Father and son feud. Prince Harry alleged that King Charles III told him the royal family didn’t have enough money to support Meghan Markle while also providing for Prince William and Princess Kate.
The Duke of Sussex, 38, claimed that his father, 74, told him “there’s not enough money to go around” because he was “already having to pay” for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, both 40.
“Pa didn’t financially support Willy and me, and our families, out of any largesse,” the Invictus Games founder wrote in an excerpt from Spare exclusively obtained by Us Weekly. “That was his job. That was the whole deal. We agreed to serve the monarch, go wherever we were sent, do whatever we were told, surrender our autonomy, keep our hands and feet inside the gilded cage at all times, and in exchange the keepers of the cage agreed to feed and clothe us.”
The former military pilot said that he soon came to believe the conflict “wasn’t about money” at all. “Pa might have dreaded the rising cost of maintaining us, but what he really couldn’t stomach was someone new dominating the monarchy, grabbing the limelight, someone shiny and new coming in and overshadowing him,” Harry wrote. “He’d lived through that before, and had no interest in living through it again.”
After Harry and the Suits alum, 41, stepped down as senior working royals in 2020, they stopped receiving public funds, but for a short time, Charles continued to offer financial support using his private funds.
“My family literally cut me off financially, and I had to afford security for us,” the BetterUp CIO said during his tell-all CBS interview in March 2021. “[I was cut off] in the first quarter of 2020. But I’ve got what my mom left me and without that, we would not have been able to do this.”
In June 2021, a spokesperson for Charles confirmed that the former Prince of Wales set aside “a substantial sum” for his younger son and his wife as they transitioned out of their roles as senior working royals. “That funding ceased in the summer of [2020],” the rep told Vanity Fair. “The couple are now financially independent.”
After his royal exit, Harry continued fighting for security, claiming that his son, Archie, now 3, was denied protection after his 2019 birth. “It was really hard,” Meghan said during the couple’s March 2021 sit-down with CBS. “If he’s not gonna be a prince, he needs to be safe.”
Last year, Harry was granted permission to challenge the U.K. Home Office in court after being denied police protection for visits to his native country. He and Meghan have visited the U.K. only a handful of times since their royal exit, returning most recently for Queen Elizabeth II‘s funeral in September 2022.
Spare will be released on Tuesday, January 10.
