So which one’s the hothead? The truth about ‘Basher Wills’
Prince Harry’s claim that he was struck by his brother while they argued about Meghan isn’t the first time the Prince of Wales’s temperament has been called into question.
This is not the first time tension between a royal William and his younger brother Henry has descended into violence. In 1100, the historian Dan Snow points out, William Rufus died in a very suspicious hunting accident in the New Forest, and his younger brother, Henry, seized the throne.
Nine hundred years later a tussle in the kitchen at Nottingham Cottage, after Prince William told Prince Harry his wife was difficult and rude, resulted in a broken necklace, a shattered dog bowl and the further fracturing of the brothers’ strained relationship.
And further leaks from the Duke of Sussex’s memoir suggest this was not the only time he saw what he calls “the red mist” descend over his brother. At a meeting between Harry, William and their father, after the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral, which was a few weeks after Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, William is reported to have twice lunged at Harry. He grabbed Harry’s shirt during an argument and told him: “Listen to me, Harold, listen! I love you, Harold! I want you to be happy.” Harry replied: “I really don’t think you do.” Prince Charles then apparently raised his hands and said: “Enough - please, boys, don’t make my last years a torment.”
In other leaks from Spare, which is to be published on Tuesday, Harry says that William told him he was being brainwashed by the therapist he was seeing. Harry also accuses William of believing he was unwell as he prepared for a new life abroad, according to a report. Harry suggested that the brothers have a joint therapy session to try and work through their problems but William did not follow up on the offer, according to the Mail on Sunday.
If William was angry then, how must he feel now that his family’s private moments are being revealed by his brother? One friend was quoted as saying William will not retaliate but he is “burning” inside.
Readers who dip into the royal strife in the future may be surprised to learn that it was Harry who was knocked to the ground in Nottingham Cottage. Hitherto it was the younger prince who seemed quicker to anger at intrusive media and, latterly, his own family. He earned the nickname “Harry hothead” among chroniclers.
While his older brother may appear to be more contained and rarely displays temper in public, however, he has also inherited some of their father’s irascibility. William had a close bond with his grandmother, but he has not yet acquired her almost preternatural calm.
The Prince and Princess of Wales have worked hard to build a life where they have control of the direction of their public and private lives and the environment their children are growing up in. The unhappiness of his frustrated and sometimes resentful brother was not something William could control and eventually, after years of simmering, William seems to have boiled over.
“He’s definitely got a temper,” says one source, who has observed both princes over many years, of the older brother. Royal writers describe him as “fiery” and occasionally liable to blow up, especially over issues regarding his family, but that Kate can usually be relied on to persuade him to cool down.
According to Robert Lacey’s 2020 book Battle of Brothers, Camilla was taken aback by the extent of his “ranting and raving” at Prince Charles when she married into the family. William was described as “letting rip with no apparent inhibition in his presence”. He added that “the rows had been earth-shattering by her account, with William doing the shouting and Charles submitting meekly”. William has a stubbornness that showed itself when he was asked by royal aides to refer to his father’s role in his upbringing at events related to the 20th anniversary of his mother’s death in 2017. He reportedly declined to do so.
That year he was also unhappy that Christopher Geidt, the Queen’s private secretary, was forced out after his father and the Duke of York joined forces to pressure the Queen to make a change, Valentine Low writes in his book Courtiers. “William was furious. He spoke to his grandmother and father. He felt Christopher had worked to modernise the institution and bring it closer together,” a source told Low. “He was concerned about the way it had been handled, and how Christopher had been treated.”
Given the traumatic death of his mother, the public scrutiny he endures and the future role he is destined to play, it is understandable that William should have a sometimes turbulent internal world. He has spoken about his mental health struggles. That his private frustrations should sometimes erupt is easy to comprehend, even if violence cannot be condoned.
William was always somewhat rambunctious. As a child, according to Katie Nicholl’s book The Making of a Royal Romance, he was nicknamed “Basher Wills”, and repeatedly rode a bright-yellow plastic truck into the walls and skirting of Craigowan Lodge at Balmoral.
At Highgrove William and Harry spent their time in a treehouse playing army games in junior military fatigues. Nicholl writes of his days at nursery school: “When he got into a scrap, a common event for the boisterous youngster, he would draw his play sword and challenge his opponent: ‘My daddy’s a real prince, and my daddy can beat up your daddy,’ he would shout.”
Diana and Charles became concerned that William, who was sometimes banished to the nursery after throwing his food around, required firmer discipline. The Queen even intervened with her grandson’s nanny, telling her she needed to be stricter with the four-year-old.
Charles observed that Harry was quieter “and, having grown accustomed to being bossed around by his older brother, was a follower rather than a natural leader like William”, Nicholl wrote. Harry became aware of the pecking order at an early age. William would be invited to Clarence House to see the Queen Mother without Harry, telling his younger brother: “I’m off to see Gran Gran.”
At Ludgrove William captained the rugby and hockey teams and was one of the best swimmers. On sports days William and Charles would compete together in the clay pigeon shooting competition and won it in 1995.
William was at Eton when his mother was interviewed by Martin Bashir for the infamous Panorama program. He watched it with his housemaster, Andrew Gailey, “his eyes filled with tears of fury and frustration”, according to Nicholl. William was dismayed that she’d betrayed his father and the family and that she had invited the cameras into their home. According to Nicholl he refused to speak to his mother when he next visited Kensington Palace.
