Spare

by Prince Harry

The story in the papers the next morning should’ve been about Prince Harry nearly being killed by a reckless pap. Instead it was about Prince Harry meeting and supposedly kissing a page-three girl, along with much frantic commentary about the horrors of the Spare dating…such a fallen woman. Third in line to the throne…dating her? The snobbery, the classism, was nauseating. The out-of-order priorities were baffling.

Other than feeling sorry for them, I couldn’t help but think that some force in the universe (Mummy?) was blocking rather than blessing their union. Maybe the universe delays what it disapproves of?

When the wedding did finally take place—without Granny, who chose not to attend—it was almost cathartic for everyone, even me. Standing near the altar I mostly kept my head bowed, eyes on the floor, just as I had during Mummy’s funeral, but I did sneak several long peeks at the groom and the bride and each time I thought: Good for you. Though, also: Goodbye.

I didn’t relish losing a second parent, and I had complex feelings about gaining a step-parent who, I believed, had recently sacrificed me on her personal PR altar.

They began pushing a story that I was afraid to go into the Army, that I was bunking off, using a fake knee injury as a way of stalling. I was, they said, a coward.

Judgment was swift, harsh. I was either a crypto Nazi or else a mental defective.

At last I came to the photos of Mummy. There were lights around her, auras, almost halos. How strange. The color of the lights was the same color as her hair—golden. I didn’t know what the lights were, I couldn’t imagine, though I came up with all sorts of supernatural explanations. As I realized their true origin, my stomach clenched. Flashes. They were flashes.

Those men who’d chased her…they’d never stopped shooting her while she lay between the seats, unconscious, or semiconscious, and in their frenzy they’d sometimes accidentally photographed each other. Not one of them was checking on her, offering her help, not even comforting her. They were just shooting, shooting, shooting.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.

For one brief moment, Spare outranked Heir.

Granny inspected the troops. When she came to me, she said: Oh…hello. I smiled. And blushed.

It made me paranoid. Willy too. It made us reconsider Mummy’s so-called paranoia, view it through a very different lens.

he concluded by promising that the handsome prince would return to his grandmother “without ears.”

Days later, another insurgent leader invoked my mother. He said that I should learn from her example, break away from my family. Rebel against the imperialists, Harry. Or else, he warned, a prince’s “blood will flow into our desert.”

I was in a bad, bad place. Paps, somehow, knew. Around this time they began hitting me with their cameras, deliberately, trying to incite me. They’d brush, smack, jostle, or just straight wallop me, hoping to get a rise, hoping I’d retaliate, because that would create a better photo, and thus more money in their pockets. A snap of me in 2007 fetched about thirty thousand pounds. Down payment on a flat. But a snap of me doing something aggressive? That might be a down payment on a house in the countryside.

I didn’t tell Billy that this was something my mother used to do. Thus began a very strange routine between us. When leaving a pub or club in 2007, I’d have the car pull into a back alley or underground parking lot, climb into the boot and let Billy shut the lid, and I’d lie there in the dark, hands across my chest, while he and another bodyguard ferried me home. It felt like being in a coffin. I didn’t care.

He’d seen me like this before. Once, maybe twice. I heard him say to another bodyguard: He’s a handful tonight. Oh, you want to see a handful? Here you go, here’s a handful.

None of it came as news to him. Turned out, he’d driven the tunnel too. He was coming to Paris for the rugby final. We decided to do it together. Afterwards, we talked about the crash, for the first time ever. We talked about the recent inquest. A joke, we both agreed. The final written report was an insult. Fanciful, riddled with basic factual errors and gaping logical holes. It raised more questions than it answered.

Why were those paps not more roundly blamed? Why were they not in jail? Who sent them? And why were they not in jail? Why indeed—unless corruption and cover-ups were the order of the day? We were united on all these points, and also on next steps. We’d issue a statement, jointly call for the inquiry to be reopened. Maybe hold a press conference. We were talked out of it by the powers that be.

The papers reported that we’d broken up. (One headline: Hooray Harry’s Dumped.)

If I die in Afghanistan, I thought, at least I’ll never have to see another fake headline, read another shameful lie about myself.

They were all sandy-haired, by which I mean their hair was matted with sand. Their faces and necks and eyelashes—also encrusted. They looked like fillets of fish that’d been breadcrumbed before frying.

The Army talked a lot about winning Afghan “hearts and minds,” meaning converting locals to democracy and freedom, but only the Gurkhas seemed to be actually doing it.

Willy told me several times that I was to act as “compère.”

it never dawned on me that I was a wounded soldier. And my war didn’t begin in Afghanistan. It began in August 1997.

I was delighted for Willy and Kate, and I was indifferent to my place in the order of succession. But nothing to do with either thing, I wasn’t anywhere close to happy.

but I also felt a bit unappreciated. A bit unloved. Relegated to the hinterlands.

It was largely to do with the Court Circular, that annual record of “official engagements” done by each member of the Royal Family in the preceding calendar year. Sinister document. At the end of the year, when all the numbers got tallied, comparisons would be made in the press.

Nine private visits with veterans, helping with their mental health? Zero points. Flying via helicopter to cut a ribbon at a horse farm? Winner!

But he swore it was all a silly coincidence, sooo…no evidence-tampering here, sayeth the justice system. Carry on. As you were.

They didn’t. They did not care.

888,246 of these poppies to be spread there, one for each Commonwealth soldier who’d died in the Great War. The hundredth anniversary of the war’s start was being marked all over Europe.

The papers were awash with stories about Willy being lazy, and the press had taken to calling him “Work-shy Wills,” which was obscene, grossly unfair, because he was busy having children and raising a family. (Kate was pregnant again.) Also, he was still beholden to Pa, who controlled the purse strings. He did as much as Pa wanted him to do, and sometimes that wasn’t much, because Pa and Camilla didn’t want Willy and Kate getting loads of publicity. Pa and Camilla didn’t like Willy and Kate drawing attention away from them or their causes. They’d openly scolded Willy about it many times.

The journalist pressed: Fifth in line—hm. No longer even the Spare of the Spare. I thought: First of all, it’s a good thing to be farther from the center of a volcano. Second, what kind of monster would think of himself and his place in the line of succession at such a time, rather than welcoming a new life into the world?

People often speculated that I was clinging to my bachelor life because it was so glamorous. Many evenings I’d think: If only they could see me now. Then I’d go back to folding my underwear and watching “The One with Monica and Chandler’s Wedding.”

One small problem: Willy. Africa was his thing, he said. And he had the right to say this, or felt he did, because he was the Heir. It was ever in his power to veto my thing, and he had every intention of exercising, even flexing, that veto power.

Now I just had to write that letter. The first challenge was finding a pen among that bunch of muppets.

He didn’t notice the prince-shaped lump under the duvet. He

I’d also mentioned that I used to live here at Clarence House, from when I was nineteen until I was about twenty-eight. After I moved out, Camilla turned my bedroom into her dressing room. I tried not to care. But, especially the first time I saw it, I cared.

In fact, my statement generated a whole new onslaught—from my family. Pa and Willy were furious. They gave me an earful. My statement made them look bad, they both said. Why in hell? Because they’d never put out a statement for their girlfriends or wives when they were being harassed.

Pa didn’t financially support Willy and me, and our families, out of any largesse. That was his job. That was the whole deal. We agreed to serve the monarch, go wherever we were sent, do whatever we were told, surrender our autonomy, keep our hands and feet inside the gilded cage at all times, and in exchange the keepers of the cage agreed to feed and clothe us.

In fact we wanted to elope. Barefoot in Botswana, with maybe a friend officiating, that was our dream. But we were expected to share this moment with other people. It wasn’t up to us.

I knew Pa loved music, but I never knew he loved it this much. Meg evoked so much in him, qualities I’d rarely seen. In her presence Pa became boyish.

But Willy always thought Granny had a soft spot for me, that she indulged me while holding him to an impossibly high standard. Because…Heir, Spare, etc. It irked him.

At one point he actually ordered me, as the Heir speaking to the Spare, to shave. Are you serious? I’m telling you, shave it off. For the love of God, Willy, why does this matter so much to you? Because I wasn’t allowed to keep my beard. Ah—there it was.

Finally I told him flatly and defiantly that his bearded brother was getting married soon, and he could either get on board or not. The choice was up to him.

Shortly before the wedding, however, Granny reached out. She offered us access to her collection of tiaras. She even invited us to Buckingham Palace to try them on. Do come over, I remember her saying.

Extraordinary morning. We walked into Granny’s private dressing room, right next to her bedroom, a space I’d never been in.

One was all emeralds. One was aquamarines. Each was more dazzlingly stunning than the last. Each took my breath. I wasn’t the only one. Granny said to Meg quite tenderly: Tiaras suit you. Meg melted. Thank you, Ma’am.