Harry

Chapter One

LITTLE WALES

For any child, losing their mother is a traumatic, life-changing experience. For a twelve-year-old prince under the glare of the media spotlight, it was unbearable. The image of Prince Harry standing behind his mother’s coffin next to his fifteen-year-old brother, Prince William, flanked by his father, the Prince of Wales, his grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh, and his maternal uncle, Charles Spencer, is one that will forever be etched in the memory of those dark-blue days. His small fists clenched and his head bowed, Harry couldn’t even bring himself to look at his mother’s coffin.

“No child,” Harry has said since, “should be made to walk behind their mother’s cortege,” and there is no doubt the prince was scarred by the experience of that day. It is also now clear that the death of his mother shaped the two tumultuous decades that followed and that for most of his adult life he was incapable of addressing his personal grief.

Harry was in his late twenties when he started a very personal journey of self-discovery that enabled him to find his purpose in life. It had been a rocky path—drinking too much, making bad decisions, lashing out at the paparazzi whom he blamed for his mother’s death, and submerging his grief—which he has since admitted culminated in “two years of chaos.” He struggled with his royal role, admitting: “There was a time I felt I wanted out,” and it is no understatement to say that he often wished he had never been born a prince. “I spent many years kicking my heels, and I didn’t want to grow up,” he has said.

Unlike William, who was born to be king, Harry has had to determine his own identity, often in his older brother’s shadow. Historically, being the spare has not been easy. The Queen’s late sister Princess Margaret struggled with the role; so too Prince Andrew, who has lived his life in Prince Charles’s shadow. Harry has grown up acutely aware of the pitfalls of being the second-born son. “Everyone seems to think that when you grow up in this position it comes naturally. But it’s like any job—you’ve got to learn how to do it,” he has said.

And Harry has. His renaissance is a remarkable one and he has proved to be one of the Royal Family’s greatest assets, his importance and popularity within the royal hierarchy growing all the time. He carries out state tours on behalf of his grandmother, Her Majesty the Queen, with diplomacy and charm and he is developing a role as a leading conservationist, philanthropist, and charity campaigner, taking on his mother’s compassion for those living with AIDS and creating his own legacy with the Invictus Games to help injured service men and women. Like Diana, he is not afraid of taking on difficult issues such as mental health and he has a unique way of communicating with people from all walks of life, young and old. “What my mother believed in,” he has said, “is if you are in a position of privilege or a position of responsibility and if you can put your name to something that you genuinely believe in… then you can smash any stigma you want.”

Harry has often spoken about being three people: a prince, a soldier, and a private person. There are, however, so many other sides to him. A party prince who was prepared to risk his life at war, he has earned the love and respect of royalists, veterans, and the public the world over. He is a dutiful son, a loving brother, a fun uncle, and very soon he will be a married man hoping, he has said, to start a family of his own.

In Meghan Markle he appears to have found an ideal partner. Harry’s search to find a wife and a meaningful role in his life has been long and at times arduous; a battle on many fronts. Yet it is only when we understand this battle that we can truly understand Prince Harry.

On Saturday, September 4, 1984, Princess Diana gave birth to her second son, Prince Henry Charles Albert David. Harry—as he was to be known—was born in the same room as his older brother, William, at the Lindo Wing in St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. He weighed a healthy six pounds, fourteen ounces and his father, Prince Charles, had been by his wife’s side throughout the nine-hour labor, feeding her ice cubes. “He is wonderful and absolutely marvelous,” he later told well-wishers, fingering a red mark on his face which he had sustained while leaning against a wall waiting for the birth. “His eyes are a sort of blue and his hair an indeterminate color. Diana is very well and happy now.”

Prince William had already met his new baby brother, letting go of his nanny Barbara Barnes’s hand to race down the hospital corridor, and was waiting in Kensington Palace to welcome Harry into his nursery with its cheerful pink and blue mural of baby rabbits and a cluster of new cuddly toys. Leaving the hospital the next day, with Harry secure in his mother’s arms, the Waleses looked like any other happy couple taking their beloved baby home.

