The New, Sad Irony of the Rift Between Prince William and Prince Harry
As Prince Harry confirmed near the end of his and Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, there has been a significant breakdown in his once-close relationship with his brother Prince William; as Harry told Oprah, the word that currently defines the relationship is “space.” There is still a lot we don’t know, and that Harry declined to reveal, about what exactly led to the divide between the brothers, but it has been previously reported that it started when William urged Harry to take his time when his relationship with Meghan began.
“Don’t feel you need to rush this,” William told Harry, according to last summer’s biography Finding Freedom. “Take as much time as you need to get to know this girl.” As the book’s authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand wrote, the phrase “the girl” immediately bothered Harry: “Harry was pissed off… that his brother would ask such a thing.”
But after what Meghan revealed in the interview about how poorly prepared she felt for life as a royal, both by her own choice — she says she didn’t even Google Harry, and that “I went into it very naively” — and due to what she called a lack of support within the palace, William’s words ring with a sad irony. What he reportedly said was condescending and understandably rankled a brother who was already falling in love, but it’s also hard not to imagine how things might have turned out better if everyone had taken just a little more time.
When she first came to meet the royal family, Harry had to show Meghan the ropes at record speed. She didn’t know she had to curtsy to the Queen in private, as she told Oprah, and though the family welcomed her, she soon felt lonely and isolated. “I didn’t fully understand what the job was,” she said in the interview. “There was no way to understand what the day to day was going to be like.”
Aides working for the duchess and staffers for Kate and William have said that they went above and beyond to make the transition as seamless as possible, despite what Meghan said about having very little help. But what is certain is that Meghan, like Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson before her, found the goldfish bowl of royalty to be very different from her expectations.
Once she and Harry were married Meghan was thrown in feet-first, traveling around the country and the world on behalf of the Queen, and soon becoming pregnant with their first child. For a woman who had been fiercely independent all her life and had been working since she was 13, giving up her independence, as she described to Oprah, was unimaginably hard. “I’ve advocated for so long for women to use their voice, and then I was silent,” she said. “I did anything they told me to do. It was always through the lens of ‘we’ll protect you.’”
But despite her lightning-fast introduction to the royal family, Meghan was an instant success. As she and Harry both noted, their tour in the fall of 2018 to Australia and the South Pacific was a huge hit — so much that there seemed to be a fear within the palace that the Sussexes would overshadow the rest of the royals. That, it seems, is when things began to change — Harry described the tour as a turning point, and compared it to the trip Prince Charles and Princess Diana took to Australia when William was a baby, where Diana was a similar smash success. In the interview Oprah brought up the way the tour was depicted on The Crown, with Charles jealous of Diana’s command of a crowd. Harry and Meghan didn’t dispute the comparison.
Harry and Meghan appear content with their new life in California, and Meghan told Oprah that her love story with her prince, though not a fairy tale at all, does have a happy ending. But there was also clear sadness in Harry’s voice when talking about his father and his brother; speaking about Charles, he said “ I will continue to make it one of my priorities to try and heal that relationship.” As for William, he is said to regret that early conversation with Harry about Meghan, because it led to the rift that continues to this day.
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Given the allegations Meghan made of racist comments about Archie’s skin color from within the royal family, the family relationship may be hard to repair — but the tie between Harry and William, as he said in the interview, is eternal. Harry is due to be by his brother’s side for the unveiling of a statue of Princess Diana in London this summer, and we can all hope that will happen. Perhaps hindsight will one day allow them all to acknowledge that William’s words, poorly chosen as they were, predicted the trouble that lay ahead.
