We know they’re in the middle of a row now. But if you had the idea Prince Harry and Prince William were besties growing up, forget it!
Royal expert and editor of Majesty Magazine Ingrid Seward spilled all the tea to The Sun on Monday — the heir and the spare were never as close as children as many believe. While speaking to editor Matt Wilkinson, she recalled what the boys’ mother Princess Diana told her about the sibling rivalry back in the ’90s.
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She says Di told her Harry wanted his mum all “to himself” and didn’t really like the fact William took some of her attention. In fact, Diana had a lot of “concerns” regarding Harry and how he was always in William’s shadow:
“[Diana] opened up and she said at one time she really worried about William, but then she started to be concerned about Harry as she said he had no interest in learning, he never picked up a book. She obviously really tried to help him, but all Harry really wanted to do was have his mother to himself.”
In fact, the expert said sometimes the Duke of Sussex would play sick just to spend more time with her:
“He would sometimes pretend that he was ill at school so she could pick him up and take him home so he could sit and watch television with her all afternoon. He was a very tactile young boy. Very close to his mother.”
Awww! That’s kinda sweet!
But we definitely see how that could put a little rift between the two brothers. It wasn’t until after Diana’s tragic passing that they became more “unified,” says Seward — it was a total “myth” they were “close as youngsters”:
“I remember after William went on his gap year, way back on operation Raleigh, Harry said ‘he’s much nicer now’, so this myth that Harry and William were very close, is a myth. They were only really close after their mother died. Of course they unified and they were the only two people that knew what it felt like. But they weren’t very close as youngsters.”
Ingrid says the boys’ mother was well aware of their rivalry, and even worried herself about the way Harry was treated in comparison to his big brother:
“[Diana and I] talked about it quite a lot. She said ‘I worry for Harry and I’m really, really careful that he’s not treated differently than William’. When they used to go and see the Queen Mother, she would pat the chair and say ‘come and sit here William’ and completely ignore Harry, and that really upset Diana.”
The expert claims this is what pushed Diana to want Harry to attend Eton College rather than a less prestigious school, even if he’d be happier:
“And that’s one of the reasons she said to me she wanted him to go to Eton rather than some other school which might’ve suited him better. She didn’t want people to say ‘he’s stupid’ or that ‘he can’t get in there’. She was very concerned about his feeling of inadequacy with William.”
The late Princess was always conscious about how “sensitive” Harry was, as well:
“When William was a little boy, he would bully him quite a lot, which was perfectly normal, and Harry would always take the blame for the scrapes they’d get into. Again, perfectly normal for young boys. But Diana was very conscious of Harry being a very sensitive child and she wondered what he was going to do, was he going to follow his love, which was the army, even as a little boy.”
William being much more privileged than his little brother was an idea the kids were made well aware of extremely young, according to the biographer:
“It was planted very, very young, that seed of William having the privilege. And Harry of course didn’t really understand. In a way it’s better to be the spare than the heir.”
Harsh… Their whole dynamic definitely is still causing issues between the two.
Sadly, Ingrid said that Harry and William’s falling out would be Diana’s worst nightmare if she were still with us today:
“What [Diana] wouldn’t like is this fall out from the family. She would really hate that. She wouldn’t be at all happy that Harry had fallen out with William. She always said to them ‘please, please remember, don’t ever forget that you’re brothers and I want you to be friends’. That would worry her about Harry.”
Aw! Are YOU surprised about this, Perezcious readers? Sound OFF (below).
[Image via Anwar Hussein/MEGA/WENN.com]
