When it comes to his family, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, has always been in second place or the runner-up. Well aware of that since he was a kid, Harry wrote about his struggles as the spare to the heir to the throne, aka his brother, William, Prince of Wales, in his controversial memoir, “Spare.” This tell-all book was a major reason for Prince William and Prince Harry’s bitter feud, a quarrel that does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
Despite how they may feel about Prince Harry, it seems like Prince William and Kate Middleton heard his side of growing up and considered as just the spare for his older brother. They are making strides so their daughter, Princess Charlotte of Wales, doesn’t feel the same way her uncle did. Robert Hardman, a royal biographer and author of “The Making of a King: King Charles III and the Modern Monarchy,” told People that Prince William isn’t just “preparing to be King himself but to make the whole royal existence approachable and not scary for all his children.”
In “Spare,” Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, wrote, “I was the shadow, the support, the Plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy.” The father of two shared how he begrudgingly accepted this, but it obviously wasn’t great to feel like your family only saw you as an extra or backup child in case something went wrong with the Chosen One. “The Spare could always be spared.”
There’s hope for future generations of the monarchy
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It’s great that William, Prince of Wales, and Catherine, Princess of Wales, are aware of the difficulties being a spare can cause, and hopefully, they will continue working to end that familial way of thinking. However, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, told The Telegraph in 2023 that he was concerned about his niece and nephews, especially Princess Charlotte of Wales and Prince Louis of Wales, since they are the younger siblings like him. “I know that out of those three children, at least one will end up like me, the spare. And that hurts, it worries me.” (via Cosmopolitan).
Hopefully, the monarchy’s practices will change for the next generation, and some updates have already been made. Princess Charlotte made history when she became the first female royal not to be bumped down the succession line after her younger brother, Prince Louis of Wales, was born. This is because her grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, amended the Succession to the Crown Act in 2013. The change made it so that the gender of a monarch’s heir didn’t matter; males would not get preferential treatment over females. Since Princess Charlotte was born before Prince Louis, she is before him in line for the throne.
Prince William and Kate Middleton have gushed about all three of their children to the press, not just Prince George of Wales. Moreover, Princess Charlotte has a sweet relationship with her brothers, something that hopefully will continue as the children grow into adulthood. The last thing anyone wants is another royal sibling feud.
