What Prince Harry Writes About William in Spare

Prince Harry portrays Prince William in Spare as a brother who shares his grief over Princess Diana’s death and grows increasingly distant from him. Harry recalls William asking him to keep his distance at school, objecting to his decision to wear a beard at his wedding, and allegedly knocking him to the floor during a 2019 argument about Meghan Markle. The memoir opens in 2021, when Harry meets William and their father, Charles, after Prince Philip’s funeral.

Random House published Spare in January 2023. The book recounts private conversations and disputes from Harry’s perspective. At the time of publication, Kensington Palace declined to comment when ABC News asked about Harry’s remarks in a related interview. ABC News coverage.

A shared loss and a divide at school

The two brothers walked behind their mother’s coffin in 1997. That public image of them side by side makes Harry’s account of their time at Eton especially striking. Harry says that when he joined William at the school, his older brother told him to act as if they did not know each other. In an interview about the memoir, Harry told Anderson Cooper that the request hurt and that he struggled to understand it at the time.

The Eton memory matters because Harry places a feeling of distance between them years before Meghan enters the story. At a new school, he expected the presence of his older brother to be a comfort. The request to keep apart shows how differently, in Harry’s telling, the brothers understood what they owed each other even then.

Why Harry’s wedding beard became a point of contention

Before his 2018 wedding to Meghan, Harry asked Queen Elizabeth II for permission to keep his beard while wearing military uniform. She agreed. Harry writes that William objected to the way he had sought permission and pressed him to shave. Harry kept the beard for the wedding.

The beard is a small detail that tells the reader something about the larger disagreement. Harry describes it as something that helped him manage his anxiety. In his account, William focuses on the position Harry put their grandmother in by asking for an exception. The brothers were arguing over the same decision while assigning very different stakes to it.

What Harry alleges happened during the 2019 argument

Harry writes that William came to Nottingham Cottage, Harry’s home on the Kensington Palace grounds, and criticized Meghan. Harry says the argument escalated and that William grabbed him by the collar and knocked him down. In Harry’s account, he landed on a dog bowl that broke beneath him. He says William later apologized.

Harry understood William’s criticism of Meghan as an echo of the way she was being described in the press. That is part of what gives the scene its place in the memoir. Harry describes a public narrative he already felt powerless to change turning up in a private conversation with his brother.

Why Spare opens after Prince Philip’s funeral

The opening scene takes place at Frogmore in April 2021. Harry arranges to meet William and Charles after Prince Philip’s funeral, hoping to talk about how things went wrong. In Harry’s account, Charles eventually intervenes and asks his sons to stop fighting.

By starting with this meeting, Harry gives readers a question to carry through the childhood and wedding scenes that follow. How did brothers with so much shared history reach a point where they could barely agree on what had happened between them? The title supplies part of Harry’s answer. William was the heir, and Harry understood himself as the spare. That difference gives the school and wedding anecdotes their weight. They show Harry repeatedly looking to his brother for understanding and finding that William, as Harry remembers him, saw the situation differently.

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To read the Frogmore opening and the surrounding chapters in full, find the U.S. hardcover of Spare on Amazon.

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