One of Sir Henry’s particular enthusiasms had been the recent creation of the British Commonwealth of Nations, formalised by the Statute of Westminster of 1931, and the ingenious arrangement by which the Commonwealth contained at that date more than half a dozen monarchies – Canada and Australia, for example. There Elizabeth’s father George VI did not reign as some remote imperial sovereign in London, but as Canada’s or Australia’s very own king and head of state.
Elizabeth II was particularly proud of having developed and built upon this decentralised system in the course of her reign – by the year 2000 there were no fewer than fourteen Commonwealth monarchies around the world – and she passed on to William the importance of maintaining Britain’s Commonwealth links, especially in Africa, the Pacific, the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and other developing corners of the globe. And all this, of course, came on top of the challenge to the young man of having to prove himself one day as a dignified and respected – but not too posh and remote – truly ‘representative’ monarch of the United Kingdom at home to the satisfaction of the fractious Brits.
As William absorbed his grandmother’s principles, there was a sense, he later described, in which he became as one with her, establishing a warm personal closeness – a strong and quite extraordinary partnership across the generations that he defined as a ‘shared understanding of what’s needed’.
The prince’s conversations in the Oak Room helped to turn the fragile schoolboy heading for a breakdown into quite a tough young man who would once be compared to a ‘nightclub bouncer’ protecting the standards of and entry to his highly exclusive royal club. The prince was not prepared to allow anyone – and certainly not his brother and his American celebrity wife – to threaten the precious legacy that had been entrusted to him by his gran.
‘She cares not for celebrity, that’s for sure,’ William declared in 2011. ‘That’s not what monarchy’s about. It’s about setting examples. It’s about doing one’s duty, as she would say. It’s about using your position for the good. It’s about serving the country – and that’s really the crux of it.’
Brother Harry might be heading for La-La Land, but brother William was heading to be king.
‘I’ve put my arm round his shoulder all our lives together,’ said the prince to a friend, explaining why Harry and Meghan’s behaviour and the succession of erratic decisions surrounding Archie’s birth and christening – particularly the weird concealing of the godparents – had led to the rupture between the brothers that Harry would describe later that year as the pursuit of ‘different paths’.
‘I can’t do it any more,’ said William.
The identity of those ‘secret’ godparents, of course, did not stay secret for very long. Secrets will out, and the names of Archie’s three British sponsors became public within months of his christening.
Tiggy Pettifer, née Legge-Bourke, had been the beloved nanny of both William and Harry. Mark Dyer had played a similarly formative role in the lives of the young princes – ‘a former equerry to the Prince of Wales’, as The Times described him, ‘who became a mentor and close friend to Charles’ sons’. Then there was Charlie van Straubenzee, one of Harry’s closest childhood friends and Eton schoolmates. Meghan and Harry had attended his wedding in August 2018.
A combination of newspaper digging and high society contacts got these three British names on the record by the end of 2019, and, once out there, the names were not denied by Buckingham Palace, the Sussex Royal office, nor the godparents themselves. The question was – who were the others? The three British names clearly represented Harry’s choices of sponsor. So the focus turned upon whom Meghan might have chosen.
If there were three British sponsors, logic suggested there must be one, two or three American sponsors. And the three US names on whom speculation, informed or otherwise, centred were tennis star Serena Williams, film star George Clooney and one or other of the political star couple, ex-President Barack and Michelle Obama. All four were friends of Meghan, who had gone to watch Serena at Wimbledon in the summer of 2019, while George Clooney had already cheerily dismissed the rumours in a cleverly crafted non-denial denial.
‘You don’t want me to be a godparent of anybody,’ Clooney said at the time of Archie’s birth. ‘I’m barely a parent at this point. It’s frightening.’
When it came to the Obamas, the husband and wife team were close to both Meghan and Harry. Barack Obama had joined the prince in Toronto in 2017 at the Invictus Games for injured ex-servicemen and women – Harry’s own creation and one of his most dearly cherished causes – while Michelle had written an article for the UK issue of Vogue that Meghan had guest-edited in September 2019 – see Chapter 22 for more on that. Certain American commentators even wondered whether the Obamas were not encouraging the new duchess to pick up their liberal political legacy at some time in the future – on the way to Meghan achieving her teenage ambition to give the United States its first mixed-race female president.
Such fanciful imaginings showed what can happen when you seek to divert the truth from its natural course – and the course of this book is to seek to reveal the truth. The pages that follow will narrate the story of two brave young men who have lived through extraordinary privilege and tragedy, each of them challenged from birth by their ultimately different destinies.
