Ingrid Seward’s latest royal biography, My Mother and I, is supposedly about King Charles’s relationship with his mother, as told by people (presumably) close to the king. The first excerpts from the book, which were published in the Mail, are all about Prince Harry and Meghan, and how Meghan reminded Prince Philip of Wallis Simpson, and how QEII thought Meghan was tacky for wearing white to her second wedding. Y’all know that Seward didn’t source her book from anyone younger than 70, because someone looked tacky and deeply inappropriate in white at the Sussexes’ wedding, and that someone wasn’t Meghan. But I digress! While the big headlines are about Wallis Simpson and white wedding gowns, C-Word also went off on how QEII didn’t think much of Charles and Diana’s child-rearing skills, and she tried to step in many times or something.

QEII didn’t understand anything having to do with Harry in her final years: According to Lady Elizabeth, the Queen was dismayed by Harry’s high-handed attitude both before and after the wedding, and their relationship was ‘quite badly damaged by it all’. It was even more damaged when Harry decided to give up being a working royal and leave the country — a decision, said Lady Elizabeth, that the Queen never truly understood. Then came the couple’s infamous interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which Harry said his father was ‘trapped’ and heavily implied that the Royal Family were racist. The Queen was upset by his attitude, said Lady Elizabeth. However much she loved Harry — and she did — she couldn’t condone the way he was speaking about the institution of the monarchy she’d spent 70 years preserving.

Harry & William’s lifelong beef: Choosing to be seen as a victim, [Harry] has tried to wreak vengeance on his family and the Press for all the slights he believes he’s suffered. And much of his ire has been directed at his elder brother. The roots lie in childhood. For a long time, Princess Diana called Harry ‘her little baby’; for his part, he didn’t want to share his mother with William, who is two years his senior. Perhaps as a consequence, Harry always felt the need to compete in everything with his brother. It didn’t help that William was notably more successful at school than his brother. Diana’s friend and alternative healer Simone Simmons was called in to give healing to Harry — partly for headaches but also because he was struggling with dyslexia. Diana was concerned everyone was going to think her younger boy was ‘thick’ as he didn’t have any thirst for knowledge and was never interested in sitting down with a book.

Harry was always given a longer leash: As the spare, Harry had always been allowed greater licence than his elder brother. He’d play the fool and get away with childish pranks such as standing behind visitors and pulling funny faces behind their backs. He showed an early talent for mimicry that took scant account of the importance of the person he was imitating — antics that amused both Charles and Diana. Later events suggest, however, that a bit more early discipline might have been helpful. Had Charles been firmer with Harry — and, to some extent, William — in their formative years, they might not have caused him so much worry.

Oh, Harry is more like Charles now?? William, for his part, was increasingly weighed down by the future unfolding before him. He became withdrawn and his head drooped in public. Just the sight of a camera would make him feel uncomfortable. As his introspection became more pronounced, he grew closer to Diana, while Harry was discovering he had more in common with his father. There was no marked favouritism involved: both Charles and Diana were careful to dispense their affection to their sons equally.

An insinuation that Charles favored Harry: Harry became fascinated with guns and all things military, pestering his father into taking him to Salisbury Plain to review the Gurkhas stationed there. They travelled by helicopter, both of them wearing combat fatigues, and afterwards Harry declared he wanted to be a soldier when he grew up. Father and son also spent many happy hours together when Harry was learning about nature and plants. ‘Plants have feelings too,’ Charles explained to him, describing how he talked to his plants to encourage their growth. Teaching Harry and William to enjoy the things he did was very much Charles’s way of showing them love, rather than smothering them with hugs and kisses. Sadly, Harry doesn’t accept this: he has said that he ‘bombards’ his own children with the love he feels he never received from his father.

Harry got Charles’s unattractive qualities?? She was wrong, however, about certain traits in Harry’s character. Since marrying Meghan and moving to California, it’s become clear he has inherited some of his father’s more unattractive characteristics — such as what Prince Charles’s former Press Secretary Mark Bolland called ‘his self-pitying approach to life’.

Petulant William: The Queen always took a close interest in her grandchildren’s welfare, particularly after their parents’ marriage became riven with acrimony. During this period, William became noticeably petulant and it seemed to the Queen’s staff that he’d inherited the worst characteristics of both his parents. In truth, however, Charles never had much chance to develop a meaningful relationship with his growing boys as Diana curtailed his time with them. Whenever he wanted to have them with him for the weekend, she thought of an excuse to keep them with her, usually at the last minute. The Queen, well aware of this, worried about the damage the Princess was inflicting on the boys, especially William. But no one worried much about Harry as he was a happy, confident boy, completely at ease with himself.

[From The Daily Mail]

In case you needed to be beaten over the head with it, they’re now claiming that Harry has every one of William’s awful traits, and everything wrong with Harry is his parents’ fault, and everything good about William is a credit to his grandmother?? “No one worried much about Harry as he was a happy, confident boy, completely at ease with himself.” He was a traumatized 12 years old when his mother died and no one would hug him or even sit with him and tell him that it would be okay. He was left alone for hours to process his mother’s death with no tools or resources to do so. If Spare did one thing, it was to show how neglectful the Windsors were of both of Diana’s sons, and how that neglect warped both of them in different ways.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.