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Prince Harry offered an intimate — too intimate by some accounts — look at his life in his best-selling Spare memoir. In the book’s 400 pages, he recounted learning of Princess Diana’s death and how it shaped his entire life. Along the way, the Duke of Sussex answered certain questions while leaving others unanswered. Ahead are four questions Harry answered in Spare and three he didn’t.
1. Question Prince Harry answered in ‘Spare’: Why did he and Meghan Markle’s assistant quit?
In one Spare passage, Harry set the record straight on his and the Duchess of Sussex’s assistant the former Suits star was rumored to have driven “to quit.” Harry explained the palace asked the unnamed assistant to resign after he and Meghan showed them “evidence” the staffer “traded on her position with Meg to get freebies.”
Harry, now 38, continued, saying he and Meghan couldn’t go public with what had transpired. “Because we couldn’t speak publicly about the reasons for the assistant’s departure, rumors filled the void,” he wrote. “In many ways that was the true start of all the troubles. Shortly thereafter, the ‘Duchess Difficult’ narrative began appearing in all the papers.”
2. Question Prince Harry answered in ‘Spare’: What really happened with the Meghan Markle/Kate Middleton crying story?
Did Meghan make Kate Middleton cry or vice versa? According to Harry’s account in Spare, his sister-in-law made Meghan cry just days before their 2018 royal wedding. He recapped the drama, even sharing text messages from the Princess of Wales.
He claimed it started with Princess Charlotte’s flower girl dress being too big. Kate, Harry wrote, brought it up during what became a tense conversation with Meghan. Then Kate remarked that not only did her daughter’s dress need to be remade but so did the other flower girls’ dresses.
Harry recalled arriving home to find Meghan “on the floor. Sobbing.” He later wrote it off as a “simple misunderstanding” after Kate apologized the next day.
3. Question Prince Harry answered in ‘Spare’: What happened at the ‘Sandringham Summit’ in 2020?
Dubbed the “Sandringham Summit” by the media, Harry recounted details of the January 2020 meeting he had to discuss his and Meghan’s exit from royal life. He, King Charles III, Prince William, Queen Elizabeth II, and their respective private secretaries met at the country estate.
Harry claimed the terms of his exit had been a “fix” where, after an hour of discussing varying options, he’d been presented with a drafted statement announcing a full departure.
“Wait. I’m confused,” Harry recalled saying. “You’ve already drafted a statement? Before any discussion? Announcing Option Five? In other words, the fix was in, this whole time? This summit was just for show?”
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Courtiers assured him there were drafted statements for all the options. When Harry asked about printed copies of the others, he claimed a courtier told him the printer wasn’t working. “Everyone was staring away or down at their shoes,” he wrote.
4. Question Prince Harry answered in ‘Spare’: What were the events surrounding ‘Tiaragate’ before 2018 royal wedding?
As Harry recounted in Spare, Meghan didn’t demand a certain tiara for her wedding day. Instead, the two had an “extraordinary morning” at Buckingham Palace where the queen had invited Meghan to try on five tiaras.
Harry noted his “Granny” left the two with some advice: “‘Make sure,’ she added, that you practice putting it on. With your hairdresser. It’s tricky and you don’t want to be doing it for the first time on the wedding day.’”
Attempts to contact the queen’s then-dresser, Angela Kelly, went unanswered. Finally, she said the chosen tiara would require an orderly and police escort to leave the palace. Then she said it couldn’t be done because of her busy schedule.
“She was being obstructive, obviously, but for what reason? We coudn’t even hazard a guess,” Harry recalled. Later, he met the “troublemaker” in the palace’s Audience Room. She handed him a form to sign before giving him the tiara.
“I thanked her, though I added that it would’ve made our lives so much easier to have had it sooner. Her eyes were fire,” Harry claimed before , he “read in her face” a “clear warning.”
5. Questions Prince Harry didn’t answer in ‘Spare’: Planted stories, racism in the royal family, and Queen Elizabeth walkabout
As for questions Harry left unanswered in his memoir, there were a few big ones. First, Harry didn’t share who’d discussed his son’s skin color. He also didn’t reveal specifics on which stories were planted the royal family in the press. (Harry mentioned one instance in Netflix’s Harry & Meghan.)
Finally, regarding more recent events, particularly the queen’s funeral and the walkabout he and Meghan did with William and Kate, Harry didn’t share details of that day in September 2022.
