Prince Harry and Prince William: How Did Things Get So Bad?

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The claim by Prince Harry that his brother Prince William knocked him to the ground during an argument in 2019 puts into raw context how troubled their relationship is.

The Guardian, which obtained a copy of Harry’s memoir Spare, due out next Tuesday, detailed how William allegedly attacked Harry at the latter’s then-home in Kensington Palace, during an argument about Meghan Markle and Harry’s status as the royal “spare” compared to first-born William, the heir. It is that relegated status which Harry has chosen as the stark title of his memoir.

Harry writes that his brother “came at me. It all happened so fast. So very fast. He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.”

The argument encapsulates the two elements apparently at the heart of the brotherly rift: Harry’s status as “the spare,” and his marriage to Meghan.

A guest who attended the reception after Harry’s wedding to Meghan—an exclusive guest list of just over 200 hand-picked guests—recalled to The Daily Beast rounding a corner in the gardens at Frogmore House and finding, to his immense surprise, William, sitting alone by a firepit, looking upset and moodily poking the conflagration with a long stick.

Everyone who has spent time with William knows that while he is extremely good at hiding his feelings in public, he does not bother to arrange his face in private. Windsor insouciance and arrogance is commonly thought to be to blame.

The individual was astonished by what was written all over William’s face; that William was far from delighted by his brother’s marriage to Meghan.

This was, on that heady evening in May 2018, a truly shocking thing to realize. Because, for all Harry’s complaints in recent months that they were spun against by the palace from the get-go, the palace had actually done a formidable job of quashing rumors of a royal rift up till then. The brothers had done a joyous joint walkabout just hours earlier in Windsor where William grinned from ear to ear, and the crowds cheered Princess Diana’s sons.

It is now known, of course, that the relationship was far from perfect. Just days before the wedding, Meghan and Kate Middleton had been involved in a fight at a bridesmaid dress fitting which had left one, the other, or possibly both of them in tears. But the bridesmaid dress story didn’t emerge until six months later (Nov. 26, 2018, to be precise) when the Telegraph published its first iteration (in which version, Meghan made Kate cry).

The only solid clue to support some persistent but largely unpublished rumors that all was not well at Kensington Palace prior to the marriage was a jocular reference Harry and William made to how hard it was to work as a family at a joint event attended by all four on February 28, 2018.

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The brothers’ friend had believed the Palace flannel like everyone else. It was extraordinary therefore, to find William, sitting there all alone, gazing at the dancing flames, when he should have been on the dance floor embracing his brother.

“The boys were close even before their mum died, but after that, the bond was forged in steel,” says one Old Etonian friend of William’s, who also knew Harry well. “Charles was well-meaning but distant, and William took on a semi-parenting role. He was immensely protective of Harry. Harry is only two years younger than him, and as Harry got older they became closer and closer and got up to all kinds of mischief together as well.”

The friend said the bond “just got stronger at Eton” where Harry started, just a year after his mother had died, in 1998 (meaning there were actually three academic years between the brothers at the school).

The friend added, “They would literally finish each other’s sentences.”

Christopher Andersen, the author of a biography of the brothers called Diana’s Boys and a new book on the family, The King, told The Daily Beast: “It’s impossible to imagine how two brothers could have been closer. They were the only two people on the planet who knew what it was like to experience what they experienced; how could the rest of us imagine what it was like?

“They were the world’s most famous children, sons of the most adored woman of her time—and yet they they grew up at the center of whirlwind, buffeted by scandal, betrayal, and tragedy.”

They pursued very different paths after leaving school; William went to St. Andrew’s University and met Kate Middleton. Harry, no academic, spent two years traveling in Australia and Africa, where he fell in love with the Zimbabwean game park heiress Chelsy Davy, before joining the army in 2005.

He and Chelsy were a fixture of the London party season for much of their relationship, from 2004 to 2011. Chelsy broke up with Harry immediately after William and Kate’s wedding, deciding she couldn’t face a life in the public eye.

Ironically enough, one of the few unfiltered pieces of evidence of the continuing closeness of William and Harry, despite their different paths, surfaced in the phone-hacking trial.

Jurors were told William left his younger brother a voicemail saying, in faux falsetto: “Hi, it’s Chelsy here. I just want to say I miss you so much and I think you are the best-looking ginger I have ever seen, although you really are quite ugly for a ginger. But hope you are having a lovely time. I really miss you. It is lovely out here in Africa and hopefully I will see you very soon, you big hairy fat ginger. Anyway, speak to you later.”

The recording was found at the home of private investigator Glenn Mulcaire and was presented as evidence that William and Harry’s messages were being hacked by the now defunct newspaper the News of the World.

And of course the brothers’ hatred of the media and its intrusions, and their firm conviction that the pursuit of Diana by the media was a massive factor in her death, was another element drawing them closer together in their twenties.

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Understandably, therefore, Harry stepping over the other side, and becoming part of the media content creation machine, creating the kind of damaging, negative stories about his brother and his family that they both so deplore, is understood to have been seen by William as a particularly wounding betrayal. (Of course, a vital part of Harry’s self-sustaining media machine is criticism of the media more generally.)

Their bond not only survived William’s relationship with Kate, which began in 2002, but was strengthened by it. When she and William got engaged, Harry called her the big sister he never had. He reputedly would pop into their apartment at Kensington Palace for roast chicken dinners. He appeared to adore her and was happy for his brother that he had found the perfect partner. It may have been particularly hard, therefore, for William and Kate to hear Harry saying in Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan that William married Kate because she fitted the part, not for love.