But all was not well. The Waleses’ marriage had been in trouble for some time, the fairy tale slowly and painfully descending into a story of dysfunction and heartbreak. Diana was emotionally fragile, suffering from bulimia, harboring deep-seated insecurities, and after William’s birth, experiencing a period of profound postpartum depression. It had taken a great deal of inner strength for her to continue with her royal duties following his birth, especially as she had become convinced that Charles was seeing his ex-girlfriend Camilla Parker Bowles, a suspicion that caused her untold anguish.

Charles also had his difficulties—especially his inability to understand his wife’s problems or believe he could do much about them—preferring to throw himself into his duties rather than take her complexities on board. By the time of Harry’s birth, while he and Diana were greeted with great rapture wherever they went—his youth charity, the Prince’s Trust, was flourishing, and her charity work made the public love her even more—Charles was becoming increasingly vexed by their incompatibility. Nowhere was this more evident than in Diana’s indifference to Highgrove, Charles’s country estate in the Gloucestershire countryside, where he liked nothing better than spending weekends away from London, out in the fresh air, tending his gardens or indulging in his passion for country sports. Diana, twelve years his junior, went to Highgrove under sufferance, rarely joining in the outdoor pursuits, staying inside to watch her favorite soaps on TV or catching up with her London friends by phone.

Diana later admitted that Harry’s conception “was as if by a miracle,” but there had been a brief respite in their attrition just before his birth. There was no doubt Charles had been buoyed by the prospect of a second child, especially since he had publicly expressed his desire for a daughter. As with many couples who believe the birth of a child may repair damage to their relationship, both were looking forward to their new arrival. In fact, despite the fact she knew Harry was going to be a boy and kept it from her husband, Diana said that she felt she and Charles were “very very close to each other the six weeks before Harry was born, the closest we’ve ever ever been and ever will be.”

Things soured pretty soon after Harry’s birth, when Charles is understood to have said, away from the public’s glare: “Oh, it’s a boy and he’s even got rusty hair.” That he sped off in his Aston Martin to play polo in Windsor Great Park a few hours after bringing Diana and Harry back to Kensington Palace added to Diana’s distress. “Something inside of me died,” she said later. There was soon no doubt that Harry’s birth was not going to make things better when it came to their marriage.

Whatever their problems, though, both Charles and Diana were fiercely determined that their children should grow up feeling loved and secure, and while Harry might have been entering a fractured household, the glue that still bound Charles and Diana together was based on a deep love and shared outlook for their sons. Neither had enjoyed the most demonstrative and happy of childhoods and, determined to raise their sons differently, they established a new template of royal parenting. Charles had often been upset at how little he saw his mother as a child, and was scarred by memories of how detached and formal their relationship had been. He had typically seen her for half an hour in the morning and again before dinner, and he later told his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby how once, on returning from a month-long tour of the Commonwealth, his mother had greeted him with a formal handshake. He had not enjoyed a close relationship with his father, whom he referred to in Dimbleby’s book The Prince of Wales: A Biography as “overbearing.”

Diana had an unequivocally unhappy childhood. Her parents’ marriage had broken down when she was six years old, her mother Frances abandoning the family home for her lover, Peter Shand Kydd. She remembered her parents fighting about the fact she was their third daughter and not the male heir her father so desperately desired, and even after her younger brother, Charles, was born, she carried the guilt of not being what her parents had wanted. When her mother left, the weight of rejection became even heavier and harder to bear, and she spent much of her childhood battling feelings of being unloved and unlovable.

Resolute to her core that her children would not experience the crushing feelings of rejection that still caused her so much anguish, she later told Andrew Morton in Diana: Her True Story, “I want to bring them up with security, not to anticipate things because they will be disappointed. I hug my children to death and get into bed with them at night. I feed them love and affection. It’s so important.” And while Charles was less overtly expressive, it became clear he agreed with his wife that their children should know they were loved. “He just loves the whole nursery thing,” Diana said. When Harry was born, Charles made a special effort, as he had with William, to be around for bath time, taking his turn to bottle-feed both his sons after Diana had stopped breastfeeding them.

