A restless prince feels misunderstood by the world and maligned by the media. Locked in a feud that has engulfed the royal family, he is deeply frustrated and desperate to tell his side of the story, so he decides to co-operate on a candid book. He has already made sensational claims in a television documentary but the book includes many more incendiary details. His family, the monarchy and the country are astonished by the damaging revelations.
The year is 1994 and the Prince of Wales has been working with Jonathan Dimbleby on a television programme and biography that will change the world’s understanding of the anguished heir to the throne and his relationships with his wife and parents.
Almost three decades later, the Duke of Sussex’s memoir, Spare, has laid bare, in even greater depth than he did in his interview with Oprah Winfrey and his Netflix series, the story of how his relationships with his brother and father collapsed.
At a meeting after the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral, Charles is said to have told his warring sons: “Please, boys. Don’t make my final years a misery.” But the revelations in the book, many of which have already leaked, are likely to cast a shadow for many years, even if a reconciliation is, somehow, eventually achieved.
Aside from the pain of seeing the details of his sons’ feud documented in intimate detail, the King seems likely to find much in the book that pertains directly and hurtfully to him. Harry says that when he was 20 he heard the story that as soon as he was born his father allegedly told Diana: “You’ve given me an heir and a spare — my work is done.” It was presumably a joke, he said, but notes caustically that immediately afterwards his father was “said to have gone off to meet his girlfriend”.
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Harry’s difficult relationship with Camilla will no doubt be well known to Charles but it may infuriate him to see it outlined to the world, particularly Harry and William’s alleged pleas to their father not to marry her. Harry says he knew that the marriage, which he explosively claims was only “grudgingly” approved by the Queen, would drive his father away from his sons. He says, devastatingly: “I wasn’t happy about losing a second parent” and claims that his stepmother “sacrificed me on her public relations altar”.
The King, whose own parents were distant, may find it upsetting that Harry saw him as being ill equipped at the moment of greatest crisis; the death of his mother. When Charles told Harry about Diana’s death, “Pa didn’t hug me. He wasn’t great at showing emotions under normal circumstances, how could he be expected to show them in such a crisis?” He also describes Charles making an ill-judged joke about Harry not being his son, at a time when false rumours were circulating that James Hewitt was his real father.
Another excerpt describes how the boys sometimes fought as children, including in the back of the car when being driven by their father in Scotland. Charles was forced to stop the car in a ditch and ordered William out to ride with the bodyguards in a separate vehicle.
However angry Charles feels about the book, he will be keenly aware that Harry is not exactly a royal pioneer when it comes to pouring out his frustrations in book form.
When he and the Duchess of Sussex spoke their “truth” to Winfrey and to the producers assigned to them by their Netflix paymaster, Harry knew they were using television as powerfully as his father had with Dimbleby, and his mother did the following year in her notorious conversation with Martin Bashir, in which she lamented that there were “three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded”.
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Harry will also have known all too well the deep impact that can be achieved through telling your story in remorseless detail over hundreds of pages. Diana kicked off the war with her husband when she taped answers to questions sent to her by Andrew Morton so he could produce his 1992 book Diana: Her True Story. She talked about her marriage making her so unhappy she tried to kill herself.
Charles began talking to Dimbleby that same summer and decided to co-operate in a way that an heir to the throne had never done before. In the documentary that was broadcast in 1994, Charles: The Private Man, the Public Role, he admitted that he had been unfaithful to Diana but only after his marriage had irretrievably broken down, and that Camilla Parker-Bowles was “a dear friend”. Dimbleby’s book, published a few months later, included a great deal more detail about the breakdown of his marriage and his relationship with Parker-Bowles. It also painted a portrait of a marriage that was never a love match.
Much of the 700-page book was taken up examining Charles’s projects and views of the world, but it included stunning revelations about his strange, complicated and often unhappy relationship with his parents. The Queen was depicted as distant and unaffectionate. The Duke of Edinburgh was domineering, mocking, sometimes even bullying in the way he behaved towards Charles and issued him with what Charles took to be an ultimatum to marry Diana or end the relationship. The revelations about his parents caused deep hurt.
Harry’s book is in the first person, even if the words have all been run through a ghostwriter’s computer. Dimbleby’s book, The Prince of Wales, was a biography, which included chunks of interviews with him along with many other voices and the author’s interpretations. Nevertheless, it was authorised by Charles and he offered Dimbleby unprecedented cooperation.
The broadcaster and journalist followed him around the country and across the world over two years, watching him up close and interviewing him for many hours. The Prince allowed Dimbleby access to his diaries and thousands of letters and gave his friends and relatives permission to talk candidly.
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Two years after its publication, the historian Ben Pimlott summed up the effect of the book. “Dimbleby’s references to the Queen and Prince Philip were brief. Since, however, they were assumed to come from the Prince of Wales, they helped establish a new legend,” he wrote in his own book, The Queen. “The Queen was presented as cold, Philip as a bully. The monarch and her husband, formerly set in the nation’s imagination as the ideal mother and father, became indifferent parents, who caused the marriages of their children to break down by starving them of love.”
