Prince William enraged Prince Harry by asking Princess Diana’s brother Earl Spencer to step in

For the last two years of his 20s, Prince Harry’s life slipped sideways into what he described as ‘total chaos’. Prince Harry just did not know what was wrong with himself. Prince Harry had probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions. At his older brother’s suggestion, Prince Harry went into therapy. Even so, Cressida Bonas, Prince Harry’s last serious girlfriend before Meghan Markle, came to feel he was a damaged and self-obsessed young man.

No matter how educated, talented, rich, or cool a person believed he is, how he treated people ultimately told it all. Bonas complained to friends that Prince Harry had a neurosis about the media. Prince Harry would rant and complain about paparazzi lurking where clearly there were none. Meghan Markle, star of the United States TV legal drama series Suits, came into his life in early July 2016.

Already Prince Harry could sense in Meghan Markle the quirks and originalities that made her such a similar character to Princess Diana. Meghan Markle was a changer not a conformist, who fought her battles with the same non-royal, those temptingly anti-royal qualities of Prince Harry’s mother. Sometime during that first summer and autumn together in 2016, Prince Harry introduced his girlfriend to his father and his grandmother, who thoroughly approved.

The problem was Prince William.

Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle actually got on rather well from the start. Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle might not be best-buddy material, but they found themselves, sister-outsiders in their extraordinary royal situation, and both of them cool professionals, treating each other with mutual respect. Each was far too canny to make an enemy of a prospective sister-in-law, it only made sense to be friends.

The fundamental conflict was between the two males who had known each other all their lives and had never hesitated to tell each other exactly what they thought and felt. For his part, Prince William was worried that his brother was going too fast in his courtship and he did not shrink from saying so when Prince Harry started talking about getting hitched. This all seemed to be moving rather quickly.

Prince William could not understand how Prince Harry could contemplate marrying this still unknown and untested quantity less than two years after their first meeting.

It went against Prince William’s every instinct, and his own track record. Prince William had taken nearly a decade to test out and approve his life partner, surely his younger brother could ponder his options for just a year or so more. Prince William, of course, took so long to commit to Kate Middleton for the sake of the monarchy. Prince William had been auditioning Kate Middleton for a job all those years.

So Prince Harry could not help but wonder whether Prince William was really concerned about his personal happiness or whether he was, once again and as per usual, thinking about the make-up of the monarchy. The response from Prince Harry was a brusque and offended pushback. After several more peppery reactions, Prince William turned to his uncle Charles Spencer for help.

From time to time Princess Diana’s younger brother had played something of an honorary godfather to both boys in the years since the death of their mother, and their uncle agreed with Prince William to see what he could do. The result of the Spencer intervention was an even more bitter explosion. Once again Prince Harry refused to slow down. Prince Harry did not blame his uncle.

Prince Harry understood why Princess Diana’s brother should want to help.

Yet Prince Harry was furious with his elder brother for dragging other family members into the row. The fraternal fissure became established. There would be patch-ups and reconciliations, especially when a public show of unity was required. But that anger, mistrust, and distance lasted to the present day. Even in the fierceness of their disharmony, Prince William and Prince Harry could clearly see and agree on some of the things that they needed to do next – extracting themselves from each other’s pockets for a start, and setting up their homes more separately.

That meant the brothers should also split apart the offices they had shared at Kensington since 2012. Prince Harry put in a request to set up his own office and mini court, possibly at Frogmore, but that was a step too far for both the Queen and Prince Charles who would have to finance the new arrangement. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were told that they would have to house their staffs in offices at Buckingham Palace under the supervision of the Queen’s private secretary Sir Edward Young.

Still, Buckingham Palace was the royal headquarters, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were willing to see how things might work out. The saddest separation in many ways came from the two brothers’ decision to split up the Royal Foundation, the thriving charitable enterprise that they had created ten years earlier to promote their various good causes. Raising and paying out a good £7 million to £8 million per year for some 26 charities, the Royal Foundation seemed to embody both the legacy of Princess Diana and the harmony of her sons in perpetuating her name.

