A royal expert is speaking out this week to say that Queen Elizabeth “placed the monarchy first” when it came to the situation with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

“Elizabeth was hurt and disappointed,” royal expert Matthew Dennison wrote in his new book “The Queen,” according to US Weekly. He added that the Queen decided quickly that Meghan, 40, and Harry, 36, would no longer be able to use their “royal highness” titles.

“Elizabeth’s official statement expressed loving finality: ‘It is my whole family’s hope that today’s agreement allows them to start building a happy and peaceful new life.’ It was an attempt to reassert control in the interests of damage limitation, and a decisive but dark beginning to a new decade,” he wrote. “Elizabeth had never been a sentimental woman; she had acted in the only way she understood.”

“As throughout a life in which she had consistently honoured her father’s belief that ‘the highest of distinctions is the service of others,’ she had placed the monarchy first, safeguarding its mission of service and duty that could never, she was certain, be a part-time calling,” Dennison continued.

Since leaving the royal family, Meghan and Harry have moved across the world to California, and they have also bashed the royal family in various interviews.

This comes after royal expert Daniela Elser warned that Meghan and Harry’s “novelty value” is “no longer quite what it once might have been” in the United States after more than a year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When they landed in Los Angeles in March last year their value as a highly bankable, rare commodity was peaking,” Elser said, according to The Express. “Their brand was on the ascendant.”

“Their arrival in the US collided with the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, snuffing out a lot of the momentum around their arrival in the States,” she continued.”They might have been ready and open for business but the nation was not. Fast forward to this year and with the US reopening and life returning to normal and something of the novelty value of a real-life Duke and Duchess in Tinseltown’s midst is no longer quite what it once might have been.”