How Prince Harry grew tired of royal life in the shadow of William
Royal duties changed Prince Harry from a charming, funny man to a sullen rebel.
It was never easy for Prince Harry to be happy, but seven years ago, as a warrior pilot above the battlefields of Afghanistan, he seemed to have found a measure of peace. Harry was a Royal Highness, but his men called him Captain Wales and in 2013 he proudly told a fellow soldier: “I’ve got the best of both worlds.”
Towards the end of his second Afghan tour, as an Apache co-pilot gunner, Harry told the soldier he finally felt free of the restrictions that harnessed his older brother, William, second in line to the throne. “I get to do all this,” Harry said. “I can fly helicopters. I can shine a spotlight on the work I want to do.” He could be both a royal and a soldier.
Returning to civvy street in 2015 turned out to be harder than he thought. “The reality is royal duties,” he told me the following year. “Most of the areas I looked at, from being able to work part-time and also do royal duties, just simply weren’t going to work.”
He explored possible careers as a rugby coach or a fireman but “what I can’t do is choose a job and not give 100 per cent”.
It was clear, back then, that he couldn’t conceive of letting down the Queen. “I absolutely adore my grandmother and I would take on everything she wants us to. We will be there ready to support her, when needs be.”
Haunted rebel
How sad his promises sound today, as he prepares for crisis talks with his grandmother, father and brother after the Queen summonsed him, Princes Charles and William to Sandringham for a meeting on Monday.
Four years after I sat down with Harry — in the run-up to the Invictus Games in Florida in 2016, shortly before he was introduced to the American actor Meghan Markle — it’s hard to overstate the magnitude of his transformation. The charming, open, funny prince I’ve observed for years, and interviewed three times, has become the sullen, haunted rebel who confronted the House of Windsor last week with the prospect of a disastrous family split.
As if one of her sons consorting with a paedophile weren’t trouble enough, the Queen now faces an infinitely more appealing grandson threatening to do a runner to North America, with his wife and baby in tow.
Many were quick to blame the latest royal crisis on the most important change in Harry’s life since his time as a bachelor war hero. He is now a married man, thrilled with being a father, so hordes of royal-watchers agreed that the changes we have seen to his princely demeanour must surely be the fault of his wife. The headlines spoke of Megxit.
However, while there’s little doubt that Meghan’s influence was part of the messy, and overly antagonistic, manner of the Sussexes’ departure, it would be a mistake to conclude that Harry’s disenchantment is entirely down to his wife. Tensions in Harry and William’s household appeared long before Meghan’s arrival.
Princes raised as equals
It would, of course, have made a lovely fairytale if no conflict had ever soured the memory of those two boys who captured the world’s hearts as they walked behind the coffin of their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, a week after her death in a car crash in Paris in 1997. Harry was 12. William, who was 15 at the time, said later that the public walk was “one of the hardest things I have ever done”.
Yet there’s nothing fair about the laws of primogeniture, and it was perhaps inevitable the boys would grow apart as adults. Diana raised her sons as equals, which frustrated senior courtiers, who worried that it would lead to problems down the line. William was on a path to the throne; Harry, like “spares” before him, was forced to carve out a role of his own.
They were never going to end up equal. For a while Harry’s star outshone William’s as he went to war and came back full of ideas for helping fellow veterans, launching charities and trying to make a difference. Yet the unbreakable restraints of the royal pecking order were certain to prevail.
“Harry felt frustrated that he was having to run things by William and sometimes not take things on, or scale things back, so as not to outshine his brother, which was starting to happen,” one source close to both brothers tells me. “There were clashes over territory on things like conservation and the military. Harry wanted to crack on with new ideas and not feel restricted by William and having to do things a certain way.”
William’s wife, Kate, conscious of growing tensions between the brothers, suggested the three of them collaborate on their Heads Together mental health campaign. It unified them, at least publicly, for a while. When Meghan arrived, she is also said to have struggled with the royal pecking order and the deference required to more senior members of the family.
Meghan’s indifference to protocol was both charming and controversial: it upset the established order. A source close to the royal family says: “She’s always hugging me, and when I say, ‘Ma’am, that really isn’t the done thing. It only works if there’s a degree of formality’, she says, ‘Don’t call me Ma’am — I’m Meghan. To hell with protocol’.” In 2018 news broke that the so-called Fab Four — the brothers and their wives — were splitting their households. “Harry was very opposed to it at first,” a source close to the brothers says. “He saw it as the opening of a chasm between him and his brother. William was also concerned. He never wanted to cast his brother adrift, but they couldn’t go on as they were. They were constantly clashing on their style and approach.”
Ire over pecking order
There was another element to the rift: William and Kate were often described in glowing terms by the media, compared with the scepticism that accompanied some reporting of Meghan and Harry. Friends of the Sussexes felt William also had faults and comparisons between the couples were unfair.
Harry had become deeply sensitive to issues of status and pecking order. When Harry and Meghan moved their office from Kensington Palace to Buckingham Palace last year, he was no longer the junior brother in the building. He talked about becoming “the most senior MRF (member of the royal family) at Buckingham Palace after the Queen”, a source says. The distinction clearly mattered to him.
Not long before last week’s announcement, a source told me they were aware that simmering tensions were coming to the boil. “I’m trying to encourage the institution and their advisers to let both feel less trapped,” the source said. “I worry about Harry. There’s a lot of anger there.”
In the end, the royal institution didn’t move fast enough for the Sussexes. “There is a real feeling of ‘us against the world’ with Harry at the moment,” another source says. “It is a real shame that they are so divided now. What the royal family needs more than anything is unity.”
I am told there is still a firm conviction in the family that the brothers “will be there for each other” and the Prince of Wales continues to see Harry and Meghan as integral to his vision of a “slimmed-down” future monarchy. However, a friend of the Duke of Sussex adds: “Harry is so stubborn and determined. He’s in that frame of mind — ‘I’m standing my ground. I’m a man of conviction and we’ve been saying we’re not happy, so now we’re off.’ At some stage it will dawn on him what he’s giving up. He can’t possibly understand what he’s doing to his family. He’s always adored ‘Granny’, but the Queen will be really wounded by this.”
Reconciliation unlikely
The prospects of reconciliation do not look promising. I remember being told of a leaving party for one of William and Harry’s aides, at Kensington Palace one balmy summer evening, not long after Harry and Meghan’s wedding.
“It was really telling,” a guest at the event revealed. “William and Kate were there from the start, going to great lengths to show their appreciation for everything this person had done for them. Harry and Meghan turned up late, and when they finally arrived, instead of mingling, they sort of stood by a pillar and stayed there, just the two of them.”
William went on to give “a really touching and affectionate speech, with lots of amusing anecdotes that included Harry, and he was obviously trying to include him in the evening. But Harry and Meghan were literally off stage.”
A source close to the brothers for years concludes: “What William really cares about now is the preservation of the monarchy and limiting the damage that is done to it. For the time being, William has decided to put as much distance between the Cambridges and the Sussexes as possible, to limit any damage by association.”
So where does this leave the House of Windsor, as it scrambles to make sense of an impetuous, wounding and seemingly irreversible gambit by a couple that seemed to have all the weapons to help secure the monarchy for another generation?
“The family’s biggest fear has always been of Harry and Meghan moving out of their jurisdiction,” one royal source says. “They worry about the danger of them being cut loose, where they go off like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to be celebrities in the US — curiosities to be gawped at.”
I too worry for Harry, who will miss the “royal stuff” he is so good at. As one of his lifelong friends puts it: “He’s disappeared. He’s always had such a tight circle of friends, but he doesn’t see them any more. He doesn’t go out with the boys.”
The friend adds: “He’s become a recluse and his friends are distraught. Everyone hoped that Harry and Meghan would get on board with being part of the family firm going forwards. But now there’s no chance.”
Another source was more optimistic. “Yes, there are some friends who have been isolated. But his closest friends will always be there, for whenever he needs them down the line.”
However, there is something that everyone agrees on. As a friend of Harry’s says: “It’s desperately sad.”
The Sunday Times
