A royal family! Prince William is his father King Charles III’s direct heir — and he couldn’t be more proud of his dad’s accomplishments.
“My father’s first words on entering Westminster Abbey yesterday were a pledge of service. It was a pledge to continue to serve,” William gushed during his speech at the celebratory Coronation Concert in May 2023. “My father has always understood that people of all faiths, all backgrounds, and all communities, deserve to be celebrated and supported. Pa, we are all so proud of you.”
Nearly one year after Charles wed the late Princess Diana in 1980, they revealed that they were expecting their first child. William arrived in June 1982. As the pair’s firstborn, the duke became His Majesty’s direct heir in the British line of succession. (Charles ascended the throne in September 2022 after the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.)
The Prince of Wales — who inherited Charles’ longtime title in September 2022 — became a big brother in September 1984 when Charles and Diana welcomed second son Prince Harry. (William and the Duke of Sussex have since faced their own ups and downs stemming from their positions as the “heir” and the “spare.”)
Charles and Diana — who died at age 36 in a fatal car crash in August 1997 — finalized their divorce in 1996, and the now-king’s relationships with his sons soon fractured.
“There was the point where our parents split and we never saw our mother enough or we never saw our father enough,” Harry — who stepped down from his royal role in 2020 alongside wife Meghan Markle — recalled in the Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy documentary, which was released on HBO in July 2017. “There was a lot of traveling and a lot of fights on the back seat with my brother, which I would win. … There was all that to contend with. I don’t pretend we’re the only people to have to deal with that, but it was an interesting way of growing up.”
While the brothers felt torn over choosing sides amid their parents’ breakup, they found solace in Charles after Diana’s death. (William and Harry were 15 and 12, respectively, when their mother died.)
“One of the hardest things for a parent to have to do is tell your children that your other parent has died. How you deal with that, I don’t know,” the Spare author confessed in the August 2017 BBC documentary Diana, 7 Days. “But he was there for us. He was the one out of two left. And he tried to do his best and to make sure that we were protected and looked after. But he was going through the same grieving process as well.”
William, for his part, continued to grow closer to his father after exchanging vows with Princess Kate in April 2011. The couple’s three children — sons Prince George and Prince Louis and daughter Princess Charlotte — have formed their own strong bonds with Charles over the years.
“When he’s there, he’s brilliant,” the Duke of Cornwall noted in the November 2018 doc Prince, Son and Heir: Charles at 70 of watching his father become a grandfather. “He’s the fittest man I know, but equally,I want him to be fit until he’s 95. Having more time with him at home would be lovely and being able to, you know, play around with the grandchildren.”
Charles was blessed and anointed as monarch in May 2023 alongside wife Queen Camilla, whom he married in 2005. William and the Duchess of Cornwall, as well as their three kids, had special roles in the processional and during the service.
Scroll below to revisit William and Charles’ relationship highs and lows through the years:
