According to royal “experts” cancer-stricken King Charles III has cut off communication with Prince Harry to avoid potentially exacerbating his frail health. But one royal author begs to differ, suggesting that it’s the Duke of Sussex’s penchant for money that has pushed him farther away from his father.
There have been several times when Harry tried to patch things up with the monarch. He has reached out asking to meet whenever he is in the U.K. But it’s always the same reason every time: the King is too busy with his royal duties to have tea with his wayward son. An opportunity came for them to finally meet, albeit not under fortunate circumstances, following the monarch’s cancer diagnosis in February.
Harry flew to London right away and had a 30-minute visit to check on his father at Clarence House. King Charles III and Queen Camilla were later seen boarding a helicopter bound for Sandringham. The visit was allegedly deemed unnecessary and only tabloid fodder. But that might have been the last time the duke got to see his father personally as His Majesty has reportedly shunned any more requests to meet and even refused to talk with his son over the phone.
While some think it’s for health reasons, royal author Robert Hardman claimed there are two “real reasons for the apparent remoteness between father and son.” He said the first involves money and suggested that the lack of financial support from the King led them to drift apart.
“Prince Harry has made clear several times that his charge sheets against the monarchy includes the lack of a financial settlement,” Hardman wrote in his piece for the Daily Mail and drove his point with this passage from the duke’s memoir Spare:
I recognized the absurdity, a man in his mid-30s being cut off by my father. But Pa wasn’t merely my father. He was my boss, my banker, my comptroller, keeper of the purse strings throughout my adult life.
Harry had told Oprah Winfrey that he had to rely on his mother’s inheritance to start anew in America with his wife, Meghan Markle and their son, Archie, after they abandoned their royal duties in 2020. They also signed deals with Spotify and Netflix to become financially independent, but failed to keep their end of the bargain with Spotify.
Since then, they have launched their non-profit organization Archewell Foundation and despite not being funded by the King, still manages to make millions and flaunt off their lavish lifestyle. So money may not be the problem here as Hardman claimed.
The second reason is Prince Harry’s rift with his brother, Prince William, which he said puts King Charles III in a difficult predicament.
If the King embarked on bilateral discussions with his younger son, he might jeopardize his rapport with his elder son, who last spring had more immediate, pressing personal worries of his own following the cancer diagnosis of the Princess of Wales. Any talks involving the King would need to include Prince William, and now was not the time.
Hardman, author of The Making of a King: King Charles III and the Modern Monarchy, did a complete turnaround in this piece. Just last week he suggested that anything related to Prince Harry only equals stress to the King. He told Fox News:
But right now, there is a sense that we’ve just got to keep the king’s stress levels down. We don’t want him to have extra things to worry about. Let’s get through this… There is a sense that now is probably not the time.
He cited the revelations from Prince Harry’s interviews and his memoir, saying “there’s a lot to unpack” there. But he feels that King Charles III would also “like to normalize things” with his youngest son but now’s not the time. However, Buckingham Palace and representatives for the Duke of Sussex have remained mum on anything related to the communication between father and son, so best take Hardman’s statements with a grain of salt.