BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN
ROYALS
THE MEDIA BLITZ FOLLOWING THE JAN. 10 PUBLICATION of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare has one major theme: he has grown apart from his father King Charles III and his brother William, the Prince of Wales.
Family tensions boiled over in public when, in January 2020, Harry announced that he was taking a step back from his royal duties because of what he saw as a lack of support from the palace staff over negative tabloid coverage of his wife Meghan Markle. But passages from Spare suggest tensions go back to birth—an underlying resentment of being “the spare,” while his older brother is “the heir” to the throne. (The book is jam-packed with revelations, such as Harry’s claim that he killed 25 Taliban fighters from a helicopter in Afghanistan—which experts say is dangerous to publicize.)
There’s a long history of royal sibling feuds, according to Alexander Larman, author of The Windsors at War: The King, His Brother, and a Family Divided. As he puts it, “Think of James II, who began as Duke of York and then made a spectacular mess of being King [in the 1680s] after [his brother] Charles II died. Or Richard III, who, if Shakespeare is to be believed, brought about the deaths of both his brothers Edward IV and the Duke of Clarence to ascend the throne [in the 1480s], only to be forced off it by Henry VII. Nobody’s thinking that Harry has had anything quite so dramatic in mind . . . yet, anyway.”
In a Jan. 8 60 Minutes interview, Harry said he was going public about the drama because the royal family’s relationship to the British press has made it impossible for him to mend his relationship with his father and brother. “Every single time I’ve tried to do it privately, there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife,” Harry told Anderson Cooper.
Harry reveals he and his brother William have been living separate lives since their mother Princess Diana died in a 1997 car crash. In high school, William told his younger brother to stay away from him. But Harry suggests that dating Meghan, an American actor, starting in 2016 str
