 2016, they suggested that Meghan and Harry would have both done “their homework” on one another before meeting.

They wrote: “Naturally both participants in this blind date did their homework with a thorough Google search.”

The two authors are not the only ones to debunk this claim that the duchess did not know anything about the man she was about to date.

Cultural commentator and fellow Montecito resident Tom Fitzgerald previously told Vanity Fair: “Meghan is the type of woman who would check a menu out online before going to a restaurant to pick what she was going to eat.

“So the idea that she didn’t know she was supposed to curtsy for the queen, I just didn’t find it particularly believable, because [based on] everything she ever told us about herself, I cannot imagine that she went into meeting the Royal Family completely cold, with no research whatsoever.”

Meghan continued her claim she did not know much about Harry before their first date in the Netflix docuseries Harry and Meghan, released in 2022. The series was filmed two years after the couple quit royal life and switched Palace walls for a Californian mansion, which they share with their two children Prince Archie, five, and Princess Lilibet, three.