Prince Harry says he ‘took it personally’ when Prince William reportedly wanted nothing to do with his younger brother when he first joined Eton College in September 1998
Prince Harry has made several explosive claims about his brother over the years, but one allegation sparked significant debate.
While promoting his highly anticipated autobiography Spare, the Duke of Sussex sat down with Anderson Cooper on CBS’s flagship 60 Minutes to open up about his life, struggles, and family tensions. During the interview, Harry sharply criticised Prince William for various reasons, including a bizarre claim that his brother attempted to ban him from having a beard at his own wedding.
Harry also accused William and his sister-in-law, Kate, the Princess of Wales, of “stereotyping” his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and not getting along with her “from the get-go.” However, one of the most controversial moments came when Harry took aim at his brother for allegedly refusing to speak out about issues at school, a remark that has left many divided over the deeper implications of their relationship.
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Harry had begun the interview by saying that he loves William and that he never deliberately tried to hurt him.
“My brother and I love each other. I love him deeply,” he told Cooper.
“There has been a lot of pain between the two of us, especially the last six years. Umm… None of anything that I’ve written, anything I’ve included is ever intended to hurt my family.”
“But it does give a full picture of the situation as we were growing up, and also squashes this idea that somehow my wife was the one that destroyed the relationship between these two brothers.”
While discussing his school days, Harry then claimed that William made a rather scathing remark when he first attended Eton.
Harry said William wanted them to “pretend” they didn’t know each other while they were at school.
“Even when you were in the same school, in high school,” Cooper said to Harry, “Your brother told you, ‘Pretend we don’t know each other.'”
Harry replied: “Yeah, and at the time it hurt. I couldn’t make sense of it. I was like, ‘What do you mean? We’re now at the same school’.
“Like, ‘I haven’t seen you for ages, now we get to hang out together.’ He’s like, ‘No, no, no, when we’re at school we don’t know each other.’ And I took that personally.
“But yes, you’re absolutely right, you hit the nail on the head. Like, we had a very similar traumatic experience, and then we— we dealt with it two very different ways.”
Many viewers took to Twitter to claim this is just standard behaviour for siblings at school.
“That made me laugh… because my daughters went to the same school and my eldest daughter would tell the younger that at school they don’t know each other….. That is normal behaviour with siblings,” wrote one person.
Another added: “My older brothers told me not to never approach them in the playground in front of their mates and if I did they wouldn’t give me a ride home on the handlebars of their bike. I’m still waiting for my 60 minutes interview to flesh that out.”
However, some people came to Harry’s defence and suggested the circumstances were very different to most.
“Did you also live in a [boarding] school without any family after losing a parent? It’s not the same thing,” asked one viewer.
A fourth tweeted: “They were two young boys still dealing with the death of their mother. Harry just wanted to hang out with his older brother, his only family member, in boarding school. Although I don’t think William’s action was malicious. But he just didn’t realise how much Harry needed him.”
Harry went on to speak about the shared traumatic experience the brothers had – the death of their mother.
The Duke of Sussex claimed William did make efforts to speak about Princess Diana, but Harry didn’t know how to discuss his mother’s passing.
“William had tried to talk to you occasionally about your mom,” Cooper said to Harry, “but you, as a child you could not— you couldn’t respond.”
“For me, it was never a case of, ‘I— I don’t want to talk about it with you,'” Harry said. “I just don’t know how to talk about it. I never ever thought that maybe talking about it with my brother or with anybody else at that point would be therapeutic.”
Buckingham and Kensington Palaces have refused to content on the contents of the book.
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