Can you feel it in the air? Today, January 10, is the one-year anniversary of the release of Prince Harry’s bombshell memoir Spare, which broke records and, some would say, further distanced Harry from the rest of the royal family.
As the book’s title portends, a large chunk of the tell-all revolves around the “heir and spare” dynamic between Harry and his older brother, Prince William. (Just in case you’re somehow unfamiliar with said dynamic, it treats the two brothers not as equals but as William as the No. 1—the heir to the throne—and Harry as less important, the “spare” in case something should God forbid happen to William. It really is a toxic dynamic, but it seems the royal family has learned from its mistakes and is not raising Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis this way.)
Harry had a lot to say in Spare—416 pages’ worth, and he said that he has enough to write a second volume of the tome—but one of his complaints and grievances? That in Kensington Palace—where the boys lived with their mother, Princess Diana—William had a bigger bedroom.
“My half of the room was far smaller, less luxurious,” Harry wrote in the book. “I never asked why. I didn’t care. But I also didn’t need to ask.”
Tension always seemed to be simmering between the brothers, and Harry noticed countless examples of preferential treatment towards William. When Harry joined William at Eton College—a prestigious all-boys boarding school that educates boys from ages 13 to 18—William wasn’t happy about him being there, Harry wrote: “For the last two years, he [William] explained, Eton had been his sanctuary,” Spare reads. “No kid brother tagging along, pestering him with questions, pushing up on his social circle. He was forging his own life, and he wasn’t willing to give it up.” At least at Eton they surely had the same size bedrooms? Just saying.
According to OK, perhaps not shockingly, William was hurt by Spare, the reverberations of which were just beginning to be felt 365 days ago as the world grabbed their respective copies. “Harry sold his family out to the media for millions of dollars, and William can’t forgive that breach of trust,” a friend said, per the outlet.
But William would only be hurt if there was (and who knows, maybe still is) love there. You’re not hurt by someone you don’t care about, and, despite brother-on-brother conflict (happens to the best of us), the two were also once close and did have good times together. “I think it’s exactly because the bond was so deep that the betrayal has been so wounding,” they said. “They were the only people who actually knew what each other had been through. How would you feel if your best friend decided to reveal all your personal secrets to the newspapers? Well, multiply that by a thousand.”
