Prince Harry’s ‘Still Picking up the Pieces’ of His ‘Battered’ Relationship With King Charles and Prince William a Year After ‘Spare’
It seems the dust hasn’t quite settled a year after the release of Prince Harry’s Spare memoir. According to a royal commentator, the Duke of Sussex is still dealing with the “repercussions” of releasing a “bombshell” book that won’t go away soon. Harry’s expected to be dealing with the fallout from Spare and its impact on his “battered” relationships with Prince William and King Charles III for the next few years.
Harry’s claims about King Charles and Prince William in ‘Spare’
“You start off at the beginning of the year, we had Harry’s memoir Spare, which was an absolute bombshell throughout the royal family,” Russell Meyers, the royal editor at the U.K.’s Mirror, told Sky News Australia (via Express). “We’re still talking about it now.”
Spare hit shelves on Jan. 10, 2023, and quickly became a bestseller. In the 410-page tome, which Harry later said could’ve been two books, the now-39-year-old made major claims about his estranged father and brother.
Harry claimed King Charles didn’t hug him when breaking the news of his mother Princess Diana’s death. He also recalled his father joking about a cruel rumor regarding paternity.
Additionally, Harry described his father as having “trouble” opening up emotionally in conversation and reacting with “petty jealousy” upon learning Meghan Markle intended to leave acting to become a working royal.
As for the Prince of Wales, Harry included many searing passages about his brother in Spare. Most notable, however, was the claim of physical harm by William when the two got into a heated argument.
The status of Harry’s relationship with William and King Charles after ‘Spare’ is still murky
The consequences of his openness in Spare are still very much at the forefront for Harry, according to Myers.
“He’s still picking up the pieces of his sort of battered relationship with his father and his brother,” the royal commentator said. “Absolutely nobody was spared — excuse the pun — from his barbs in that book.”
Besides King Charles and William, Harry included not-so-flattering passages about his sister-in-law, Kate Middleton, as well as his stepmother, Queen Camilla, among others.
“I think we’ll still see the repercussions of that in the next year or two,” Myers went on. “And whether Harry can sort of find a way back into the family remains to be seen.”
The last time Harry reportedly spoke with his father happened in November 2023, when King Charles turned 75. Harry and Meghan called the monarch, also sharing a video of their children, Prince Archie, 4, and Princess Lilibet, 2, singing “Happy Birthday.”
As for William, it’s been silence as the 42-year-old reportedly views Harry as a “defector.”
Meanwhile, Harry and Meghan have seemingly moved on from rehashing their royal past publicly.
“I remember after the whole furor around Spare,” Rebecca English, Royal Editor of the Daily Mail, said. “And before that, the Netflix documentary [Harry & Meghan], and all of the interviews, one member of their team briefing very grandly that this was the end of their ‘look-back projects.’”
“Part of me thought, who gives you the right to say this is our programme [sic] of look-back projects?” she continued. “But that’s what they said. We are entering this new era, and now we are focusing on our future, our own self-generated stuff rather than stuff about the royal family.”
“And they haven’t done any royal family-related project,” English said of the couple. “So I get the impression they were really hoping to start to move forward, slightly naively, I think.”
Indeed, Harry and Meghan haven’t revisited their leaving royal life on a major scale since Spare. Now they’re poised to produce a film adaption of Carley Fortune’s Meet Me at the Lake novel through Archewell Productions.
‘Spare’ is Prince Harry’s way of telling King Charles and Prince William why he and Meghan Markle left
Spare is, as Harry explained in the book’s prologue, his answer to a question William asked him after their grandfather Prince Philip’s funeral. It was April 17, 2021, and Harry met with his brother and father at Frogmore Gardens near Windsor Castle.
It was there William, Harry recalled, shared he “honestly” didn’t know why he and Meghan Markle left royal life.
“To claim no knowledge of why my wife and I took the drastic step of picking up our child and running like hell, leaving behind everything — house, friends, furniture? Really?” Harry wrote.
Glancing at his father, who had a “Neither do I” look on his face, Harry thought: “Maybe they really don’t.”
“If they didn’t know why I’d left, maybe they just didn’t know me. At all. And maybe they never really did. And to be fair, maybe I didn’t either,” he wrote. “I thought: ‘I have to tell them. How can I tell them? I can’t. It would take too long. Besides, they’re clearly not in the right frame of mind to listen. Not now, anyway. Not today.’”
“And so: Pa? Willy? World? Here you go,” Harry concluded Spare’s prologue.
Since Spare’s release, Harry has reunited with William and King Charles on one occasion, the latter’s May 2023 coronation.