And so it was that despite his parents’ profound unhappiness and difficulties, Harry was raised in a household that provided him and his brother with love and stability. Quite apart from his parents, there was the army of nannies, protection officers, and staff who also gave Harry unconditional security and love as he grew accustomed to the world into which he had been born. Diana delighted in the way William reacted to Harry’s arrival on the scene, writing to Cyril Dickman, a steward at Kensington Palace: “William adores his little brother, swamping his brother with an endless supply of hugs and kisses, hardly letting the parents near!” And mostly, William was unselfishly accepting of his baby brother, sharing his toys with Harry, who especially liked William’s red racing car and green-and-white “kiss me” frog.

Harry was a good-natured toddler who, according to Charles, “sleeps marvelously and eats well,” and while two-year-old William was a bit of a handful—known for a time as “Basher Wills”—Harry was, as testified to by his father, the “one with the gentle nature.” An early walker, Harry was pretty soon up and about, wobbling around on his little legs, exploring everything he could. He took his first royal walkabout at eighteen months, at Aberdeen airport as he arrived, en route to Balmoral, with his mother and brother. Coming off the plane in Diana’s arms, he toddled off as soon as they reached the tarmac, where he made a beeline for the waiting press, much to their surprise and delight. In the same year he participated in his first royal overseas engagement when his parents took him and William on their tour to Italy, another of the royal couple’s departure from protocol and further evidence of their desire to keep their children close.

Initially, Harry was a quieter toddler than William had been. He was cautious and let his brother lead the way. He was, as is common for second children but maybe more so when your brother is going to be king, in William’s shadow and took his place accordingly. But when William went to preschool and a new nanny, Ruth Wallace—whom he endearingly called “Roof”—replaced Barbara Barnes, he came out of his shell and as he learned to express himself more fluently, his confidence began to grow. According to a member of the nursery staff, Harry was “a bundle of fun who was very bright and much smarter than his brother at that age.”

Harry was talkative and would chatter away to anyone who would listen. As one of Diana’s protection officers, Ken Wharfe, remembers: “Diana didn’t want any barriers. William and Harry were encouraged to speak to the chefs, the chauffeurs, the dressers, the gardeners—they were all on first-name terms with the boys. Harry liked Frances Simpson, one of the housekeepers. Harry was always down in the staff quarters. He knew everyone, the flower man, the butcher. And everyone adored him, he was a very funny little boy.” And as Darren McGrady, who worked for the Prince and Princess of Wales and William and Harry as their personal chef from 1993 to 1997, remembers: “Harry was always my favorite at KP. I watched him and William grow up. Diana told me, ‘You take care of the heir; I’ll take care of the spare.’ She often said that to me while we were in the kitchen. She would comment on how Harry was more like her, an airhead, she joked, while William was more like his father.”

Diana established a weekly routine for William and Harry during their preschool years. Their days were spent at Kensington Palace, on playdates, watching videos, or running around outside in the beautiful gardens. On Wednesday afternoons, she would take them to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen, telling them on the way there to be on their best behavior. When her schedule allowed, she would take the boys out to the cinema or to a local restaurant. One Saturday, when Harry was five and William seven, Diana took them to W. H. Smith on High Street in Kensington. The boys found Diana’s disguise that day—a long brown wig and sunglasses—particularly amusing because she looked so different, and as they donned their oversized baseball caps, their police protection officers keeping a discreet distance behind them, they held hands and laughed and joked together. In W. H. Smith, Harry headed straight for his favorite action-packed superhero comics, but when he got to the cash register with a comic, a chocolate bar, and a pack of chewy sweets, Diana showed him that he didn’t have enough pocket money to cover all three, so he would have to put one back. Typically, members of the Royal Family did not carry any cash on them, but Diana felt it imperative that her children understand the value of money and gave them pocket money that they were allowed to spend on such trips to the shops. Harry behaved so well, putting back the sweets, that Diana decided he deserved a cheeseburger and French fries, so the three of them headed to the nearest McDonald’s, where William and Harry ordered their own meals and carried their Happy Meals to a table in the corner, not far from their discreetly placed protection officers, who were busy tucking into their own burgers. For anyone else, this would have been the most normal lunch in the world, but for Diana and the boys it was a special treat, made all the more exhilarating by the fact that they were incognito.