When Prince William, Kate Middleton, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle appeared on stage together for the first time to launch their Royal Foundation Forum at the end of February 2018, they had been hailed as the ‘Fab Four’.

Prince Harry was incredibly proud and excited that his soon-to-be wife, who was equally passionate about seeing positive change in the world, would soon be joining them with this work. Prince William then welcomed Meghan Markle to the family in a more official fashion, adding how delighted he was for her to be joining the team, while Kate Middleton backed her husband up with a round of applause. It was announced that Meghan Markle would become a fourth trustee, and she expressed the hope the foundation might extend its support to the women’s empowerment movement that was developing in the United States from the recent Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandals.

With so many campaigns like #MeToo and #TimesUp, there was no better time to continue to shine a light on women feeling empowered and people supporting them. Everybody nodded approvingly, yet no one appeared to realize quite how revolutionary was this suggestion that the new recruit was making. Because only the previous month a $13 million legal defense fund had been created, linked to MeToo and TimesUp, seeking legislation to discipline and punish companies that tolerated sexual harassment.

Legislation meant politics, and in royal terms politics was simply taboo. It was a total no-no for the British Royal Family to endorse any cause, no matter how virtuous, that could be seen to take one political side against another. So here was another profound reason for the rift that would divide Prince William and Prince Harry and come close to shattering the House of Windsor within two years.

Meghan Markle did not just want to do good in the world, she wanted to change the world.

On June 20th 2019, not long after Archie’s birth, it was announced that the Royal Foundation’s assets would be divided. Prince William and Kate Middleton would take over the existing organization, while Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would establish a charity of their own aiming at global outreach. The following day, which just happened to be Prince William’s 37th birthday, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle trademarked ‘Sussex Royal — The Foundation Of The Duke And Duchess Of Sussex’.

Sussex Royal was the work of Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, and her team of American advisers headed by the powerful Hollywood talent and PR agency Sunshine Sachs. Those advisers were on hand at the end of July 2019 when the contents of Meghan Markle’s ‘Forces for Change’ were previewed and met by stern and rather worrying disapproval from the British Press. Meghan Markle clearly did not understand that her new, royal status precludes political statements.

Meghan Markle still had not grasped that the role of the monarchy was to unite the country. The Sun took up the same theme. It was a formidable chorus of disapproval, and not just from commentators. Editors had serious constitutional concerns about the monarchy trespassing into politics. Meghan Markle evidently did not know what it meant to be a Windsor. That feeling was coming to be shared among the Windsors themselves, and Prince William was particularly disturbed.

Prince William’s concern went much deeper.

Money, power, and survival. These were basic royal issues, and they were far too important to be threatened by trendy controversies in a glossy magazine. Prince William had heartily endorsed his sister-in-law’s previous publishing initiative. The Royal Foundation had stepped in to support the Grenfell Tower fire cookbook, administering the collection and distribution of the funds.

The project had been driven by a desire to make a difference together. Prince William did not see his future role as monarch as a matter of him working to maintain the nation’s feelings in harmony while his activist brother and his wife jumped up and down beside him cultivating political and cultural divisions in pursuit of their trendy vision of doing good. Prince William had been worried for some time that Prince Harry was growing away from him.

As with the brothers’ arguments of Prince William’s attempts to make Prince Harry ‘go slow’, the details of the showdown over Meghan Markle’s ‘Forces for Change’ were not known. But there was another classic Prince Harry explosion, followed by a further, even deeper rift. Suddenly Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, and Archie were no longer joining Prince William, Kate Middleton, and the other members of the Royal Family for their annual summer holiday with the Queen at Balmoral.

The official excuse, conveyed straight-faced by the palace, was that at three months Archie was still too young for the air travel involved.

But that did not stop the Sussexes somehow managing to travel to Minorca for a week that August, and then taking Archie with them for a few days in the South of France with Elton John and his partner David Furnish.