When Prince Harry was first dating Meghan Markle, Prince William was so concerned about how quickly things were moving between them that he asked his uncle, Charles Spencer, to intervene.
According to a new excerpt from Battle of Brothers, the book by royal expert Robert Lacey, “From time to time Diana’s younger brother had played something of an honorary godfather to both boys in the years since the death of their mother, and their uncle agreed with William to see what he could do. The result of the Spencer intervention was an even more bitter explosion. Once again Harry refused to slow down. He didn’t blame his uncle. He understood why Diana’s brother should want to help. Yet he was furious with his elder brother for dragging other family members into the row.”
The division between the once-close Harry and William has been one of the most written-about feuds in recent history, and is the focus of Lacey’s new book; Tatler reported new details from the book, which will be published next week. According to Lacey the situation between the brothers was at one point so fractious that Harry and William weren’t on speaking terms around the time Harry and Meghan announced their engagement in 2017. It came down to their father Prince Charles to try and engineer a rapprochement, which resulted in William and Kate and Harry and Meghan spending Christmas together weeks after the future Sussexes announced their engagement.
Lacey describes the fall out as a “fraternal fissure” so great that it could threaten the future of the monarchy.
The books also reveals that William had concerns about some of Harry and Meghan’s work, and “had been worried for some time that Harry was growing away from him.” There was apparently some fallout over Meghan’s decision to edit the September issue of British Vogue; William felt, according to Lacey, “that the Windsors do not do work.”
The final blow is said to have been when the Sussexes snubbed the Queen by not joining her and the Cambridges for a summer holiday to Balmoral last year. Just weeks later Harry and Meghan traveled to South Africa for their last official tour as a working royal couple. When they announced they were leaving the royal family in January, William who felt that his brother was abandoning his sense of duty and birthright. William was so upset with Harry’s handling of the announcement that according to sources, he refused to meet his brother for lunch with the Queen ahead of the so-called “Sandringham Summit.”
Battle of the Brothers also confirms what was first reported by Vanity Fair: that it was the fallout between Harry and William, not a much-speculated-upon feud between Meghan and Kate, that broke up the “Fab Four.”
“Meghan and Kate actually got on rather well from the start,” Lacey wrote. “They might not be best-buddy material, but they found themselves, sister-outsiders in their extraordinary royal situation, and both of them cool professionals, treating each other with mutual respect. Each was far too canny to make an enemy of a prospective sister-in-law—it only made sense to be friends. The fundamental conflict was between the two males who had known each other all their lives and had never hesitated to tell each other exactly what they thought and felt.”
Buckingham Palace have so far declined to comment on Battle of Brothers.
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