Royal secrets, lies, and the weight of families
Parents shun their children. Children stop speaking to their parents. Sibling relationships shudder and shatter. Calls, texts, and invitations are lost in the painful void of estrangement.
That’s the unfortunate reality of many families.
Yet when it comes to Britain’s royal family, many seem to forget that the operative word there isn’t royal; it’s family. Put aside (only for a moment) their brutal imperialistic history, stolen wealth, and meticulously choreographed public image. What remains is a profoundly dysfunctional family whose disagreements feel far more familiar than the rest of us may want to admit.
In his memoir “Spare,” Prince Harry talks about his life — of being born to enormous privilege but in the shadow of a brother who will become king; the tragic death of his mother, Princess Diana, when he was only 12; self-medicating his grief with alcohol and drugs. And, of course, the decision to move an ocean away from the monarchy after overt racism from the British tabloids and within Harry’s own family targeting his biracial wife, Meghan, duchess of Sussex, left them no other choice.
Teasers for Harry’s many TV interviews to promote his book have promised salacious details on truths long concealed behind palace walls. But peel away the breathless headlines. It’s mostly a too-common story of the cruelties that relatives can inflict on one another and how sometimes the best way to deal with family is to get as far away from them as possible.
Near the end of a “60 Minutes” interview, Anderson Cooper said to Harry, “It’s hard, I think, for anyone to imagine a family dynamic that is so ‘Game of Thrones,’ without dragons.” He was referring to
HBO’s bloody medieval fantasy series.
“I don’t watch ‘Game of Thrones’ but there’s definitely dragons and that’s the third party, the British press,” Harry said. “So ultimately without the British press as part of this, we would probably still be a fairly dysfunctional family, like a lot are. But at the heart of it there is a family, without question.”
That Harry’s family is complicated is hardly news. What seems to be fueling the cries of “Enough already” directed at Harry has less to do with anything his family has done but that he has the audacity to publicly discuss it — just like his mother famously did in a televised BBC interview in 1995.
To speak truth about family can feel like a betrayal. Relatives are bound by bloodlines but also by secrets and lies. And whether spoken or not, families are expected to guard those secrets, accept those lies, and toe the line. It can only be exponentially worse when that family is also a business and institution which calls itself “The Firm.”
When Diana died in 1997, Harry and his brother, William, then 15, were fed to a mourning public clamoring for any morsel of sentiment from the stoic royal family. Only days after their mother’s death, the boys were forced to swallow their overwhelming grief and instead help the assembled masses cope with their own sense of loss. The boys smiled, shook hands, and accepted flowers to add to the massive piles that pooled in front of Kensington Palace.
If the fabled British resolve cracked, the young sons of a dead mother were afforded no such courtesy. Looking back, it bordered on emotional child abuse. As Harry recalled to Cooper, taking those flowers made him feel like “a middle person for their grief.” He’s still trying to process his own grief over his mother’s death.
Ours is an era of lives filtered and curated for social media. By comparison, Harry’s rawness about his family may seem as if he’s harming them by discussing how they have harmed him and, now, his wife. The sinned against becomes the sinner. In a November YouGov poll, the only member of the royal family who ranked lower in popularity than Harry and Meghan was Prince Andrew — who palled around with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and last year settled a lawsuit with a woman who accused him of sexual assault when she was underaged.
No one’s support means more than a family’s. Conversely few others’ cruelty can pierce as deeply. Perhaps what’s triggering for so many is that Harry is doing what they dare not — speaking aloud of the messiness that has held him hostage and perpetuated a conditional love based on smothering silence.
Harry has said he wants to reconcile with his family. For now, given the level of rancor, that seems a remote possibility. But if, as the old saying goes, you’re only as sick as your secrets, in truth Harry has found a cure that we could all use.