These times with their mother, doing things that “ordinary” people did, combined with her deep compassion for the people she met in connection with her charity work both at home and abroad—those with AIDS or leprosy, the homeless, addicts—would come to shape William and Harry and be an incredibly important foundation for how well adjusted, engaged, and emotionally intelligent they were to become as they grew up. And weekends at Highgrove, while not exactly Diana’s preferred destination, were also profoundly important to William and Harry, giving them the chance to be outdoors, to learn how to appreciate the wonders of nature, to make up games, and most important, to spend quality time with their doting father.

For two little boys, Highgrove, with its acres of land, was paradise, and Charles was delighted his sons shared in his love of the place. He taught them how to care for their pets, in Harry’s case a soft little gray rabbit that he completely adored and took great care of, cleaning out its hutch with great concentration; he took them for long walks, accompanied by the Highgrove dogs, and to see the lambing; and he let them tend specially created vegetable patches that they planted, watched grow, and then ate. Best of all, he built them a special play pit filled with brightly colored plastic balls where the boys would hide, shrieking with excitement as Charles dived in to find them and, later, a tree house where the brothers devised all sorts of games, making up complex military maneuvers that kept them occupied for hours on end.

Charles loved the boys being at Highgrove and never stopped them from dashing in and out of the many rooms. If he needed peace and quiet, he would ask them to leave him to get on with his work but promise them a game of their favorite Big Bad Wolf later, which, according to Wendy Berry, the housekeeper at Highgrove, “consisted of Charles standing in the middle of the day-nursery floor, trying to prevent them from getting past him. Sometimes it got a bit rough with little William and Harry being hurled on to the large sofa at the side, although nobody ever got hurt, because of all the cushions. Invariably they were prevented from passing and, amid gales of laughter, were sent spinning on to the sofa.”

From an early age Harry was adventurous, throwing himself into physical activities, taking to the saddle right away. He was taught to ride by local instructor Marion Cox, who on weekends would take the boys out on their Shetland ponies.

By the age of four, Harry was doing so well that Marion entered him (under the name Harry Cox) in local riding competitions where he won his first rosette on his pony, Smokey. By five, he had the guts to ride his father’s horse, Centennial, well-known for being frisky—though touchingly, his little legs weren’t long enough to reach the stirrups. He was soon entering—and winning rosettes—at competitions near Highgrove or at Balmoral where the boys also rode. Harry was such a natural that Princess Anne, his aunt who was herself an Olympic equestrian, told him he had “a good seat” and, if he worked hard, had the talent to compete more widely, possibly on the international stage.

Meanwhile, as Charles and Diana’s marriage began to spiral down even further and they spent less and less time together, they inevitably sought solace elsewhere—Charles with Camilla Parker Bowles and Diana with Captain James Hewitt, the dashingly handsome red-headed cavalry officer whom she met at a party in the summer of 1986, when Harry was nearly two years old. He was an accomplished horseman and when Diana confessed that she had lost her confidence in riding, he offered to teach her at the Knightsbridge Barracks where he was stationed. They soon fell in love and he quickly became very much a part of William and Harry’s lives, stopping by often at Kensington Palace and staying at Highgrove when Charles was away. James took to William and Harry immediately, reading to them from William’s favorite book, Winnie the Pooh, joining in nighttime pillow fights, and talking to them about his stint in the army.

Harry had been interested in all things military from a very young age. William had recruited Harry in playing his favorite game—snapping to attention and saluting their father when the Prince of Wales came in and out of a room. This so tickled the prince that he usually barely managed to return their salute with a straight face, and to join in the spirit of their game, he commissioned cut-down uniforms of the Parachute Regiment, of which he was colonel in chief. At Highgrove William and Harry would frequently dress in those uniforms and set up roadblocks, stopping staff and pointing toy guns at them as they rolled down their windows and handed over the 20-pence tariff imposed by the make-believe soldiers. Hewitt was only too happy to indulge Harry’s passion, inviting both boys to his army barracks, where he allowed them to climb in and out of tanks, pretend to shoot machine guns, and meet other serving officers.

