And there’s an instance far graver: an account, in the prologue, of a fraught encounter between Harry, William, and Charles in April, 2021, a few hours after the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen’s husband and the Royal Family’s patriarch, at Windsor. There’s a jocular reference: “To beard or not to beard” is how Harry foreshadows a contentious family debate over whether he should be clean-shaven on his wedding day. Within the first few pages of “Spare,” Shakespeare’s play is alluded to more than once. What ghost would that be, and what play? The big one, of course, bearing the name of that other brooding princely Aitch: Hamlet.
He goes on to describe his father’s appearance with an unusual simile: “His white dressing gown made him seem like a ghost in a play.” “He was standing at the edge of the bed, looking down,” Harry writes of the moment in which he learned of the loss that would reshape his personality and determine the course of his life. It was in this bedroom, early in the morning of August 31, 1997, that Harry, aged twelve, was awakened by his father, Charles, then the Prince of Wales, with the terrible news that had already broken across the world: the princes’ mother, Princess Diana, from whom Charles had been divorced a year earlier and estranged long before that, had died in a car crash in Paris. William occupied the larger half, with a double bed and a splendid view Harry’s portion was more modest, with a bed frame too high for a child to scale, a mattress that sagged in the middle, and crisp bedding that was “pulled tight as a snare drum, so expertly smoothed that you could easily spot the century’s worth of patched holes and tears.” Beyond lay the castle’s fifty bedrooms-including the one known in the brothers’ childhood as the nursery, unequally divided into two. We get the red-coated footman attending the heavy front door the mackintoshes hanging on hooks the cream-and-gold wallpaper and the statue of Queen Victoria, to which Harry and his older brother, William, always bowed when passing.
Balmoral Castle, in the Scottish Highlands, was Queen Elizabeth’s preferred resort among her several castles and palaces, and in the opening pages of “ Spare” (Random House), the much anticipated, luridly leaked, and compellingly artful autobiography of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, its environs are intimately described.
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