Robert Lacey’s latest book on the British monarchy is still four days from publication, but already he’s getting hate mail from furious Prince William fans. “There is such anger that the book has dared to suggest Prince William is not perfect,” says the historian, 76, who has been writing about royal matters for more than 40 years. He is also consultant on The Crown, whose fourth series comes to Netflix next month.
“Portraits of William are always so idealised because he is our future king. Charles III and Queen Camilla is not an appealing prospect, but there is William and his wonderful wife - and that’s what everybody has their hopes set on.”
Not an appealing prospect? Now Prince Charles fans will be reaching for their organic quills.
Read Next
Lacey’s book, Battle of Brothers, is an account of the uneasy relationship between William and Prince Harry. Until he began his research, Lacey had thought this feud was a newspaper invention. He says he has spoken to dozens of people who know the princes and now believes the rift is even more serious than reports have claimed.
Lacey suggests, among other things, that William has a formidable temper and that - perhaps more wounding - he has gained his reputation for steadiness and sense of duty at the expense of his younger brother.
Yet this was not the book he had been hoping to write. The heir and the spare he originally had in mind were Charles and Prince Andrew, but he dropped that plan after talking to his friend Peter Morgan, the writer of The Crown, who bluntly advised: “They aren’t the princes that matter any more.”
The resulting book is a mixture of the occasional revelation and well-worn anecdotes about the lives of William and Harry that stretch back to their parents’ courtship and the very public disintegration of that marriage.
Tension between the princes, he claims, dates back to their school days at Eton, where William introduced Harry to a riotous social circle. While Harry took the blame for bad behaviour, William seemed to emerge unscathed.
“This was the beginning of the relentless popular media stereotyping that would eventually drive Prince Harry out of Britain,” writes Lacey. “The other face of that stereotype was, of course, the impeccable image of his perfect elder brother, golden boy Prince William.”
One of the only times Harry got the better of his brother was during his military service. On graduating from Sandhurst, Harry noted that William, then a cadet, would now have to salute him. And while Captain Wales came under fire in Afghanistan, it was decided that sending William anywhere near the front line would prove too great a temptation to the Taliban.
Apart from that, Harry was always going to finish in second place. He was hurt, says Lacey, by his father’s plans for a slimmed-down monarchy and resented an official portrait taken early this year showing only the Queen, Charles, William and Prince George - the direct line of succession. But, as we all now know, it is Harry’s marriage - to a woman the author describes, with Wallis Simpson in mind, as “the second American divorcee to screw up the monarchy” - that has proved particularly divisive.
“The palace expected Harry to marry a nice girl called Annabel or Henrietta and to go and live in the country,” says Lacey. “They didn’t expect this bombshell.”
Presented with the opinionated and outspoken Meghan Markle, the palace didn’t know what to do. “There was personal animosity in the palace towards Meghan - and the feeling is mutual,” says Lacey. “There was somebody in the palace - and I can’t name them - who hated Meghan. There is no love lost there.”
This revelation was removed from the book on legal advice. Even with this precaution, Battle of Brothers proved too explosive for sensitive courtiers. Lacey’s usual practice with his royal books is to submit selected chapters to the palace in advance, a habit dating back to the help he says he got for Majesty, his 1977 biography of the Queen. But this time the packet came back unopened. “They took fright over the title, probably,” he says.
Nothing seemed to bring the two sides together. William, who made his girlfriend wait nine years before suggesting marriage, was so worried about Harry’s rush to the altar that he asked his uncle, Earl Spencer, to intervene. That only made matters worse: “Harry was furious with his elder brother for dragging other family members into the row.”
Relations between the palace and the Sussexes became so bad that pictures of Harry and Meghan were notably absent from the display of photographs on Her Majesty’s desk during the 2019 Christmas message, although they had featured the year before: “Who does and who does not feature on the royal Christmas desk has always been like the changing panorama of faces on the historic balcony of Moscow’s Kremlin. It showed who was in favour and who was not.”
Palace officials complained that talking to Meghan and Harry was like dealing with a hard-nosed Hollywood lawyer, although Lacey suggests the attention of courtiers might have been elsewhere: “One of the reasons things went wrong over Christmas and new year was that the palace was so preoccupied with the Andrew problem, they didn’t see the Harry problem coming.”
Matters came to a head in January, when the Queen called the princes to what has become known as the Sandringham summit. According to friends, William was so furious that, not wanting to face his brother, he refused his grandmother’s invitation to join a family lunch.
If you consult your royal family scrapbook, you will recognise much of the information here, but the book gathers it into a narrative that suggests the rift between Harry and the rest of the family was probably inevitable.
Lacey is the son of a banker and a school cook. He went to grammar school in Bristol, studied history at Cambridge and started a career in journalism that led him to The Sunday Times, where he was Jilly Cooper’s editor. It was Lacey’s investigation into stale yoghurt and mouldy pork pies that partly led to the establishment of “best before” dates.
While working on the paper he wrote a book about Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex (a warning about the dangers of court intrigue: he was a favourite of Elizabeth I who became the last person to be beheaded at the Tower of London). Books about Henry VIII and Sir Walter Raleigh followed, but it was Majesty that became his first bestseller.
Since then he has lived in the desert to research a book about the Saudi royal family and worked on a Detroit production line for a biography of Henry Ford. But he is now best known as an expert on the royal family. He was a television pundit during the weddings of both the Cambridges and the Sussexes. He can even boast a distant royal connection. His second wife, Lady Jane Rayne, daughter of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry, was a maid of honour at the coronation. He has three children from his first marriage and lives in north London.
Lacey’s advice on The Crown is mainly delivered in phone calls with Peter Morgan. It probably wouldn’t be stretching a point to suggest the royal family is not entirely looking forward to the next series, which will not always show them at their happiest. It will include the collapse of Princess Margaret’s marriage, the assassination of Mountbatten, the wedding of Charles and Diana, the birth of the princes and the looming presence of Camilla Parker Bowles.
As for William and Harry, Lacey doesn’t expect any reconciliation: “I was optimistic, but I’ve become less so. It’s rather worrying that Buckingham Palace is taking William’s side against Harry. The problem with the royal family is that it doesn’t know how to do ‘woke’. Woke is not going to go away. It’s here to stay, and Meghan is the very embodiment of it.”
Battle of Brothers: William and Harry - The Inside Story of a Family in Tumult, by Robert Lacey, will be published on Thursday by HarperCollins at pounds 20
Read Next
Comments
https://news.google.com/__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?oc=5
2020-10-11 06:51:00Z
52781105586123
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar