What to Know
Sibling relationships are almost always complicated, but there’s still so much to unpack about Prince William and Prince Harry‘s brotherly dynamic, including the way things were between them before their big rift. In fact, when the time came for Harry to join William at Eton College in September 1998, his older brother basically wanted him to pretend they were total strangers.
Prince William didn’t seem too jazzed about his little brother cramping his style at Eton.
Harry started at Eton at 13 years old in the fall of 1998, which also happened to be one year after he and William lost their mother, Princess Diana. At the time, Will would have been 16 years old, and he didn’t seem too interested in hanging with his little brother just because they were now attending the same school.
In his memoir Spare, Harry wrote that William told him to “pretend I didn’t know him.”
“For the last two years, he explained, Eton had been his sanctuary. No kid brother tagging along, pestering him with questions, pushing up on his social circle. He was forging his own life, and he wasn’t willing to give that up,” Harry wrote in the book.
According to what royal expert Sally Bedell Smith told People, it sounds like William didn’t want to jeopardize the “much-needed haven” that Eton had become for him, but he really hurt his brother in the process.
And as InStyle pointed out, Harry even said as much to William in the 2017 documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy.
“Me turning up thinking, ‘I’ve got my older brother at the school, he’ll be looking after me.’ When, in fact, you just ignored me,” he said of his first day at Eton.
Prince Harry struggled at his new school.
It wasn’t just that Harry was still mourning the traumatic loss of his mother during his first year at Eton — he also wrote in Spare that he felt he was in “way, way over my head” academically, too.
And without his brother’s support at school, he found a different way to cope.
“Sport held me together,” Harry said in an interview with Time earlier this month. “I was one of those kids at school who did not enjoy classroom work. If it wasn’t for the sports field, and the amount of sports that were on offer, there’s no way I would have stayed in school.”
Prince George will continue the family’s legacy at Eton this fall.
George is set to start school at Eton in the fall, leaving younger siblings Charlotte and Louis behind.
“George has always wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps,” a source recently told People.
Hopefully, George will have an easier time adjusting than his uncle Harry did. And since Eton is an all boys’ school, he won’t have the chance to snub Charlotte when the time comes for her and her parents to choose her next academic adventure in a couple of years.
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