It was a poignant comment. On his way home from his second tour in Afghanistan in 2013, Prince Harry responded to a reporter’s question. “Normal for me? I don’t know what is normal anymore. I never really have.”
It hasn’t been for lack of trying. Since childhood, Prince Harry has claimed to be searching for a normal, more equitable life. Uncomfortable with the royal hierarchy, Harry and Meghan Markle have made a new life in the United States. Here they have traded the rarefied world of the constitutional monarchy for Hollywood, a place populated by those whose talent or drive have propelled them to the heights.
Harry’s democratic roots seem to have been instilled in him by his mother, Princess Diana. Herself a child of privilege, she was determined to make sure Prince Harry and Prince William understood life outside of the palace walls.
“Princess Di insisted that she herself would be responsible for the upbringing of William and Harry,” says Nigel Cawthorne, author of Call Me Diana: The Princess of Wales on Herself. “Royal children, like Charles, were previously handed over to a nanny who had her own four footmen. Even the queen was only allowed to see her children if the nanny agreed.”
Diana was particularly insistent that the boys would receive their education at a normal school with non-royal classmates. “Diana won her argument with Charles about sending their sons to school with other children from the start, rather than having them tutored in the palace, as Charles was before he was shipped off to a boarding school—an experience he despised yet he seemed to think would be appropriate to repeat it with his own boys,” says royal historian Leslie Carroll, author of American Princess: The Love Story of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.
She also made sure the boys were exposed to everyday actions that seem comical to commoners. “Diana gave them pocket change so they would understand how ‘normal’ people lived, because Charles never gave the boys money and didn’t understand why they needed it,” Carroll says. “Diana may have had many faults, but a lack of empathy wasn’t one of them. She wanted her sons to grow up knowing what the real world was like,” says Christopher Andersen, author of the Brothers and Wives: Inside the Private Lives of William, Kate, Harry, and Meghan. “That meant trips to McDonald’s, amusement parks, go-kart tracks, and the movies—where, in sharp contrast to their royal cousins, she made the princes wait in line with everybody else.”
In Harry: A Biography of a Prince, royal journalist Angela Levin recounts one morning when Diana brought the boys to Selfridges to see Santa. Even though they arrived at 9 a.m., there was already a line, and the boys waited with everyone else. Harry left the store with a giant teddy bear.
Much like his mother, from a young age the gregarious Harry, who former bodyguard Ken Wharfe reportedly compared to a friendly Labrador who liked everyone, sought out friendships with those outside the royal bubble. “In hindsight, Harry, more so than William…seems to have internalized the democratic nature, and the excitement, of being able to mingle with everyone else,” Carroll says.
He seemed to particularly like seeking out friendships with employees at the various royal residences. “Even as a small child, he was eager to rake leaves with the palace groundskeepers or help out in the kitchen,” Andersen says. “Harry was always the hands-down favorite of the royal worker bees—the bodyguards, butlers, footmen, maids, cooks, and nannies who keep the whole thing running.”
Diana also made sure that William and Harry felt comfortable connecting with people who faced enormous hardships—taking them to missions, rescues, and hospitals. “Diana drummed compassion into her boys,” Andersen explains. “[She] trained them to be more than those cardboard cutout figures waving from the Buckingham Palace balcony.”
Prince Harry has credited his mother with his ability to connect with people from all walks of life. “My mother took a huge part in showing me an ordinary life, including taking me and my brother to see homeless people. Thank goodness I’m not completely cut off from reality,” Prince Harry told Levin.
After his mother’s death in 1997, a lost Harry found in military life a way to disappear into a team. In 2005, he entered the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst as Officer Cadet Wales. While he was never academically gifted, he excelled as a soldier, and relished the opportunity to be one of the guys. Levin writes in Harry: A Biography of a Prince:
He called his fellow cadets “really good guys” who treated him “normally” and “always give me support if some rubbish comes up in the papers.” It made him feel “really lucky”; one of the best things about Sandhurst, he said, was knowing “you’ve got a platoon of guys, that everyone’s going through the same thing and the best thing about that is being able to fit in as just a normal person.”
After graduating from Sandhurst, Prince Harry was commissioned as an army officer in 2006. “The happiest times in my life were the 10 years in the army. Without question,” Prince Harry shared in the Apple TV+ docuseries The Me You Can’t See. “Because I got to wear the same uniform as everybody else. I had to do all the same training as everybody else. I started from the bottom up like everybody else.”
