Earlier this year, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle shocked the world when they stepped down as senior royals and left the United Kingdom. Now, a royal expert has revealed that Harry’s 99 year-old grandfather Prince Philip still has not gotten over this, as he does not understand why the couple had such a difficult time with being royals.

“He can’t understand what was so awful about being a member of the royal family,” Ingrid Seward, author of “Prince Philip Revealed: A Man of His Century,” told US Weekly. “They had a beautiful house. They had a huge influence, and Harry was really enjoying helping the military. And Meghan had got the beginnings of a place for herself in the Commonwealth and then they had a beautiful child [Archie]. So, beautiful house, beautiful child, looked after — what was so awful about that?”

She added that Philip just can’t grasp his grandson’s reasoning for wanting to step back from royal life.

“I don’t think Philip can understand what he calls Harry’s dereliction of duty,” Seward explained. “All Harry could say [was], ‘I didn’t want to be a prince.’”

She went on to say that Philip was “hands off” when it came to the couple’s decision, adding that “he just couldn’t fathom it and can’t fathom it.”

Seward said that Philip had no issues with Meghan when she joined the royal family, but they didn’t have the opportunity to get very close given the fact that he had retired from official duties.

“He was very welcoming to Meghan because of course she was a newcomer and a very different newcomer, but of course at the time of Meghan and Harry’s romance, he wasn’t around nearly as much because he’d retired,” Seward said. “So he didn’t see very much of Meghan at all. So he didn’t really have a chance to form a relationship with her.”

Even so, Philip made it a priority to attend Harry and Meghan’s wedding.

“He was determined that he was going to go to the wedding because he literally just had a hip operation six weeks before, which is a really good example of him being absolutely determined that whatever happened, he was gonna walk down that aisle at the wedding and take his seat and he was not gonna have a [cane] and he was not going to have a wheelchair,” Seward recalled. “But he didn’t go to the reception after that whole marriage ceremony and the long sermon and everything else was pretty uncomfortable but he’d never let it show.”

“I would say that he had very high hopes for Meghan,” she concluded. “And then I think he would have been very, very disappointed at how it panned out.”