william and harry battle of brothers
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What Really Went Down Between Princes William and Harry?

Theories from the new book Battle of Brothers, out today

Where did it all go wrong between Prince William and Prince Harry? To the public, it felt like one minute they were the inseparable twosome, brothers bonded forever by the loss of their mother—and then suddenly they were in a cold war, the rift between them so undeniable that Harry actually addressed it in an interview last year. “We’re certainly on different paths at the moment,” he told ITV last October. “As brothers, you have good days and you have bad days.”

The question of how we got to the point where—if reports are to be believed—the brothers haven’t spoken in months is something that veteran royal commentator Robert Lacey’s new book seeks to answer. While Battle of Brothers is no Finding Freedom—Lacey didn’t seem to have the (alleged, much disputed) direct access those authors had to their subjects—it does shed some interesting light (and context) on just how things got as frosty as they have. Spoiler alert: William isn’t quite the paragon The Firm wants us all to think he is…

Tidbit #1: William and Harry’s dynamic has *always* been complicated

Popular lore says things first went sour between the brothers around the time that Harry, head over heels in love, declared his intention to marry Meghan, whom he’d known for a very short time, like, yesterday. That’s something Battle of Brothers backs up, although Lacey seems to think it was out of William’s concern for Meghan and what all that would mean for her. But he goes much, much further back to lay out the boys’ history—and makes a compelling case that their tensions date back to *before* Harry was even born.

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How can that be? Well, aside from the obvious “heir and spare” psychological damage, there’s an interesting assertion that Charles desperately wanted a daughter after Wills, the necessary son, was born. Charles and his sister, Anne, had been close growing up—he chose his country house to be just seven miles from hers in adulthood—and he wanted the same dynamic for his kids. Diana (who, let’s remember was only 23 at the time), knowing this, found out that Harry was going to be a boy and decided to keep the news to herself. “These happened to be warm and rather close months in the Wales’ marriage,” writes Lacey, “and Diana was clearly scared of spoiling that.” The result was a surprise for Charles in the delivery room—and he apparently didn’t take it well. (“Oh God, it’s a boy,” Diana later recounted him saying. “And it’s got red hair!”) According to Lacey, Charles “did not praise or thank” Diana for giving birth to a healthy baby. “He just sulked.” Per Diana, that was a downward turning point in their relationship—the inference being that, beyond being the hierarchically inferior “second son,” Harry started off life on an entirely different playing field with his father than his older brother, inextricably tangled up with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage.

Tidbit #2: William regarded Harry as “his”

According to Lacey, both Diana and Charles were indulgent parents while being absorbed in their own personal lives, leaving a lot of their boys’ care to nannies. As a result, little Willam was “a law unto himself,” earning the nickname “His Royal Naughtiness” and he apparently regarded Harry as his “favourite toy,” something his little brother didn’t mind…then.

“William spends the entire time pouring an endless supply of hugs and kisses onto Harry,” Diana is quoted as saying at the time. “We are hardly allowed near.” Diana, to her credit, always tried to treat her boys as a unit, not favouring her eldest because he was a future king—but then she, in Lacey’s opinion, would undermine that by calling them “One” and “Two” in interviews.

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Fast-forward to recent years, and Lacey sees an echo of this dynamic in William’s difficulty in dealing with a more independent, “Meghan-fired” Harry who, apparently, “flummoxed” him. According to Lacey, William told a friend: “I’ve put my arm around my brother all our lives, and I can’t do it anymore. We’re separate entities.” His analysis of that statement? “The inference of this apparently kindly remark was that William could not deal with his brother as a separate entity—or did not choose to…his lifelong care for Harry had always been based on some element of control, and that had now surely vanished.”

Tidbit #3: Harry was offered up as the royal scapegoat

When it comes to public perception, William has always been the “good one”—reserved, a bit staid, very serious—and Harry the fun bad boy with a strong rebellious streak. While you can’t deny Harry got up to some hijinks and exhibited some majorly questionable judgement (wearing a Swastika-emblazoned uniform to a costume party springs to mind), Lacey argues that Harry often took the flak for things that his older brother did, too, but managed to get away with because he was protected for dynastic reasons.

For instance, back in their school days, when the basement of their dad’s house at Highgrove was turned into “Club H” complete with a “well stocked bar,” a tween Harry would hang out with Wills and his older friends. “William ‘relaxed’ as intensively as Harry did,” writes Lacey. “In fact, the sixteen year old was already a steady drinker.” (Elsewhere, Lacey calls William “the Lord of Misrule” behind those teenage parties.)

Fast-forward a few years later, and not only was 15-year-old Harry “drinking in serious quantities,” but his love for weed, learned from his brother’s friends, had earned him the nickname “Hash Harry,” thanks to “the smoky aroma that emanated from his room” at Eton. With his brother off at university, a lonely Harry started to get stoned alone on the regular, and eventually a Highgrove staffer reported him to Prince Charles.

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Where things get really interesting is in Lacey’s account of what happened next. The widely believed story is that Charles, upon finding this out, took his son to a rehab facility to nip it in the bud, something he got major parenting points for in the public eye. But according to Lacey, it was Mark Dyer, a family friend, who actually took Harry to visit drug addicts and learn about the consequences of drug use, months before his dad ever found out. Charles’s PR team spun the story into “a fable of fatherly redemption”—by making a deal with the News of the World, which broke the story, to let them run with their reporting but only with this much more positive-for-Charles ordering of events. But at what cost to Harry? “Dad might have emerged from the story smelling of roses,” writes Lacey, “but it was Harry who was typecast as the ‘Bad Boy of Buckingham Palace’ or ‘Boozy Harry.’ That was the beginning of the relentless popular media stereotyping that would eventually drive Harry from Britain.”

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Tidbit #4: There was never any rift between Meghan and Kate

Contrary to the narrative pushed relentlessly in the tabloids—and somewhat substantiated by Finding Freedom—Lacey writes that there was no drama between the two duchesses. “Meghan and Kate actually got on rather well from the start,” writes Lacey. “They might not be best buddy material, but here they found themselves, sister outsiders in their extraordinary royal situation, and both of them were cool professionals, treating each other with mutual respect. Each was far too canny to make an enemy of a prospective sister-in-law—it only made sense to be friends.” Surprise, surprise, everyone wanted to blame two women for their husbands’ complicated relationship that began decades earlier in one of the most fraught families of all time. Sounds about right.

 

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