“My family had declared me a nullity. The Spare,” declares Prince Harry in his new memoir, frustrated in a history lesson at Eton that the teacher expected him to know the story of Charles Edward Stuart. He doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to know about history – “Why memorise the names of past spares?”. And yet he has: they thread through his book, unspoken. Not just Princess Margaret (who he notes once gave him a Biro for Christmas), all the others who were No 2, and those who are to come. Harry was, as he sees it, “brought into the world in case something happened to Willy”.
“The heir and the spare” was, he tells us, a “shorthand” about the two brothers used by the entire family, and says it was what Charles told Diana after his birth. The word “spare” is repeated so much that it is almost dizzying – and recurs in the most heated incidents. When, he said, William pushed him, his brother was “in full heir mode and couldn’t fathom why I wasn’t dutifully playing the role of the spare”.
And, as the first sibling marries and has children, the No 2 becomes less central, as he describes in the case of Margaret, lonely and without purpose, and as he depicts himself post-army and pre-Meghan: eating takeaway alone and watching reruns of Friends – “no longer the spare of the spare”.
In the past, the spare was urgently required in case the heir died. Many monarchs have been spares; Henry VIII was the younger brother of Arthur, Prince of Wales, who died at the age of 15 from an illness, perhaps sweating sickness. Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, was the second spare, younger half-sibling to Edward VI and Mary I, never intended to come near the throne.
Victoria was the ultimate spare – the daughter of the fourth son of George III, only on the throne because all three elder sons died without living children. Harry’s great great grandfather, George V, had been the younger brother. Albert Victor, the eldest son, died in an influenza pandemic in 1892. Most recently, the Queen’s father was No 2, after Edward VIII abdicated.
But these days, early deaths from influenza or, as in the case of the elder cousin of Victoria, Princess Charlotte, dying in childbirth, are rare. Now, Harry argues the role of the spare is fodder for the press, “a distraction” in the “game” of journalists writing stories, briefed by offices.
As he puts it, he was conveniently branded the “naughty one” in order to take the heat off other royals – and it never stopped. He admits to his times with drugs and drink – but he’s clearly annoyed that he was not allowed to defend himself against accusations such as cheating on an A-level exam, when the exam board cleared him of doing so. Diana haunts the book: his inability to believe in her death and the lack of a wider recognition of his long-term grief, so keen was everybody to cast him as the “party prince”.
And, most of all, that (even though Prince Andrew put out statements saying he hardly knew Jeffrey Epstein), Harry was discouraged from trying to stop stories accusing Meghan of everything from killing the planet with avocado consumption to attempting to kill the young Princess Charlotte with her bridal flowers, stories with racist undertones or arguing she was breaking protocol by editing magazines.
In 2020, Harry and Meghan proposed they were “half in, half out” of the royal family, earning their own money while also supporting the Queen part time. Their idea was refused by courtiers and claimed to be unworkable. But this is exactly what the European royal families do. The younger siblings of the Dutch king worked in finance and law, Princess Madeleine of Sweden lives in Florida and works for the family charity. Surely in the future, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis should be allowed to spend their lives not as back up royals, but have careers, and earn their own money as doctors or cake bakers, while supporting the monarchy on a part-time basis.
The example of Sophie Wessex is often brought up about the “half in, half out” model – she tried to keep her PR job and was tricked by Mazher Mahmood of the News of the World into being indiscreet when she thought she was talking to a potential client. So if the monarchy is to reform, it’s also up to us. Can we allow the second born to work in a hospital without photographers and the rest of us snapping her with cameraphones? Or let him go to work in an office on the tube? If we can’t, this whole story will repeat again.
Kate Williams is professor of history at Reading University and author of Rival Queens and The Edge of the Fall
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