The trouble with royal spares

'Think no more of it, brother: you are but a child who has had evil counsellors'

The Ottomans had a tried and tested solution to the problem of royal brothers falling out. When the old sultan died the strongest of his sons would simply take the throne, and then have the head gardener strangle all his half-brothers with a silken cord, with their bodies thrown off a cliff.

If this seems a bit cruel, the Ottomans feared the alternative — endless strife caused by excess brothers, who invariably rose in rebellion or went to foreign courts to become rallying points for discontent.

This culminated with Mehmed III at the end of the 16th century, who upon his accession had 19 half-brothers murdered. His successor Sultan Ahmet I, a poet and patron of the arts, outlawed the practice, yet afterwards there were conservative Ottomans who believed that things had started to go downhill with the ending of fratricide. Politics had got a bit ‘woke’ now that defeated court rivals were no longer being strangled and chucked in the Bosphorus.

As well as minimising conflict, the Ottoman system also insured against the roulette wheel of genetics. The sultan’s largely Balkan concubines were selected for their intelligence as well as beauty, and the hope was that the most ruthlessly effective might rule; in contrast European royal houses at the time were plagued by bad kings and by chance, since there was no way of ensuring that a fine ruler didn’t sire a dud.

The same year that Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, 1453, England’s King Henry VI had gone into a catatonic stupor, triggering a succession of dynastic conflicts known as the War of the Roses. Henry’s grandfather had been an effective if cursed ruler who took the throne from his cousin, and his father was a brilliant if brutal war leader; the third in the line was his opposite in character, gentle and listless, and most likely suffering from the same mental illness as his maternal grandfather (who thought he was made of glass). The conflict and drama at the heart of court life pushed young Henry over the edge.

The same dice are thrown with all royal families. Prince Philip, for example, was a highly intelligent man who also possessed great resilience in dealing with immense personal tragedy; his grandson Harry, in contrast, is described as not being ‘the family scholar’. He grew up surrounded by inhuman press intrusion, family conflict and grief. And, like so many could-have-been kings or sultans, he has become a destabilising force for the ruling dynasty, a perhaps unwitting vector for the family’s enemies — even while helping his mother’s real tormentors, the press, who now follow his story around like crows eyeing a line of men going into battle.

Harry’s background story, the sadness over a mother hunted to her death, is genuinely worthy of pity. The best argument for monarchy is that, by any measurement, it works; the best argument against it is that it is undoubtedly cruel to those involved. Even the most ghoulish rubbernecker must wince as the younger prince pleads to have his brother and father back, while doing everything to ensure that this is impossible — blowing up the family for the sake of popularity, caught up by toxic validation.

In some ways Harry is a quintessential example of elite overproduction, of too many aristocrats and would-be aristocrats competing for limited numbers of positions. But then the issue of what to do with younger sons is a timeless problem for monarchies, even in an age when political conflict is not resolved by violence.

Tales of royal brothers at war are a common theme, a staple of Norse sagas in particular, a recent example being the television series Vikings, and the brothers Ragnar and Rollo. William and Harry’s own family story in England begins with a tale told in one 14th century Icelandic saga, Hemings þáttr, which draws on older Norwegian stories to recall two royal brothers who became deadly rivals, Harold and Tostig.

Harold, as Earl of Wessex and the second most powerful man in England, had had his brother installed as Earl of Northumbria, where he had made himself immensely unpopular and provoked an uprising. When in 1065 Harold did a deal with the northerners to remove his sibling — presumably in exchange for the Northumbrians supporting his claim to the throne when the ailing King Edward passed away — Tostig fled abroad, embittered and determined to get revenge. Later accounts suggest that Harold and Tostig were rivals from an early age, one story having the young brothers fighting at the royal court as youngsters. Who knows, maybe Harold got the bigger room.

Tostig, now an exile, travelled around the North Sea looking for someone to help him invade England, finally finding his man with the terrifying Norwegian giant Harald Hardraada. Tostig had told all the Norwegians he was popular back home, but when they arrived in York they found that their English ally was in fact widely despised, and that not a single person came out to greet the former earl. 

Tostig was killed soon after, in battle with his brother, having first (supposedly) exchanged words in this legendary meeting.

Harold himself would follow soon, victim of the English aristocracy’s great forefather William the Conqueror, whose success is illustrated by the naming patterns that followed. Harold’s brothers were Sweyn, Tostig, Gyrth, Leofwine and Wulfnoth; the Conqueror’s sons Robert, Richard, William and Henry. We haven’t had any Prince Wulfnoths recently.

The Conqueror’s son Richard having died in a hunting accident, the surviving Norman brothers had similarly fallen out, by one account the feud starting with a practical joke where William and Henry had poured a bucket of urine over eldest brother Robert. But mainly it was over land and power: after their father’s death Robert was made Duke of Normandy, the middle brother became William II of England, while Henry had to make do with just a cash payment.

Yet when William died in a mysterious hunting accident in the New Forest in 1100, Henry was conveniently close enough to reach the Treasury at Winchester within an hour to claim the crown. Six years later he invaded Normandy, with a partly English army, and captured his surviving brother, keeping Robert imprisoned for the rest of his life.

Henry I ruled for 35 years, but his long reign was followed by a civil war between his daughter Matilda and nephew Stephen, resulting in the rise of a new dynasty, the House of Anjou, or Plantagenets — so defined by internal conflict that Francis Bacon called them ‘a race much dipped in their own blood’.

