Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle reportedly felt they could no longer deal with the palace aides and the royal family, who refused to take their concerns seriously. Insiders claim it didn’t have to be that way.

The Royal Family were reportedly upset, disappointed, and angry when Meghan Markle and Prince Harry revealed their decision to quit their senior roles. Although the couple claim they had been thinking about their decision for months, it came as a surprise to Prince Charles, the Duke of Cambridge, and the Queen.

In the following days, the family worked alongside their most trusted aides to arrange the logistics of Harry and Meghan’s new lives, but the couple was reportedly unhappy with the final conditions of their arrangement. The Queen restricted them from using the word “royal” in their new branding for future endeavors, leaving them no choice but to scrap their SussexRoyal account and website.

If insiders are anything to go by, things turned out to be more drastic than they were supposed to, and the majority of the upset could have been avoided if Meghan and Harry would have handled things differently. In their new biography Finding Freedom, royal journalists Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand write, “Even sources close to Harry and Meghan had to admit that the way the couple was forced to approach the situation (mainly in the act of keeping the family and their team in the dark about the website) ‘created a lot of ill will in the household and especially in the family.”

The couple would have reached a more beneficial agreement to let them lead the life they wanted, provided they had handled things in a more dignified, private way, says a senior Buckingham Palace aide. Another courtier said the couple oversimplified what they were asking for, thinking they would give their rider, negotiate over email and arrive in London, give a 3-month notice, and fly back to Canada.

Much to their chagrin, they didn’t have a choice as they thought the royal family had decided not to pay heed to their concerns. The courtier went on to reveal that Harry and Meghan felt they had been patronized by the staff and other family members for too long.

People poked fun at them when they opened up about their grievances, never realizing that the couple would actually something so drastic. “The explosive reaction was a direct result of their growing impatience,” the courtier said, adding that it wouldn’t have reached that point only if the family and those working with the household had taken their concerns more seriously.