There is nothing new about sibling feuds in the British royal family
If Prince Harry were living in the 15th century instead of the 21st, it wouldn’t be the king’s guest list he was worrying about – but the king’s hit list.
So Prince Harry is not on brother Will’s coronation guest list, according to sources close to William. The Windsor boys are thought not to have spoken since the funeral of their grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, on September 19, 2022 – a royal winter that surprisingly coincides with the release and worldwide promotion of Harry’s memoir, Spare, which recounted a savage assault by the elder prince that resulted in a ripped necklace, a broken dog’s bowl and a lucrative publishing deal.
There is nothing new about sibling feuds in the English royal family, although Harry was unusual in putting his out there in airport bookshops.
When King Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon in favour of Anne Boleyn, life became awkward for Catherine’s daughter, Mary, who soon found herself usurped in the king’s affections by her baby sister, Elizabeth.
Mary never forgot the slights she endured from her stepmother and after becoming queen she wasted no time in locking up her sister in the Tower of London – the place where her mother was beheaded and where King Richard III disposed of his own brother’s sons.
Elizabeth stayed in the tower for only a year, but the experience taught her a lesson about royal realpolitik and as queen she incarcerated her own uppity cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, before eventually having her executed for treason.
If Queen Elizabeth I knew one thing, it was that marriage – especially marriage to a foreigner – spelled trouble, so she famously kept her suitors dangling. Some of them, like the hapless Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, dangled all the way to the chopping block. But there’s no doubt England’s Virgin Queen was on to something.
There were no Americans asking for Elizabeth’s hand, or none we know of, but Americans have been a common denominator in recent royal feuds. According to Spare, William called Harry’s wife, Meghan Markle, “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive” – hardly terms of fraternal endearment but nothing to the epithets bestowed on King Edward VIII’s American bride, the much-vilified, twice-divorced Wallis Simpson.
Harry’s great-grandfather, King George VI, never forgave Harry’s great-granduncle Edward for giving up the throne to marry Simpson, seeing his abdication as a personal betrayal since it obliged George to accept the crown he never wanted.
The brothers are said to have met only a handful of times after the abdication before they fell out for good over a spectacular row – ripped necklaces, broken dog’s bowls, the lot – triggered by King George’s refusal to allow Simpson the title Her Royal Highness. As young men the brothers are thought to have got along well, with George taking a particular shine to his older brother’s twice-married mistress, Thelma, Viscountess Furness.
It all went south after Edward met Simpson. Even the ageing King George V predicted the worst for his lovelorn elder son, allegedly telling an acquaintance: “When I’m dead, the boy will ruin himself in 12 months.”
The old king was not far out. A year later Edward was hobnobbing with Adolf Hitler at the Berghof and enjoying high tea with Hermann Goering at his hunting estate, all expenses paid by the German government. Joseph Goebbels, who had dinner with Edward, described him in his diary as “a nice, sympathetic fellow” and thought it a shame he was no longer king. According to Joe Bryan and Charles Murphy’s book The Windsor Story, Simpson was less gracious, describing the Nazi propaganda minister as “a tiny, wispy gnome with an enormous skull”.
King George VI died in 1952, his death at the age of 56 often attributed to the strain of being king. At his brother’s funeral Edward was described as “jaunty”.
History records that Prince Harry had his own Third Reich moment, immortalised by Netflix in an episode of The Crown in which Harry asks Will and his girlfriend, Kate Middleton, what they think of the Nazi costume he is trying on for a fancy dress party. “I don’t know,” the sceptical Kate tells him. “Maybe cover the swastika?” To which Will replies reassuringly, “C’mon. Wearing the outfit doesn’t make him a Nazi.”
In his book, Harry offered a different take, saying Kate and brother Will egged him on. Tossing up between a sand-coloured Nazi uniform with a swastika armband and a British pilot’s uniform, Harry said he rang the couple for advice. It was they, he said, who told him to go the full Nazi.
Harry is not the first royal to be undone by an estranged brother and a poor choice of costume. On July 6, 1685, the warring sons of another King Charles – this time King Charles II – led opposing armies at the Battle of Sedgemoor, with Henry FitzRoy, the first Duke of Grafton, defeating his rebellious half-brother, James Scott, the first Duke of Monmouth.
While on the run, Monmouth swapped his ducal finery for the garb of a shepherd, who was quickly found and interrogated. The brown hem of Monmouth’s borrowed coat is said to have given him away as he lay in a ditch, concealed under ferns and brambles. Monmouth was condemned for treason against the new king, James II, and sentenced to death.
After dismissing his simpering plea for clemency, James remarked that Monmouth “did not behave as well as I expected”. Like Anne Boleyn, Monmouth was beheaded and buried at the Tower, although his executioner, the infamous Jack Ketch, botched the job and took several blows to finish him.
Two hundred years earlier George, Duke of Clarence was awaiting the same fate for the same crime at the same place when his brother, King Edward IV, decided to speed up the process. Accusing Clarence of “unnatural, loathly treasons”, Edward had his second youngest brother “privately executed”, drowned by unknown hands, so it’s said, in a vat of Penfolds on February 18, 1478.
In medieval England, finding yourself on the wrong side of the king was usually fatal, even if the king was your brother. If Prince Harry were living in the 15th century instead of the 21st, it would not be the king’s guest list he was worrying about but the king’s hit list.
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