Prince William’s shock three-word response to Prince Harry’s plea for peace
Prince William did not mince his words when it came to healing the rift with his brother. Prince Harry revealed what happened when they came face-to-face for the first time
Prince Harry has revealed Prince William’s shock three-word response to his plea for peace.
The Duke of Sussex gave his take on the extraordinary fall-out with his family – and just what happened when he had reached out an olive branch to his big brother. Instead of the sympathy he had hoped for, Harry said his brother’s three words to him were quite the opposite. William told him: “You left, Harold,” writes Harry in his memoir Spare.
A stunned Harry replied: “Yeah – and you know why.” William returned: “I don’t.” Harry explained in an excerpt from his book: “My beloved brother, my arch nemesis, how had that happened? He continued: “I felt massively tired. I wanted to go home, and I realized what a complicated concept home had become.”
Prince Harry detailed his brother’s three words to him (
Image:
Getty Images)
“Or maybe always was. I gestured at the gardens, the city beyond, the nation, and said: ‘Willy, this was supposed to be our home. We were going to live here the rest of our lives.’.” The brothers are still yet to heal their rift since Harry and wife Meghan Markle’s bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey.
→ Swipe to see more articles
Harry recalled his reaction to his conversation with his brother. He said: “I leaned back. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was one thing to disagree about who was at fault or how things might have been different, but for him to claim total ignorance of the reasons I’d fled the land of my birth— the land for which I’d fought and been ready to die—my Mother Country?
“That fraught phrase. To claim no knowledge of why my wife and I took the drastic step of picking up our child and just running like hell, leaving behind everything—house, friends, furniture? Really?”
When it came to sympathy from his father King Charles, Harry was no better off, he says. Recalling the scenario in his book, Harry said: “I turned to Pa. He was gazing at me with an expression that said: ‘Neither do I.'”
Harry stepped away from senior Royal duties in 2020 (
Image:
Getty Images)
Harry then continued: “Wow, I thought. Maybe they really don’t. Staggering. But maybe it was true.And if they didn’t know why Id left, maybe they just didn’t know me. At all. And maybe they never really did.”
Meanwhile Harry has been told the one thing he’s so far failed to do with William and King Charles that might achieve his “one aim”. After stepping away from their senior Royal duties in 2020, Harry and Meghan Markle have been candid about their experiences and made a series of damaging claims.
Their public comments, notably those made during a bombshell 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, the couple’s 2022 Netflix docu-series, and Harry’s anticipated 2023 autobiography, seem to only widen the seeming rift within the monarchy.
Speaking exclusively to The Mirror, royal writer and expert Tom Quinn said: “Over the years that Harry has complained about his treatment by his family he has had just one aim – to get an apology and to see his father and brother make amends. Harry just can’t see that complaining in private might work; complaining publicly just makes things worse and in Harry’s case that means more and more ties to his past being severed.”
