When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sat down with the BBC following news of their engagement last year, they recalled how they met being a blind date after a friend set them up.
“It was definitely a set-up. It was a blind date,” the 36-year-old said at the time. “I didn’t know much about him and so the only thing I had asked her when she said she wanted to set us up was, I had one question, I said ‘Was he nice?’”
But it turns out like any modern-day woman going on a blind date, she did have a couple more questions after all.
Meghan’s former agent Gina Nelthorpe-Cowne has revealed that she had lunch with the then-Suits actress just hours before the date in June 2016, and that she did actually google the handsome royal.
“Meghan had just told me, ‘I’m going on a date tonight … with Prince Harry’,” Nelthorne Cowne tells the Daily Mail.
“She whispered it so quietly I had to ask her to repeat it. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing but I think she could barely believe it either. We were both extremely excited.
“I jokingly asked if she knew what she was letting herself in for and she said: ‘Well, it’s going to be an experience and at least it will be a fun night.’
After the date, Markle told Nelthorne Cowne that Harry was “a real gentleman, genuinely nice”.
Nelthorne Cowne, who was close with Meghan during the early days of her relationship but is no longer in contact with her, also revealed that it was the couple’s trip to Botswana that was a turning point in their relationship.
“They were so clearly already in love. She told me it was serious and they had started discussing the future,” says Nelthorne Cowne.
“She said they’d said to each other, ‘We’re going to change the world.’ I knew then there was no other way than for them to get married.”
Nelthorne Cowne says she was happy for her friend but warned her that it would be “the end of your normal life, the end of your privacy – everything”.
To which Meghan reportedly held up her hand and replied, “Stop. I don’t want to hear any negativity. This is a happy time for us’.”
The pair ended their working relationship in October 2016 just a month before Harry and Meghan went public with their relationship.
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