They immediately started off on the wrong foot. In his memoir, Spare, Prince Harry writes about the awkward moment in 2016 when his brother, Prince William, met his then-girlfriend, Meghan Markle. “I introduced Meg, who leaned in and gave him a hug, which completely freaked him out. He recoiled,” Harry wrote. “Willy didn’t hug many strangers. Whereas Meghan hugged most strangers.” Harry’s shocking reaction? “The moment was a classic collision of cultures …which felt to me both funny and charming. Later, however, looking back, I wondered if it was more than that …. Whatever, Willy got over it.”

He actually never did, according to a new book. “This tactile manner made William uncomfortable because Meghan hugged him virtually every time they bumped into each other,” writes in Yes Ma’am: The Secret Life of Royal Servants, as excerpted in The Times.

And the future king wasn’t the only one. “I was astonished to hear from a couple of members of staff that one of the things the royals found difficult about Meghan was that she was a bit too relaxed,” Quinn exclusively tells In Touch. “She was constantly hugging and embracing various royals and even senior members of staff.” The “devastating” truth about William and Meghan, adds a source, “is that their misunderstanding about cultural differences not only hindered their relationship, but sparked a family feud.”

The real reason Meghan and William never got along. In his book, Quinn makes a bombshell claim about palace rumors. “The hugging and cheek-kissing fueled gossip among the staff that Meghan was flirting with William, which she was obviously not,” he writes. “But the tense atmosphere caused by all the touchy-feeliness (and the resultant gossip) deepened the rift between the brothers.”

Meghan’s informality had a negative effect on most of the senior royals, says Quinn. “Kate, William and Charles tended to flinch when she moved in for a hug” which left Meghan, 43, “understandably hurt,” he writes, adding that “Meghan even tried to hug a singularly stiff Old Etonian equerry. He too flinched as if she’d tried to poke him in the eye, as another member of staff put it.” (In Spare, Harry reveals that Meghan didn’t initiate at least one embrace, with “one of Granny’s equerries …. He handed Meg a thank-you note and gave her a tight hug,” he writes, after she consoled him over the death of his son.) Meghan has acknowledged that The Firm’s behavior was foreign to her. “I was a hugger. I’ve always been a hugger, I didn’t realize that that is really jarring for a lot of Brits,” she said in her Netflix series, Harry & Meghan. “I guess I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside. [I thought there would be] a forward-facing way of being, and then you close the door and go, ‘You can relax now.’ But that formality carries over on both sides. And that was surprising to me.”

Also surprising? How William was reluctant to believe that his brother could truly be in love with someone like Meghan. “He’d actually been pretty discouraging about my even dating Meg,” Harry writes in Spare. “One day … he’d predicted a host of difficulties I could expect if I hooked up with
an ‘American actress,’ a phrase he always managed to make sound like ‘convicted felon.’”

She didn’t have much of an ally in her fellow commoner, , either. Harry, 40, writes of the pair’s tense 2018 showdown over various slights, including a gaffe in which Meghan had referred to Kate’s “baby brain,” for which the princess, 43, wanted an apology. “You talked about my hormones. We’re not close enough for you to talk about my hormones!” Harry quotes Kate as saying, adding that William, 42, “pointed at Meg. ‘It’s rude, Meghan. It’s not what’s done here in Britain.’”

Meghan had not only had trouble adjusting to British custom, but to her place in The Firm, according to Quinn. “She was a great believer in grabbing the bull by the horns — except the royal family is not really a bull,” he quotes one staffer as saying. This contributed to her “Duchess Difficult” nickname. “The strongly held view among current and former royal staff is that Meghan felt she was standing up for her husband, telling ‘her truth’ and encouraging him to tell his,” he writes, “but this was seen as deeply disruptive.”

It’s no wonder Harry — who writes of his “longing to hug” his grandmother and of his father’s difficulty in showing emotions — ended up embracing the casual California lifestyle instead. But his differences with his family aren’t insurmountable, says the source. Since Kate’s cancer diagnosis, “she and William have actually loosened up a lot, hugging people at appearances and even sharing intimate details about their struggles,” says the source. “Eventually maybe they’ll realize they have more in common with Meghan than they thought, and let bygones be bygones.”