King Charles and Prince Harry: a deeper look into their story

“Wonderful! Now you've given me an heir and a spare — my work is done,” Charles said, according to Harry's book, Spare at his birth. Could these have been the first words uttered that would lead to a lot of Harry's words in the future?

"I feel really let down," Prince Harry told Oprah Winfrey during their now (in)famous interview in early March. "There's a lot of hurt that's happened." With these words, the Duke of Sussex made the rift between him and his father painfully clear.

The young prince added that his father stopped taking his phone calls for a while after Harry and Meghan Markle had announced their move from Britain. What's behind this immense estrangement between father and son?

Harry emphasized that he loved his father and continued to try and re-establish a loving relationship, but he was most of all disappointed in Prince Charles. "There’s a lot to work through there, you know? I feel really let down, because he's been through something similar. He knows what that pain feels like."

The memory of the late Diana weighs heavily on the story of Charles and his son Harry. The Prince of Wales and his wife Diana were under a similar scrutiny by the press as Harry and Meghan Markle are now. For that reason, the prince told Oprah, he had expected more understanding from his dad.

The farce of his parents' marriage, the anguish that his mother endured in the palace, and Lady Di's death under brutal circumstances when Harry and William were just children...  Harry has emphasized various times that these experiences were very traumatic for him. Did he get enough help from his father to heal the pain of that drama?

The Diana-Charles marriage did not result in a 'normal' royal family, and therefore Harry and his father have never had a normal relationship. Even though they love each other, the interview and other publications indicate that King Charles' distancing from his son goes back a long way. It became even harder when Charles began rebuilding his life with Camilla while his children were still in mourning over the death of their mother.

King Charles's life also has a thread of melancholy. He was a prince who, given the longevity of Elizabeth II, had not been able to reign until into his 70s.

A single father, Charles has had to put up with his youngest son's adolescent rebelliousness. Harry wore a swastika to a party (as part of a costume, but still) and he was also caught in Las Vegas in the middle of a huge party...

While some of the outrageous partying episodes occurred when Harry was in the army, the young prince's time in the British Armed Forces was generally a time in which he calmed down. In the picture, Charles appears as a proud father honouring his soldier son.

As Harry and William grew into adulthood and the time came for them to take on several responsibilities, Charles never seemed to be a central figure. The brothers were strongly united by the absence of their mother, the memory of Diana, which they repeatedly confirmed to the press.

In the years when Harry was still part of the senior royalty, he and William had sometimes aired the internal, generational differences within the Windsor family. Charles had privately expressed his anger about their revelations. In 2019 the Daily Mail claimed that the Prince of Wales was "furious" by the statements of his sons.

Palace sources claimed at the time that Charles felt his sons were "totally destroying the work he's doing" by talking about their different points of view to the media. Since then, however, it appears that William has stepped more in the traditional line of his father, while Harry continued to try and change things within the palace.

Prince Charles has indicated over the years that the critical stance of his son reminded him of Lady Di. The Sun reported 2019 that Charles looked with concern at Harry, because - like his mother - the prince refused to conform to the rules of the British Royal House.

In the years of their engagement and early marriage, various British media reported, Charles was unable to build a connection with Meghan Markle. Her style and some aspects of her behavior did not fit with the tradition of the British Royal House. The daughter-in-law and her father seemed irreconcilable on matters of custom and conformity.

And then came the moment when Harry and Meghan broke with the Royal Family and its traditions altogether. As the prince recalled in the Oprah interview, his father stopped taking Harry's calls for a while. The reason was that "I took matters into my own hands. It was like, 'I need to do this for my family.'" In other words, Charles's son left the parental home indefinitely to take care of his own wife and children.

Harry told Oprah that his father and brother inspire pity in him, because they are "stuck" in their palace traditions, duties, and limitations. "You know, I was trapped," he told Oprah about his life in the Royal Family. "Trapped within the system, like the rest of my family are. My father and my brother, they are trapped. They don’t get to leave. And I have huge compassion for that."

That has to be hard to hear for someone like Charles, who has spent his whole life devoted to an institution in which tradition and heritage are essential. He had always been secondary to Elizabeth II. For someone like the Prince of Wales, there are rules of the game that cannot be questioned (as his son Harry has done).

However, from their end, while emphasizing protocol and custom, Charles and his family had made a peculiar exception to royal tradition themselves when it came to Harry's son Archie. Before the child was born, they had decided that it would not get the princely title nor the protection that comes with it. "They said they wanted to change the convention for Archie," Meghan Markle remembered in the Oprah interview. "They were saying they didn’t want him to be a prince or a princess and that he wasn’t going to receive security." Of course, now Charles is King, his grandson is referred to as Prince Archie.

While she didn't mind the title of 'prince' at all, Markle argued, she and Harry did mind the fact their child would not get protection. "We haven’t created this monster machine around us in terms of clickbait and tabloid fodder. You [the royal family] have allowed that to happen, which means our son needs to be safe," she said in the interview with Oprah.

Their argument about "tabloid fodder" is an example of the intergenerational disagreement between Harry and his father. Charles had come to accept the aggressiveness of the tabloids (including vicious attacks such as those directed at Meghan Markle) while Harry had begun to say 'enough' and gone to court to stop what he considers to be the media's abuses.

Apart from his vulnerability to paparazzi (such as the aggressive journalists who have often been blamed for Lady Diana's deadly car accident), there was another aspect of Archie losing his customary princely title that bothered Meghan and Harry. It was the matter of race and representation.

In one of the most shocking parts of the interview, Oprah Winfrey asked Meghan Markle whether this exception made for their baby had to do with its race. "I can give you an honest answer," Markle said with a sigh. "In those months when I was pregnant, all around this same time...  we had in tandem the conversation of ‘He won’t be given security, he’s not going to be given a title’ and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born." Markle suggested that the two conversations were related.

Whereas Diana, in her time, had raised issues feminism in royal relations and reporting, the new topic Meghan and Harry have added to the conversation is that of race. They argue, as they have done several times in the past years, that their treatment by the press and the institution is characterized by a combination of racism and sexism.

For Charles, who reacted with "despair" to the whole Oprah interview, this was one of the most painful accusations by the couple. In fact, his son William's first public response to the interview was that "we are not a racist family," and Queen Elizabeth had released a written statement saying that "the issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning."

According to some media, Harry had sent his father an email beforehand to explain what he was going to say in the interview with Oprah. Despite this warning, however, the then-Prince of Wales was reportedly in shock over the couple's statements. According to Vanity Fair USA, Charles has been in a "state of despair" since he heard the remarks of his son and daughter-in-law during the Oprah interview.

Harry would like a reconciliation with his father, but that will take a huge amount of work. Not only because of the bombshell interview with Oprah but also that this was followed by the media tour against his own family.

In Harry's book, Spare, his father comes off terribly. The Prince had written about completely private matters, airing 'dirty laundry' to the whole world. In interviews, Harry also didn't hold back when speaking about his father.

Harry and his father also have very different experiences with race prejudice which doesn't help put out the fire. "I’ve tried to educate them through the process that I have been educated," Harry told Oprah Winfrey - indicating that he had learned much about racism from his wife and that he had tried to share his new knowledge with his family.

Harry said he will "continue to make it one of my priorities to try and heal that relationship." Well, he turned up at the King's coronation, didn't he?

It doesn't seem easy for father and son to reconcile in the short term. There is a gulf between them in terms of worldview. Harry has, in a way, followed in his mother's footsteps. He has broken ties with the palace and has asserted his independence as a person. That is something his father, a more old-fashioned royal, cannot understand. Who will make the next step now Charles is crowned King?