For the three remaining years that William stayed at Ludgrove with Harry, the brothers’ performance could not have been more dissimilar. Harry’s academic performance was a repetition of Diana’s when she had been at the same school as her academically gifted eldest sister. But Diana saw no more reason for Harry’s performance to bother her than it had when she was in the same boat. The message she always gave out to Harry and everyone else was that they were two peas of one pod. Look at how well life had turned out for her. You didn’t need to achieve academically to flourish after school. Of course, she was right, but more than being technically right, she was playing to his strengths, and encouraging him to feel good about himself despite his poor scholastic results.
In 1995 William left Ludgrove and started at Eton. In September, Charles, Diana and Harry all accompanied him on his first day. Harry would join him three years later, by which time their mother was dead. Diana’s death hit both boys hard, but Harry was hit even harder than William. He had always been a mummy’s boy, and, being that much younger than William, was less well equipped to cope with the loss. By his own account, he ‘shut down emotionally’ and was ‘very angry’. This response did not help him academically, and his stay at Eton was ‘difficult’.
I know from friends whose children are presently attending Eton that, even now, the school regards it as a distinction to have educated the Heir and Spare to the Throne.
Nevertheless, Harry’s Eton days were anything but distinguished. ‘He would never have been accepted had he not been Prince Henry of Wales,’ an Old Etonian, who still maintains good links to the school, told me. ‘He simply did not possess the intelligence to perform adequately at such an academic school. He’d’ve been far better off attending Gordonstoun, where character counts far more than academic results.’
Another Etonian says, ‘To this day, there are all sorts of stories doing the rounds (at Eton) of how the school had to alter its academic requirements so that Harry could pass tests. And even then, he’d fail them, to the despair of his masters.’
Many of these claims were borne out by the findings of an Employment Tribunal in 2005, when Sara Forsyth, an art mistress, sued Eton for unfair dismissal. She maintained that she had been asked by the Head of Art, Ian Burke, ‘to assist Prince Harry with text for his expressive art project’ for his Art A-Level examination. During the trial, there was evidence suggesting that Eton had not only thrashed around to find positive ways of marking Harry’s entrance examinations, but that thereafter they had struggled to have him pass his further exams. The Headmaster, Tony Little, Deputy Headmaster, the Rev John Puddefoot, Ian Burke, and other members of ‘staff were bluntly accused by the tribunal of being unsatisfactory witnesses whose words were unreliable’ when it found in favour of Ms Forsyth. Damningly, the Tribunal concluded that while it was not called upon to find whether Eton had assisted Harry in cheating on his exams, this was because ‘(i)t is no part of this tribunal’s function to determine whether or not it was legitimate. That is for Edexcel’ - the examination board.’
By the time of Harry’s arrival at Eton, William had established himself as a successful student with both masters and pupils. He had done well academically. He was athletic. He got along with his peers. Later on, he would be elected into Pop, the group of prefects who ran the school, would be chosen as Head of the Oppidan Wall, and was awarded the Sword of Honour as an army cadet. ‘William was genuinely popular. He was liked by everyone. The same could not be said of Harry,’ a parent of one of Harry’s contemporaries told me. ‘Harry was not liked. He was bumptious and antagonistic. He was a very angry young man. He swanned around rubbing everyone’s nose in being Prince Henry of Wales: just the sort of thing not to do. Eton has always had royalty. The Queen’s Uncle Harry, the Duke of Gloucester, was at Eton, as were his two sons, Princes William and Richard and his nephews Eddie (the Duke of Kent) and Prince Michael. So too was Queen Mary’s brother Prince Alexander of Teck and his son, Prince Rupert, whose mother was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Princess Alice of Albany. The King of Nepal, King Leopold III of the Belgians…the list is fairly endless. Harry had a definite chip on his shoulder and it made him unpopular.’
Harry would later claim that he struggled not only academically, but also with sports. Although he still excelled in them, even rugby was a problem because boys ‘would see me on the rugby field as an opportunity to smash me up.’ This, in truth, was only part of the problem. Harry could be needlessly vitriolic, such as when he was pitted against a Jewish opponent from one of the other top public schools and hurled anti-Semitic abuse at him, a fact I received from a priest who was at school with this boy. Just as how Meghan’s colour was an unseen problem for her, Harry’s royal status - or at least, his perception of it - was shaping up into becoming a problem for him.
‘I didn’t enjoy school at all,’ he admitted. His solution was to act up and act out. ‘I wanted to be the bad boy.’ And he was. He snuck out of school. He drank and smoked. He was abusive. And he dabbled in drugs.
People, whose children were at school with him, claim that he was ‘unpopular with the boys, but the masters cut him some slack, not only because he was a prince - though that was the larger part of the reason - but also because he had lost his mother so tragically. Who