The brothers were physically reunited at Sandhurst, British army’s officer training college. Prince William began there in January 2006, while this time it was Harry who was more senior, having started at Sandhurst in May 2005.

Andersen says: “At Sandhurst and throughout their military careers they supported one another, boosted each other’s confidence, covered up for each other and defended each other whenever one of the brothers broke the rules.”

Harry stayed in the military until 2015, and, according to biographers Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand’s book Finding Freedom, this is when Harry began to chafe at his little brother position.

In the book they wrote: “During his ten-year career in the military, outside the royal bubble, he had learnt not to make snap judgements about people based on their accent, education, ethnicity, class or profession. Harry was tired of the dynamic that had become established between him and his older brother. There had come a point when Harry no longer felt as though he needed looking after. There was a thin line between caring and condescending.”

The bubbling resentment didn’t fully express itself until Harry began dating Meghan and swiftly announced his intention to marry her to his brother.

Scobie and Durand say William told Harry: “Don’t feel you need to rush this. Take as much time as you need to get to know this girl.” Bizarrely, it was the words “this girl” that flipped Harry.

The book says: “Harry heard [in the words] the tone of snobbishness that was anathema to his approach to the world. William may have felt he was acting out of concern, but Harry was offended his brother treated him as if he were immature.”

It seems such a tiny thing —“this girl”—to send Harry off the deep end, but there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of Scobie and Durand’s account of Harry’s thought processes. They were briefed by Harry and Meghan’s team and spoke to their close friends when writing the book.

To outsiders, however, it initially seemed that the relationship between Harry and Meghan was going to result in a stronger unit of young royals; the “Fab Four” as they were overhastily dubbed after their first appearance at Christmas together, in 2017.

But already behind the scenes, there was anxiety about some of Meghan’s actions. Her cover interview with Vanity Fair, ahead of even the engagement announcement, certainly set alarm bells ringing at the palace.

But Christmas 2017 was a success. Harry said as much in an interview on BBC Radio 4. The four decided to pool their influence and set up a joint foundation.

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It was short-lived. By February 2018 Harry and William were making those jokes on stage at their first and only joint foundation event. Asked if there were any disagreements with the family working closely together, William hammed it up and said: “Oh, yes!” Harry added: “They come so thick and fast. Working as a family does have its challenges, of course it does. But we’re stuck together for the rest of our lives.”

Of course, they weren’t.

The stresses of the wedding in May 2018 likely didn’t help. They have been extensively documented, not least the allegations that either Meghan or Kate reduced the other one to tears during a bridesmaid dress fitting for Princess Charlotte.

In October 2018, it was revealed that they were splitting their courts. Even then, however, the extent of the argument between the two families remained largely a matter of hint and innuendo.

We now know that, behind the scenes, bitter arguments were roiling relations between both families.

A huge part of this was Meghan’s alleged bullying of royal staff, which prompted her PR supremo, Jason Knauf, to submit a formal complaint in October 2018. Knauf wrote in his email: “I am very concerned that the Duchess was able to bully two PAs out of the household in the past year. The treatment of [anonymous] was totally unacceptable.”

Equally importantly, Meghan, as she told Oprah, was finding it hard to cope with her public role and, in January 2019, feeling suicidal, told the Palace she needed to get help, a request she said they ignored.

Harry said in Harry & Meghan: “They thought, ‘Why couldn’t she just deal with it?’ As if to say, ‘Well everyone else has dealt with it, why can’t she deal with it?’ But it was different. This was different. But actually if you strip all that away and say, ‘OK, fine, it was exactly the same,’ so do we still believe we should have just sucked it up like other members of the family? Or does one think maybe it’s about time that we stopped?”

It exploded into public view in October 2019 interviews Harry and Meghan gave to ITV’s Tom Bradby in which Meghan famously thanked him for asking if she was “OK,” and Harry confirmed he and his brother were on “different paths.”

In December 2019 Harry and Meghan fled to Canada for Christmas where they began negotiations with the family about leaving their royal roles—and their photo was excluded from Queen Elizabeth’s desk during her Christmas address. In January 2020, they announced they were leaving the royal family.

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Since then the relationship between the brothers seems to have traveled in one direction only—downhill—and much of what has happened, including a Sandringham screaming match, is now a matter of public record thanks to Harry.

At every stage, things have got worse, positions have hardened, opposition has become entrenched and the prospect of reconciliation has retreated. Harry and Meghan gave multiple interviews, beginning most explosively with Oprah Winfrey, trashing the royals and notably accusing them—and a senior member of the family at that—of racism. (William denied the royals were racist after the Oprah interview, but then strongly condemned racism after his godmother Lady Susan Hussey quit her royal position after asking Black charity boss Ngozi Fulani where she was really from.)

The royals responded to Harry and Meghan’s claims of bad treatment by snubbing Harry, explicitly at Queen Elizabeth’s jubilee, where they were kept out of sight, and again at her funeral.

This was probably the last chance for reconciliation, but when Harry was not informed of her death at the same time as his brother, was deprived of the right to wear uniform at her funeral, and then seated in the second row, behind his cousin Zara Tindall, it must have been clear to him that his family have closed the door on him, for now at any rate.

When the brothers and their wives did make a joint appearance, William’s team were quick to claim credit for it.

King Charles made a point of expressing his love for Harry and Meghan in his accession speech, but Harry was clearly not impressed by the olive branch, recently telling interviewers the family had shown “no willingness to reconcile.”

And with the publication of Spare, last night’s revelation of the physical fight, and likely much more to come, relations are almost certain to hit a new low.