“To Harry, the modern British military was a democratic institution in the first place, where promotion was based on merit, and he was bunking with men from all social strata, all focused on the same mission,” Carroll says. “And it was vital to him to be just Harry Wales, one of the lads, comrades in arms, all in it together, in the same gritty circumstances eating the same shitty food. His Army ID number was WA 4673A and to the other pilots he was simply known as call sign ‘Widow Six Seven.’”
Throughout his military career, which included two tours of Afghanistan, Harry treasured the friendships he made with other soldiers. “This is what it is all about, what it’s all about is being here with the guys rather than being in a room with a bunch of officers,” he said. “I think this is about as normal as I’m ever going to get.”
Harry seemed to crave the approval of people from more typical backgrounds and was eager to prove he wasn’t just a snobby royal. “More than any of the other princes…Harry went out of his way to bond with his fellow soldiers, taking on the dirtiest and most dangerous assignments, kicking around a soccer ball with them in the middle of the desert, pulling practical jokes,” Andersen says. “He always wanted to be treated like just one of the guys, and he got his wish.”
However, Harry’s royal status inevitably got in the way. During his first tour of Afghanistan in 2008, he was pulled out of the country when the media revealed his location. “I felt very resentful. Being in the army was the best escape I’ve ever had,” he remembered. “I felt as though I was really achieving something. I have a deep understanding of all sorts of people from different backgrounds and felt I was part of a team…I also wasn’t a prince. I was just Harry.”
After leaving the army in 2015, Harry increasingly became one of the Firm’s most effective communicators, much like his mother had been before. It was something he prided himself on and seemed insistent on proving. “Thank goodness I’m not completely cut off from reality, but not everyone can understand that I can be a prince and still understand them,” he once said.
“It’s awfully hard not to look at Harry and see something of yourself in him—a disarming measure of self-doubt beneath the cloak of affability,” Andersen says. “Harry may look like a relaxed, casual character, but I think he works hard at it.”
From the start of their courtship, Harry and Meghan both spoke of yearning to live a more ordinary life and relished the simple pleasure of sharing meals together or going on dates undetected. According to Robert Lacey, author of Battle of Brothers: William and Harry—The Inside Story of a Family in Tumult, Queen Elizabeth sympathized with this impulse. He writes:
She had heard and read much of Harry and Meghan’s wish to live an “ordinary” existence…she could recall such a period in her own life—her “Malta Moments” between 1949 and 1951, when Philip was serving as a naval officer on the Mediterranean island and she would fly out to stay with him. In Malta, Elizabeth had tasted “normal” life as a young naval officer’s wife, not a king’s daughter…and [did] own shopping with real money out of her handbag.
Despite the queen’s empathy, it became increasingly clear that the Sussexes would never be able to escape the royal fishbowl in England. They increasingly looked to America—much as Princess Diana had after her divorce. “Diana always felt at a home in the U.S., where her openness, compassion, and charisma made her even more popular than she was in Britain,” Andersen says.
According to Carroll, it was an affinity shared by her youngest son. “Even when Harry was a boy, America came to symbolize a concept of freedom to be oneself—whether actually true or not—that he didn’t have as a member of the British royal family,” she says. “Britain’s social hierarchy has always been class-based, rather than a meritocracy, and Harry has expressed discomfort with the concept that solely because of his birthright he’s a notch, or several, ‘more than’ those he interacts with, goes to school with, or works alongside.”
Andersen agrees. “Harry always seemed an ideal fit for life in America, and his marriage to Meghan sealed the deal,” he says. “Harry has always seemed slightly embarrassed by his position at the top of Britain’s class system and would like nothing better than to fit in like a regular bloke—something his father, Prince Charles, was congenitally incapable of doing.”
Since his family’s move to Montecito, California, Harry has spoken of enjoying simple things like riding a bike with his son and walking on the beach unnoticed. Of course, it is impossible not to point to the inherent contradictions in his new lifestyle. “I’m not sure that living on an [seven-acre] estate in California can be considered a normal life,” Cawthorne says. “It is hard to deny that by signing a deal with Netflix and appearing with Oprah he is trading on the fame endowed on him by birth. The latter is the essence of royalty; he has adapted it to modern times.”
But Carroll believes that in moving to America, Harry has the freedom to make it or break it on his own terms, despite the privilege of his position.
“Harry had wanted to earn a wage and mix with ordinary people before he became a full-time working royal,” she says. “Who expects him to become a hermit after leaving the U.K. for California? When was that ever part of the equation? In America he can continue to focus on, and bring awareness to, the same philanthropic and charitable interests that he did in the U.K. In fact, now that he is no longer a working senior royal, he is also no longer financially constrained.”
In other words, in America, Meghan and Harry get to define their version of ordinary contentment of success just like everyone else.
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