The monarchy relies on fiction. It is a constructed reality in which adult humans are asked to subscribe to the notion that a human is more than human – that he or she contains something that approaches the indescribable essence of being British. Once this fiction rested on political and military power backed by a supposedly direct line to God. Today it draws on the much weaker foundations of custom, the mysteries of Britain’s unwritten constitution, and spectacle: a sort of symbolism without the symbolized. Ceremonies like the funeral of the late Queen are not just decorative; they are the institution’s means of ensuring its continued existence. The monarchy is theatre, the monarchy is storytelling, the monarchy is illusion.
All of this explains why royals are so irresistible to novelists from Alan Bennett to Peter Morgan: they’re already halfway to myth. And apparently no one holds to the myths more than the royals themselves. There is a fascinating passage in Prince Harry’s autobiography, Spare, in which he describes his father’s enjoyment of Shakespeare: how he regularly took his son to Stratford, how he wrote “Henry V adored. He compared himself to Prince Hal.” Harry himself tried Hamlet. “Hmm. A lonely prince, possessed by a dead parent, watches as the remaining parent falls in love with… the parent’s usurper? I slammed it.” At Eton, he was cast as Conrade, one of Don John’s comic servants in Much ado about nothing. To his surprise, he was quite good. “Being royal, it turns out, wasn’t that far from being on stage.”
Prince Harry does not portray himself as a great reader. study of invited reflection; reflection invited sorrow; Emotions were best avoided. But he wrongs himself. He is a voracious reader – the press. For years, it seems, he’s devoured every syllable published about him, in outlets from the London Review of Books to the Sun to the fecal depths of below-the-line on social media feeds. His father’s most quoted refrain in the book is “Don’t read it, darling”; his therapist, he writes, suggested he was addicted to it. Spare is about the torment of a king in the age of smartphones and Instagram; an ordeal of a different kind from that endured by his mother and certainly Princess Margaret, forbidden by her own sister to marry the man she loved. (To Harry, Margaret is “Aunt Margo,” a cold-blooded old lady who “could kill a houseplant with a scowl” and once gave him a pen—”Oh. A pen. Wow”—for Christmas.)
The fiction of royalty can only be sustained when its characters are visible, hence its symbiotic but rarely direct relationship with the media. Spare claims that portrayals of the royals in sections of the press – apart from sometimes being linked to shocking delinquency, overt fabrication, intolerable harassment and outright racism – were also often hinged on some sort of zero-sum game in which a family member’s spokesman was trying to protect their client at the expense of others by trading gossip for favors. Harry, in his role as an expendable “reserve,” was often a victim of this process, he argues. Narrative tropes and archetypes as old as the hills were conjured up in the distortions: the wayward son; the fighting brothers. In Meghan’s case, something even more caustic: the witch-like woman.
It’s the monarchist press that Harry particularly detests. The Royal Correspondent of the Telegraph “always made me ill,” he writes; and he can’t even bear to call News UK chief executive Rebekah Brooks, whom she anagrammatically refers to as Rehabber Kooks. As for her boss, “I didn’t care about Rupert Murdoch’s policies, which were to the right of the Taliban.” Oblivious as Harry may be to the sheer extent of his privilege – at the beginning of the book he writes “It sounds classy, and I suppose it was” about childhood fish fingers served up by lackeys under silver domes – he is not remotely a snob, yet, I conclude, temperamental from the right.
One notable passage recounts the prince’s conversation with his therapist about Hilary Mantel’s 2013 LRB essay on Kate Middleton. It became infamous and was deliberately misinterpreted by the tabloids as anti-Kate, although it was the monstrosity of portraying the now-Princess of Wales that speared Coat. Harry recalls his disgust at Mantel calling the royal family “pandas” – spoiled, fascinating animals kept in a zoo. “If even a celebrated intellectual could dismiss us as animals, what hope would the man or woman on the street have?”
Still, he understands halfway what Mantel was getting at. The words “always struck me as both astute and uniquely barbaric,” he writes. “We lived in a zoo.” Describing his unpreparedness for having his funding cut in 2020, he writes, “I realized the absurdity of a man in his mid-30s being cut off from his father… But I had never asked to be financially from.” Being dependent on Pa was forced into this surreal state, this endless Truman Show, where I almost never carried any money, never owned a car, never carried a house key on me, never ordered anything online, never a single box from Amazon received, almost never took the subway.”
In her essay, Mantel remarked that “Harry doesn’t know what he is, a person or a prince”. Spare is clearly the prince’s attempt to reclaim the personality, to assert his own narrative. He writes of his tabloid followers: “I was royal, and in their eyes royal meant non-person. Centuries ago, royal men and women were considered divine; now they were insects. What fun plucking their wings.” This, of course, is Shakespeare’s half-reminiscence: “As flies are to wanton boys, we are to the gods; They kill us for their sport,” says the blinded Gloucester in Lear. The gods in Harry’s version are neither Olympians nor kings, but paparazzi and reporters – and so the circle has turned.
Spare is by turns compassionate, frustrating, oddly persuasive, and absurd. Harry is short-sighted while sitting at the center of his truth, at the same time loathed and enmeshed in the tropes of tabloid storytelling, the style of which mirrors his ghostwriter autobiography. Had he seen more of the golden jubilee year 2002, he would have found that his impression that “Britain was drunk… Everybody wore a version of the Union Jack” was quite wrong; Parts of the UK were indifferent, some hostile. His observations about the darkness of the basement flat he once occupied at Kensington Palace, whose windows are shielded from the light by a neighbor’s 4×4, will seem offensive to those who can’t find a home or can’t afford to heat one. The corollary of the views he now holds would be a personal republicanism, but of course that is not the path he is taking: “My problem,” he writes, “was never with the concept of monarchy.” What he does show, though – whether intentional or not – is that the monarchy is fooling us all.
Spare is published by Penguin Random House