Prince William Has 'Great Sadness' Over His Relationship With Harry, Claims Biographer
Author Russell Myers says the brothers' issues go back to childhood—and the very different ways the royal institution treated them growing up.
Prince William has worn the weight of the crown-in-waiting his entire life, but according to one royal biographer, it is not the throne that has troubled him most. It is what that throne did to his relationship with his brother.
Russel Myers, the author of the newly released William and Catherine, The Monarchy's New Era: The Inside Story, has spent considerable time examining the emotional architecture of the Prince of Wales, and his judgment is that William is a man shaped, in no small part, by what he witnessed done to his own brother. Speaking to Marie Claire, Myers reveals that William has long harbored deep reservations about the institutional instinct to treat royal siblings as categorically separate beings and that those reservations are inseparable from his complicated feelings about Prince Harry.
"The issue of treating the 'heir and spare' as completely separate entities is something William has always wanted to change," Myers said. "It's not how he and Catherine have brought up their own children, and William saw fundamental problems with the different treatment he was given as a child to his brother. In his view, it wasn't healthy."
And that discomfort has its own roots. Princess Diana was herself acutely attuned to the dangers of the heir-and-spare hierarchy and made efforts to shield both her sons from its more corrosive effects. Yet, despite her very well-placed intentions, the royal household's instinct to elevate the future king above his younger brother proved difficult to override.
Opening one window into their childhood dynamic, Diana reportedly nicknamed her youngest "Good King Harry" on an occasion when a young Harry volunteered to take on the burden of kingship after William declared he wanted nothing to do with it. These formative experiences, Myers suggests, are not merely historical footnotes—they are the foundation on which William has deliberately constructed a different kind of family. "Why the Wales family are an incredibly close unit" today is directly tied, in Myers' telling, to the lessons William absorbed from his own upbringing.
Princess Charlotte, unlike her mother's generation, has the company of Prince Louis in her non-heir status, and both the Prince and Princess of Wales are intentional about ensuring no child occupies a privileged emotional tier above the others. "Of course, George, as a future King, will inevitably have a different role to fulfill than his siblings, but that doesn't mean the family dynamic should reflect that," Myers explains.
Yet, for all that William has done to rewrite the script within his own household, the original story—the one written between him and Harry—continues to haunt him. Myers is candid about the weight William carries on that front, noting that the Prince of Wales "has a great deal of sadness over the way his relationship with his brother fractured, possibly beyond repair." Myers is deliberate on one point in particular-- the brothers' "issues go way back before Meghan was introduced to the fold." The fracture, in other words, was never really about her.
