King Charles reportedly urged Meghan Markle to reconcile with her estranged dad Thomas Markle before she stepped down as a senior working royal. Before marrying into the Royal Family in 2018, the 44-year-old is known to have been very close to her dad – once referring to him as “thoughtful, inspiring, hardworking” in a social media post in 2014.

His absence from her wedding to Harry was announced just hours before, with Buckingham Palace revealing that he would not be present due to health issues and his recovery from heart surgery. Just days before Meghan and Harry’s wedding, Thomas secretly collaborated with a British paparazzi photographer to stage a series of pictures – a move that has now led to his estrangement from his daughter.

The father-daughter duo are thought to have not spoken since 2018, with him having never met Harry and his two grandchildren.

According to the Daily Mail, the King, who celebrates his 77th birthday today, allegedly “berated” Harry and Meghan to visit Thomas to end his then-recent spate of embarrassing interviews.

This included the one with Mail on Sunday, which is where he threatened to “unload” on the Royal Family after being cut off from Meghan.

In Thomas’s absence, King Charles walked his daughter-in-law down the aisle at St George’s Chapel in Windsor on May 19, 2018.

In their 2022 Netflix documentary series, Meghan claimed that she asked the King to walk her down the aisle after her father got caught up in a paparazzi scandal.

She explained: “Harry’s dad is very charming. And I said to him, like, ‘I’ve lost my dad in this.’ So him, as my father-in-law, was really important to me.

“So I asked him to walk me down the aisle and he said yes. The whole thing was surreal. It was at that moment I could see H.”

Meghan now resides in California with Harry, 41, and their children, Prince Archie, six, and Princess Lilibet, four.