Gyles Brandreth, in his recent biography of the late Queen, considered the looming publication of Harry’s book. “I do not think King Charles is looking forward to Harry’s book with much relish,” he wrote, but added that because of his co-operation with Dimbleby all those years ago, “he is not in so strong a position to complain about it as his parents would have been.”
Under his deal with the prince, Dimbleby agreed to take into account any comments regarding factual inaccuracies but was free to make his own interpretations. He said that he had tried to accommodate his subject’s sensitivity about the effect of what he might write on other people, especially his family. The prince had asked that he should not use any knowledge he acquired in ways which might hurt other living people. “I cannot claim to have succeeded,” Dimbleby wrote.
By necessity, his mother was distracted by the burdens of being an heiress-presumptive and then a young Queen. Philip, a naval officer, was away at sea when Charles was young. This frequent separation from his parents “combined with the emotional reserve of both mother and father, did much to ensure that the bonds of affection that grew between young charge and devoted nannies were at least as powerful ... as those between the child and his parents”.
The Queen and Philip were away on long official trips, including one of six months just after his fifth birthday. It seems extraordinary to us today that he spent that birthday with the Queen Mother at Windsor while the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were shooting at Sandringham with the King of Romania. The Queen Mother, who offered praise and encouragement, developed a bond with him that would become “the most intimate of the Prince’s relationships within the family.”
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The Duke, whose own childhood had been marked by exile from Greece, the death of a sister in a plane crash and his parents’ estrangement, was a challenging father. In contrast to the outgoing, confident Anne, who was adored by Philip, Charles was “timid and passive and easily cowed by the forceful personality of his father.” When Philip upbraided Charles, tears filled the boy’s eyes.
Philip thought he was preparing Charles for the rigours of his future role, but the son lived in trepidation of his “brusqueness.” One nanny departed after the duke perceived that she was indulging his son’s “softness.”
His parents did not display affection, even in private, and another nanny, Mabel Anderson, became, according to Dimbleby, a “surrogate mother”. Even as an adult “the heir to the throne would turn as soon to Mabel for comfort and advice as to his parents, whom he did not cease to love and honour, but with whom open and easy communication was to remain difficult.”
Philip would often find Charles’s withdrawn demeanour “irksome”, causing the boy to withdraw even more. Philip didn’t just correct him but seemed intent on “mocking him as well, so that he seemed to be foolish and tongue-tied in front of friends as well as family. To their distress and embarrassment, the small boy was frequently brought to tears by the banter to which he was subjected and to which he could find no retort,” Dimbleby said. One friend of the Duke concluded that Philip regarded his son as “a bit of a wimp” and that “Charles realised what his father thought, and it hurt him deeply.” A close relation said the “rough way” Philip addressed Charles was “very bullying.” An otherwise devoted retainer said: “Charles was frightened of him.”
Dimbleby wrote that friends were “frustrated by the failure of the child’s mother to intervene by protective word or gesture. She was not indifferent so much as detached, deciding that in domestic matters she would submit entirely to the father’s will. It was the more perplexing because they otherwise had every reason to believe that both parents had a deep if inarticulate love for their son, and that this love was reciprocated.”
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Charles did not share the passion for horses that united the Queen, Philip and Anne. When Charles excitedly returned from the library one day after being shown a collection of drawings by Leonardo, the rest of the family were bemused “and, as so often, he felt squashed and guilty; as if by choosing the library rather than horses he had in some indefinable way let his family down.”
At Gordonstoun, the school on the northeast coast of Scotland that Philip had attended, Charles was relentlessly bullied. “It’s absolute hell here most of the time and I wish I could come home,” he wrote in a letter, and in another said: “I simply dread going to bed as I get hit all night long.”
Philip’s response to Charles’s unhappiness was to write bracing letters in which he admonished his son “to be strong and resourceful,” reported Dimbleby. “This did not help.”
By the time Philip was involved in helping to arrange Charles’s spell in the Royal Navy, the relationship between father and son was conducted mostly by letter. They lived separate lives when they were in Buckingham Palace.
‘Though he was too proud to admit it, the prince still craved the affection and appreciation that his father — and his mother — seemed unable or unwilling to proffer,” Dimbleby wrote. “Therefore, in self-protection, he retreated more and more into formality with his parents, which their closest mutual friends could do nothing to dissolve.”
After Charles had been courting Lady Diana Spencer for a while and media attention had reached fever pitch, the duke told him that he could not delay for much longer a decision on whether to marry her or end the relationship. the prince interpreted his father’s attitude as “an ultimatum. Detecting in the duke’s advice an insinuation that he had callously exploited an innocent girl and that, by his hesitation, he was threatening to dishonour the family, he felt ill used but impotent.” He confided in a friend that he wanted to do the right thing for the country and his family “but I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it”. As Dimbleby put it, this was not “the most auspicious frame of mind in which to offer his hand in marriage.”
“If his betrothal to Diana Spencer was hardly the love match for which his friends had hoped, that she had perhaps wanted, and which the nation certainly assumed, he was determined that their marriage should succeed”, Dimbleby wrote. The headlines when the book was published said that he had never been in love with Diana. Dimbleby insisted in interviews that Charles had not said that he had never loved her, but the account of their marriage suggested that was the case.
