Does he or doesn’t he? The airwaves have been thick with conjecture over the past week that Prince Harry wants to return to Britain to tuck himself back into the royal fold. Sources claim that he has been WhatsApping old friends and advisors in the UK, seeking to “rehabilitate” his image. A friend was said to have suggested he might even perform “very low-key royal duties” to rebuild public trust and help out with the family’s dwindling personnel problem.
However, rumours of this “Comeback Campaign” were swiftly rebutted by other sources close to the Duke of Sussex who insist he has “no interest” in returning home, nor resuming royal duties.
But both camps agree that Harry, who turns 40 next week, appears at a crossroads and has a heartfelt longing to reconcile with his father, King Charles who is recovering from cancer. All sides also believe that the rift with Prince William still feels like a bridge too far to cross.
This was in evidence last weekend at Lord Robert Fellowes’ funeral. Harry crept into the country to stay with Princess Diana’s brother, Lord Spencer, at his Althorp estate. While his mother’s family remains loyal and open-armed to Harry, his brother is giving him the cold shoulder. William and Harry did not exchange a word at the funeral or gathering afterwards.
What the historical playbook on the Windsors-in-exile illustrates – whether imposed or self-imposed as the Sussex’s Megxit move to Montecito was – is the piteous irony that in trying to find a life of happiness away from your birthright, the chances are that you keep hitting a bruise of unhappiness.
When you consider Harry’s great-great uncle, the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated as King of England in 1936 to marry American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, you see how Edward VIII’s manic need to prove to the world that he had made the right sacrifice weighed him and Wallis down.
As the writer James Pope-Hennessy said after spending time with the Windsors in France post-abdication: “They are like people after a cataclysm or a revolution, valiantly making the best of infinite luxury.” The Duke of Windsor never recovered from the shock of exile, the family drawbridge firmly up. He always assumed that after a suitable cooling-off period, he would be able to return to Britain again and resume royal duties supporting his brother, King George V.
It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But Harry is feeling the sharp end of this lesson from history: the problem with renouncing crown and country for your own personal happiness is that you have to constantly convince yourself and others that it has not all been for nought.
“The Duke turned Wallis into the most hated woman in the world, then he couldn’t get what he promised her: the HRH title, or his family to accept her,” royal historian, Hugo Vickers, told me. “So he must have spent his whole life feeling guilty. I saw him once at Princess Marina’s funeral and I have never seen a man with sadder eyes.”
Sometimes in photographs of Prince Harry, you see those same hangdog eyes. At other times, especially when he is with Meghan in public, Harry looks cock-a-hoop. On their recent quasi royal tour to Colombia, the couple projected a sense of easy partnership.
Although history relates that both the Duke and Duchess of Windsor wanted to return to Britain – the Duke was torn. He nursed a deep wound over the way his family refused to accept his wife or accord her the HRH title.
Similarly, Harry’s loyalty to his wife whom he loves, now pits him against his birth family. We know that there is no love lost between William and Kate for Meghan after all the “truth bombs” that the Sussexes have lobbed in the royal family’s direction.
So what lessons of the past tell us about what could be in store for the next chapter for these brothers? Recently, I was given a fascinating letter from a private collection that has never been seen in public or published before. It was written on behalf of the Duke of Windsor to a woman who had clearly sent Edward an encouraging missive after his wedding to Wallis in June 1937.
The Duke’s response was written on 7 September 1937, from Schloss Wasserleonburg, a castle in Austria that Edward rented from 5 June to 7 September for the couple’s honeymoon. The Duke dictated the letter before they left the castle to return to France.
“Dear Mrs Boraston, I am desired by the Duke of Windsor to acknowledge your letter of August 30th. His Royal Highness thanks you for the poem and your kind wishes, but asks me at the same time to assure you that the information that His Royal Highness is homesick is entirely without foundation. His Royal Highness wishes me to add that quite apart from rumours in the press, it is not very likely that he would be missing his country which in every possible way, tried to humiliate and misrepresent both himself and the Duchess of Windsor.”
The passing of time told a different story. After the hot-headedness of the abdication, the reality is that the constant, corrosive sense of exclusion becomes painful to negotiate.
Since, Harry and Meghan’s staunch renunciation of royal life in Britain, if Harry does harbour homesickness – and it would be almost impossible not to from time to time – how does he go about this? Naturally, he will nurse a desire for family reconciliation, especially with Charles, but friends of his and William who could have helped in the past have been forced to take sides.
In the Machiavellian monarchy, proximity to the court is critical in terms of survival. Just as Wallis said in 1954 to her biographer, Charles Murphy: “British friends are afraid to receive us for fear of not being invited to court. Some of our former American friends are equally apprehensive. Our life, in consequence, has been circumscribed. I would gladly have worked for British charities. But where would I find the right British names to help me?”
To those closest to the inner circle, Harry is now seen as an outlier. With powerful enemies in Prince William and Queen Camilla, who could possibly broker peace? It seems impossible now, yet there is one person who holds a glimmer of hope for this broken family where the fault lines run deep and dark.
The likeliest and kindest candidate is Princess Eugenie, with whom Harry has remained demonstrably close. As the daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah Fergurson, she knows well the pain of parental royal exclusion. She has also demonstrated laudable loyalty to her parents, while remaining close to both of her cousins, William and Harry.
She has managed to do all of this while never betraying the institution into which she was born.
Could she be the one to persuade her uncle, King Charles, that the most generous and loving act would be to extend the hand of forgiveness to Prince Harry? In such a divisive world and as the country’s patriarch, it would be befitting for him to reach out to Harry.
As the future monarch, William too, needs to be mindful that diplomatic skills will need to be deployed in some of the most trying times. And facing those times now, trust, love and finding the patience to be the “better person” could be pertinent to the training for the role to which he has been born.
The latest disclosure that Harry will not be updating the paperback of his autobiography, Spare, or giving any interviews to promote it, are the tentative steps of a man trying to repair a shattered relationship. So far, it has not been enough to staunch family mistrust.
As Wallis said: “In other families even if a man or woman marries a person of whom the family may disapprove, reconciliation usually takes place after several years. Sensible people, kindly people, make up. But that has not been so in my case. The Iron Curtain has never lifted. For my husband, it has meant permanent exile.”
We can only hope for Harry that history does not repeat itself.
Anna Pasternak is the biographer of ‘The Duchess of Windsor: The real Wallis Simpson’
She will also appear at The Independent’s virtual debate ‘Is the shrinking Royal Family on the brink of collapse?’ next week as one of the experts discussing the personnel crisis at the heart of British monarchy
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