“William was absolutely livid. He felt really bad for his mum because of what she had gone through, but he was furious with her,” Simone Simons, an alternative healer who was a friend of Diana’s, told the author. “People at school were calling her all sorts of names. He wanted to defend her, but it was very confusing and hard for him. Eventually William said he forgave her when she promised him she would never do anything like that again. It was the most angry I had seen him at his mother.” When it became clear many years later that Bashir had engaged in skulduggery to persuade Diana to do the interview, William was furious with the BBC. Quite what he makes of the interview featuring in the Netflix series his brother made he has not publicly disclosed.
A year after the death of his mother in 1997, the teenage William told a dinner guest at a shooting party about his antipathy towards the media.
He had recently been photographed abseiling down a dam without a helmet. His father was reported to have been enraged that his nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, had allowed this to happen. William was more worried that the photographers had captured him with a girl. “He was scared and angry that there were other pictures out there, that he knew existed, that would be published when the media saw fit,” his dinner companion said. “He went on a very angry rant for about 15 minutes about how much he hated the media. He said that when he grew up he was going to get a motorbike and go so fast that no car or camera would be able to get him. It was implicit that he believed the media killed his mother. It was a very powerful rant from a very young man. But it does make you wonder how much it would take for his relationship with the media to crack.”
It hasn’t cracked in the way it has for his brother and, at times, his father. But there is no doubt he has his family’s allergy to intrusive lenses. As a younger man he did get that motorbike and, according to Nicholl, loved riding it around London “safe in the knowledge that in his leather and helmet he is anonymous”.
In his professional life, first in the British Army and then as an RAF search and rescue helicopter pilot and with the East Anglian Air Ambulance service in Cambridge, William gave the impression of being unflappable. I visited the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst when he was a cadet and officers training him said he was cool under pressure. One recalled that when he went before the commissions board seeking a place they deliberately gave him a very difficult command task. It went wrong, “but he kept very calm”.
As a young man he did not attract controversies like his brother, but there were some embarrassing stories involving antics in nightclubs and the time he flew an RAF helicopter to a stag do on the Isle of Wight.
His life with Catherine has appeared to be about building control. Harry has said that his brother cannot leave the “system” like he can. William insists that he doesn’t want to. A friend of both brothers told Roya Nikkhah, royal correspondent of The Sunday Times, that William sees things differently. “He has a path set for him and he’s completely accepting of his role. He is very much his grandmother’s grandson in that respect of duty and service.”
He has shown individuality in setting out to make the system work for him and his young family in ways that it didn’t when he was a boy.
After they married he was clear that he wanted to do his search and rescue and air ambulance work. He found the air ambulance work rewarding but sometimes traumatic. He said that when he had his own kids “the relation between the job and the personal life was what really took me over the edge, and I started feeling things that I have never felt before”. He loved the job, especially because he worked in a team: “Something that my other job doesn’t necessarily do. You are more out there on your own.”
Miguel Head, his former private secretary, told The Sunday Times that in his royal role everyone always told him how marvellous he was. “The RAF and air ambulance jobs were about knowing what his abilities were, what he was good at in his own right.”
He delayed committing himself to full-time royal duties until 2017 so the couple could have a quieter family life together before moving from Norfolk to London for George to start school. They have now shifted the hub of family life to Windsor and protect their children’s private lives assiduously, even to the extent of releasing their own pictures of them taken by Kate, who has become an accomplished photographer.
As a full-time royal William has strong views about what interests him. In 2019 he spent three weeks following spies at MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to immerse himself in counter-terrorism work. He told the spooks to call him Will and ate with them every day in the canteen.
William has made clear that he wants to “modernise and develop” the royal family and, as Duke of Cambridge, was focused on issues around mental health, racism in football, homelessness and the environment. William Hague, who worked with William as chairman of the Royal Foundation, has said he has a clear focus. “He’s very persuasive. You only see that behind the scenes. He knows what he wants and he goes out to get it,” he has said.
Charlie Mayhew, chief executive of Tusk, the conservation charity that is very close to William’s heart, has described his “sincerity, but never without wicked humour. His teasing is merciless.”
That may come from his army background. There was a lot of back and forth teasing with Harry, but now those who have witnessed it wonder if it was all really that lighthearted.
Royal correspondents who interviewed the brothers together at RAF Shawbury in 2009 were surprised at the edge to some of the banter between them.
After Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which they made claims of racism in the royal family, the official line was that “some recollections may vary”. In public William appeared only just able to contain his anger. On an engagement at a school in East London he said: “We’re very much not a racist family.” A source close to the duke told Nikkhah that, at the time, “his head is all over the place on it”.
In 2018 William made a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories. During the trip he made a last-minute change to a speech to young Israelis and Palestinians to show solidarity with the Palestinians, telling them they had not been forgotten. Officials were relieved that the trip was regarded as a success by both sides.
He didn’t bring peace to the Middle East, but he made a small contribution to the dialogue. Now he faces a dispute closer to home that looks similarly bitter and intractable. His family and aides will be hoping that William the diplomat, not the fighter, comes to the fore the next time the brothers meet. Whenever that might be.
The Times