Matilda’s husband Geoffrey Plantagenet had his brother Elias imprisoned, and Geoffrey’s son, King Henry II, had also gone to war with his younger brother, also Geoffrey. Even Geoffrey Plantagenet’s grandfather Fulk ‘the Quarreller’ had spent over 30 years fighting for control of the county with his older brother, yet another Geoffrey. 

Henry II in contrast fought his four sons and, after his death, his heir Richard I would also face rebellion from his younger brother John. When the Lionheart returned from crusade to deal with his deeply unlovable sibling he was remarkably forgiving, telling him: ‘Think no more of it, brother: you are but a child who has had evil counsellors.’ This was despite John being 27 at the time. 

More than two centuries later the House of Plantagenet came crashing down with a war pitting cousin against cousin, although brothers also fell out in the form of Edward IV and George, Duke of Clarence. 

Both men were tall, blond and handsome, and both had a cruel and violent streak, but here the younger brother was impulsive, vain and foolish. He lacked maturity or self-control, was easily flattered and tempted into unwise decisions. He had been given vast estates and a lavish household but resented his older brother, who had also blocked his marriage to the daughter of the country’s largest landowner. 

So Clarence had joined in the overthrow of Edward in 1470, while the youngest brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had remained loyal. However, when Edward returned to England the following March and Clarence led 4,000 men out to fight him, he was talked into changing sides again.

Clarence was forgiven, but the two brothers looked upon each other ‘with no very fraternal eyes’, and five years later he seems to have lost his mind after his wife died during childbirth. He accused the king of ‘necromancy’ and of poisoning his subjects, and when brought before his brother made things much worse by claiming that Edward was a bastard. He was put to death.

Apparently, a soothsayer had also told King Edward that ‘G’ would take his crown, and this must have fuelled his paranoia about George; after all, his other brother, the loyal Richard of Gloucester, would never do such a thing.

Such fraternal feuding ended with the rise of the Tudors and the conflicts between the House of Stuart and Parliament. There would be no more point in younger brothers threatening the monarch because the monarch no longer really had power; the royal family had evolved into a business, ‘the firm’, one in which hierarchies were clear and immovable, and the fortunes of family members were clearly joined.

Indeed, conflict only now emerged where royal brothers wished to avoid power, the most famous case being the conflict between George V’s sons Edward and Albert. Born 18 months apart and raised together, the princes were polar opposites in character: Edward was athletic and confident, Bertie painfully shy and a slow learner, ‘a cock pheasant [and] an ugly duckling’ in the words of one contemporary.

Edward, as Prince of Wales from 1910, had become something of a fashion icon after the First World War, his style a reaction to the formality of his father, but it also reflected the lifestyle of the new aristocrats, a world of parties, sports and flying. Yet he also hated his position, and the responsibility, and the prince’s reckless womanising and drinking had become a cause for concern.

‘After I am dead,’ George V had said of his heir, ‘the boy will ruin himself in 12 months’. The old king passed away in January 1936, and his predictive abilities turned out to be spot on.

Edward’s mistress, Thelma Furness, had introduced him to Wallis Simpson, an American already divorced and remarried; Special Branch, which followed the couple around, described him as being ‘under her thumb’ while ministers were becoming reluctant to send confidential papers to the king, concerned that Simpson could see them.

In August 1936 the king went away on cruise and by October it was clear he intended to marry Wallis. By the end of the month the scandal was breaking; although the affair had been reported in the foreign press, most people in Britain were unaware but rumours were being fuelled by letters from family abroad.

When Bertie was told the news that he would be king, he cried on his mother’s shoulder, and now as George VI he feared that he assumed ‘a rocking throne’. Spain had recently joined the growing list of republics, and in the words of one Labour MP, the abdication crisis did ‘more for republicanism than 50 years of propaganda.’

The brothers had already begun to drift apart in their twenties, especially after the arrival of Bertie’s wife Elizabeth, who disapproved of her brother-in-law’s lifestyle and the way that Edward teased his younger brother for his stammer. But following the abdication the relationship fell apart completely; Wallis was not granted the title Her Royal Highness, and even Edward’s closest brother, the Duke of Kent, refused to be his best man. The couple remained outcasts, Edward dying in 1972 and Wallis in 1986, and the damage the estranged brother did to the monarchy haunted the family for decades.

Today, Harry’s wayward turn threatens to cause similar grief, except in some ways worse, since this division is caught up with the culture war. In that sense the closest historical comparison is with the Tudors, the children of Henry VIII having stood for opposing sides in the great conflict of the time.

The current royal tragedy is culture war-coded, at the very least, Meghan and Harry standing for a range of new reformation ideas: the triumph of the therapeutic, the importance of personal fulfilment over duty, romantic autonomy, racial diversity and the empowerment of women, against the forces of tradition and hierarchy. 

That they proclaim these values while also living a life of privilege is what many find so grating, both about the Sussexes and the new elite more generally (will Harry be deported from the United States for his drug confessions? Obviously not.) But because they are now partisans in the culture war, the couple can always depend on a basic core support, because while not many people are pro-Harry and Meghan, a lot are anti-anti-Harry and Meghan. 

Yet despite all this, the badly-advised prince has managed to hugely damage his popularity and reputation with the book; and however much he hurts his family, he will surely be the biggest loser from all this oversharing. And the biggest winners from the whole affair? The vultures of the press he rightfully hates.