Dimbleby did not mention the toe-curling engagement interview when, asked if he were in love, he said “whatever love means”. But he detailed how Diana became miserable and bulimic soon after she moved into Buckingham Palace and took an intense interest in Charles’s relationship with Camilla, even though he had told her there would be no other woman in his life.
On their honeymoon, he was perplexed by her mood swings. It is easy to see why she’d be aggrieved. On Britannia, the royal yacht, he locked himself away writing letters in the Duke of Edinburgh’s cabin or reading on the verandah, leaving her to hang out with the sailors. When they got to Balmoral, he went fishing and hosted his friends. “So far from being the focus of her husband’s attention, he seemed to go out of his way to avoid the moments of intimacy with her that she craved,” Dimbleby wrote.
If this account was read by their sons, aged twelve and ten in 1994, it must have been devastating to think that their father had never loved their mother. A few weeks after the publication of the book, Andrew Morton wrote an account in The Sunday Times of the Princess of Wales’s loneliness, which included a glimpse of the princes’ desperate hope that their parents would be reconciled. “As she mourns her unfulfilled life, grief catches her by surprise,” Morton wrote. “Once she heard the boys say: ‘Daddy really does love you, mummy,’ on their return from Highgrove and she found herself gulping back the tears.”
As the marriage disintegrated and became the subject of tabloid speculation, Charles’s parents were of little help. “The emotional gulf between the prince and his parents was hard to bridge, while communication between them was normally limited to the exchange of social pleasantries and the formal business of the family enterprise,” Dimbleby explained.
However, following the publication of Morton’s book, in the Queen’s “annus horribilis”, both parents rallied to Charles. The duke wrote him a long letter in which he praised his son for saint-like fortitude.
Towards the end of the book Dimbleby addressed the state of play between Charles and his parents. “His relationship with his parents has never been easy: the gulf of misunderstanding that often exists between the generations has been sharpened by the intense pressures of public life, and the expression of mutual affection does not come easily to any of them,” he wrote.
After publication, Philip delivered what appeared to be a withering assessment of his son’s decision to open up to Dimbleby. “I’ve never discussed private matters and I don’t think the Queen has either. Very few members of the family have,” he said in an interview in The Daily Telegraph that appeared the day after the publication of the first extracts. “I’ve never made any comment about any member of the family in 40 years and I’m not going to start now.”
Buckingham Palace sources were quoted as saying that the duke had never issued an “ultimatum” about marrying Diana, but he had been concerned that his son should make up his mind for the sake of her feelings. The Times reported that Charles did not regret co-operating on the “serious and deeply researched biography”, according to a spokesman. But a royal aide said: “The Prince of Wales himself has always been at pains to explain that he remembers nothing but a happy family life, even though as in every family there were occasional difficulties while he was growing up.” The aide said that the prince did not necessarily agree with all the author’s interpretations.
Charles’s depiction of his emotional estrangement from the Queen and Prince Philip “hurt his parents”, Brandreth wrote in his most recent book.
“The Queen, of course, said nothing, but I know — because Prince Philip told me — that it saddened her. It made the duke bloody angry, both because he reckoned it was unfair and because he thought it was bloody stupid of the Prince of Wales to air his grievances in public. All that Prince Philip would say to me on the record about his and his wife’s parenting skills was, we did our best.’” Brandreth added: “Both the Queen and the Duke were appalled by the Dimbleby book” and thought the decision to grant access to his diaries and letters was “sheer foolishness”. They could not see how Charles’s indiscretions, or special pleading on his own behalf, could serve his cause or that of the royal family. And “their recollection of Charles’s childhood was rather different from his own”.
Sally Bedell Smith, the royal biographer, wrote in her book on Charles that he had tried to distance himself from the depiction of his parents, insisting that it came from members of his circle and Dimbleby. When the Queen and Philip read the descriptions of themselves in Dimbleby’s book they were angry and “wounded, to say the least. Charles’s siblings — Anne especially — sprang to their parents’ defence,” she write. Anne said that she didn’t believe there was any evidence the Queen wasn’t caring: “It just beggars belief.”
Bedell Smith suggested that Charles sought to make amends in a TV documentary on the occasion of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. The film included footage of an idyllic childhood at Sandringham and Balmoral.
Scenes of the Queen romping with her children “were meant to dispel the notion of her being distant and unaffectionate.” At a charity dinner, Charles paid tribute to his father by reading excerpts from The Song of Hiawatha, which Philip had read to him as a child.
The late Countess of Mountbatten said in an interview with Bedell Smith that Philip’s parenting style involved “trying to help Charles develop character in his life”.
Charles took a different approach with his own boys. “The prince is eager to establish a lasting relationship with his two sons,” Dimbleby wrote at the end of his book. Despite some simmering tensions that are now becoming apparent, he clearly succeeded broadly in doing that until the seismic activity that followed Harry’s marriage to Meghan Markle. This caused a rift which only yawns wider with the tremors caused by the thudding impact of Harry’s memoir.