But it wasn’t all to be fun and games. There was soon the matter of education. Although the Queen had expected Charles’s children to be educated at home in keeping with tradition, Diana—with Charles’s agreement—insisted that both her sons go to school in order to mix with children their own age. As Diana’s protection officer Ken Wharfe recalls: “Everyone anticipated they’d be raised royal, but they had a very normal childhood. They went to visit friends and had playdates.” Accordingly, at three years old Harry followed William to Mrs. Mynors’ nursery school, a few roads away from Kensington Palace; from ages five to seven to Wetherby, a pre-preparatory school in Notting Hill; and then at seven, to Ludgrove, a boarding school in Berkshire. Whenever she could, Diana would take both William and Harry to school, and both Charles and Diana—when their schedules allowed, and often separately—attended school concerts, plays, and sporting events, which was of great significance to both William and Harry at the time and how they were shaped as young boys.

For the most part, Harry enjoyed being a “cygnet” in Mrs. Mynors’ nursery and later his time at Wetherby, but he was at first reluctant to leave the security of home, preferring to spend time with his mother, contriving all sorts of situations in which he could stay at home and be with her. He would snuggle into her lap and cuddle up to her, and they would enjoy days in which they watched films together, read picture books, and waited for William to come home. They were exceptionally close. As Simone Simmons, a friend of the princess, remembers: “It was not uncommon for Harry to have a day off from school because he wasn’t feeling well. He used to go down with more coughs and colds than William, but it was nothing serious and most of the time I think he just wanted to be at home with his mummy. He loved having her to himself and not having to compete with William.”

And Diana adored him, feeling especially protective toward Harry, given his position as the spare. Simmons recalls: “I remember Harry complaining that when he and William were with the Queen Mother, that William was always the center of attention. William would be sitting next to the Queen Mother in a drawing room that dwarfed the pair of them, and Harry would be sitting at a distance from them keeping himself entertained. He was particularly upset when, on one occasion, the butler brought sandwiches just for her and William.” Ken Wharfe recalls Harry being acutely aware of his position from a very early age:

Harry loved Diana unconditionally and even as a young child could sense that she needed looking after, telling people that he wanted to be a policeman or a fireman so he could protect his mummy.

While he was pretty well behaved at school, as his confidence grew Harry proved himself a bit of a mischief at home. As Wharfe remembers: “Harry was often in trouble. Princess Margaret, who lived next door to them at KP, complained to Diana once that Harry was chasing her cats. Well, he was often out in the garden mostly checking for foxes in the traps that Princess Michael left.” But it was good-natured, and Diana’s friend, Carolyn Bartholomew, thought that Harry was “the most affectionate, demonstrative, and huggable little boy.”

At four, Harry underwent a small operation to repair a hernia and then later in the year, just before he turned five, he started at Wetherby a few days later than planned as he had been recovering from a viral infection. In his uniform of a gray-flannel blazer with red braiding, school cap, gray socks, and sandals, Harry let go of Diana’s hand, left William behind, and raced along the pavement to the waiting headmistress, Frederika Blair-Turner, smiling broadly at her and the waiting press while she bent down to shake his little hand. Jonathan Weinberg, a friend and contemporary of Harry, went to Wetherby with him. “It was rather exciting having a prince at the school, and Harry was always popular and fun. I remember at Wetherby that one of the coatrooms was turned into a place for Harry’s protection officer.”

At home, Harry could keep everyone busy with his need to be occupied. He was a regular visitor to Ken Wharfe’s door:

Harry’s sporting prowess was evident from an early age, but not just on horseback. When he was six, Diana took him and William skiing to Lech, Austria, during the school holidays. “I remember the first time we took Harry skiing,” recalls Ken Wharfe fondly.

Harry became a “squit”—a new boarder at Ludgrove—in September 1992. After an initial period of homesickness, he took to the weekly routine well and soon made friends. William, who was three academic years above him, was extremely well-liked throughout the school, and having his older brother around undoubtedly helped Harry get used to being away from home. While he was not as academically able as William, Harry was a superb sportsman, excelling in football, rugby, cricket, and tennis, and the school encouraged him in the many and varied extracurricular activities.

In another letter to Cyril Dickman, Diana told him, “The boys are well and enjoying boarding school, though Harry is constantly in trouble.” “Trouble” didn’t seem to be anything other than mischief or high spirits, as a close friend of Harry’s recalls: