We Are Brothers At War

The ongoing rivalry between Princes William and Harry might appear unusual in the level of public outrage it’s created.

Fuelled by apparently non-stop complaints from Montecito, most recently in the shape of Prince Harry’s new memoir Spare, it has definitely forged a torrent of bad publicity for The Firm, but this isn’t the first time the royal brothers have declared war, or that the consequences threatened to be so serious.

Ninety years ago there was a bitter falling out between two leading members of the Royal Family, brothers who, by the outbreak of the war, could barely stand the sight of each other.

The ingredients were tumultuous. This was a stand-off between a King, George VI, and, exceptionally, a former King, the Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated to marry the woman he loved.

The Duke was rumoured to have pro-Nazi sympathies that moved from the merely embarrassing to the potentially treacherous with the onset of the Second World War.

Prince Harry might have dressed up in a Nazi ensemble for a fancy dress party in 2005, but it was rumoured that the Duke had actually hoped to be restored as King by Adolf Hitler, had the German oppressor won the war.

These sets of warring brothers are not so many generations apart. George VI (or Bertie, as his family knew him) was great-grandfather to William and Harry, whilst his older brother David, who had briefly reigned as Edward VIII, was their great-great uncle, and the similarities with today’s generation are evident.

They include the high level of emotion that’s forever present with any sibling rift, a devastating loss of status brought on by a departure from royal life, fiercely intelligent divorcees looking to influence their husbands, and, underlying everything, as it always does, the question of money.

The month after Edward’s abdication, relations had looked as though they might remain cordial. The former monarch wrote to his brother, George VI, on January 17, 1937, to say the events of December were past history and that they had a future to look forward to. That George VI had his life as King to look forward to, and that Edward had attempted to make his succession as easy as possible. He also pledged that throughout his reign, which he hoped would be a long and grand one – for the rest of his life, he would do all in his power to support his brother to the best of his ability.

But, soon after he sent the letter, they started to argue furiously.

The first, and foremost, reason for this conflict was money.

The initial agreement between the brothers was that the Duke of Windsor would receive an annual allowance of £25,000, a sum paid straight from the king’s pocket. This would keep it a family matter and remove any risk of taxpayers financing the ever-controversial Wallis.

But the details of this circulated to the newspapers, probably via Edward, and that made George VI extremely upset, and he complained to the Duke that he hadn’t told anyone that they had even signed an agreement and that this was now public property.

It was also obvious that the former king had fibbed about his finances and that he’d squirrelled away as much as a million pounds from the Duchy of Cornwall, and George said that the rumour was that he’d preserved a very large sum from this source and that his brother must tell him whether this was so because when he signed the papers it was understood that he was going to be very badly off.

The difference in all of this is that Edward VIII was the heir and Harry has always been the spare.

Could you imagine William putting his hand in his pocket for his brother Harry? However, Charles continued to finance the Sussexes until the summer of 2020, somewhere in the region of 2.5 million.

William didn’t ask to be born first, but then Harry didn’t ask to be the spare. Very much like Princess Margaret was the spare.

Prince Harry isn’t the first and probably won’t be the last royal to encounter tribulations amid the frustrations at being the spare to the heir.

Of course, Princess Margaret was the spare for a long time, but she was completely devoted to the Queen, and I’m assuming all the indulgences that came with that devotion.

The only thing that she really complained about was that she wished she’d been better educated.

Lessons need to be learned for the new generations of royals because all they seem to do now is complain and winge. Previous generations lived through the war and had a truly perilous childhood, and the people that came out of it just felt extremely fortunate to be alive.

I know, I know. Now I’m banging on about previous generations and they were completely different from today’s generation, and it’s evident that Prince William’s standing and wealth are well established and secure – Harry’s will never be.

Some might say that Edward chose badly for a wife, the same as Harry has done, but he only chose badly because other people didn’t like her. However, the marriage lasted and they lived together until the end, unlike other royal couples who may not have divorced but live largely disconnected lives.

Perhaps if the Queen Mother had encouraged her husband to be slightly more accommodating in his attitude and they’d welcomed Wallis Simpson into their family, perhaps Edward could have been a support to his brother in his new role. Sadly the Queen Mother disliked him enormously and it seems that Edward was a weak man.

He probably tried out plenty of other women before settling on Wallis Simpson. Perhaps he saw her as an escape route from the burden of being King, and I’m pretty sure a role could have been found for them in the United Kingdom, but sadly divorcees were made an example of back in the day.