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Prince Harry and Princess Margaret friends? It’s what the Duke of Sussex thought should’ve happened because, as he shared in Spare, they’d had “so much in common.” Ahead, what Harry knew about Queen Elizabeth II’s younger sister (spoiler: not much) and why he thought of her before proposing to Meghan Markle.
Prince Harry ‘didn’t know’ his ‘Aunt Margo’ Princess Margaret
Harry might’ve spent holidays with her and the rest of the British royal family, but the now-38-year-old admittedly didn’t know his great-aunt, the Countess of Snowdon, well.
“I didn’t know Princess Margaret, whom I called Aunt Margo,” Harry wrote in Spare (via Town & Country). “She was my great-aunt, yes, we shared 12.5 percent of our DNA, we spent the bigger holidays together, and yet she was almost a total stranger.”
“Like most Britons, I mainly knew of her,” Harry explained. “I was conversant with the general contours of her sad life. Great loves thwarted by the Palace. Exuberant streaks of self-destruction splashed across the tabloids …”
Harry continued, sharing he often avoided Margaret as a kid.
“Growing up, I felt nothing for her, except a bit of pity and a lot of jumpiness,” he wrote. “She could kill a houseplant with one scowl. Mostly, whenever she was around, I kept my distance.”
“On those rarer-than-rare occasions when our paths crossed,” he continued before adding, “when she deigned to take notice of me, to speak to me, I’d wonder if she had any opinion of me. It seemed that she didn’t. Or else, given her tone, her coldness, her opinion wasn’t much.”
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Harry thought he and Margaret ‘should’ve been friends’ because they were ‘spares’ with ‘familiar’ sibling rivalries
The Duke of Sussex continued, sharing that as he grew up, he realized how much he and Margaret had in common. Furthermore, that because of it, they should be friends.
“Now and then, as I grew older, it struck me that Aunt Margo and I should’ve been friends,” he wrote, noting they “had so much in common” as “Two Spares.”
“Her relationship with Granny [Queen Elizabeth II] wasn’t an exact analog of mine with Willy [Prince William], but pretty close,” Harry explained. “The simmering rivalry, the intense competition (driven largely by the older sibling), it all looked familiar.”
Despite their similarities as the younger siblings to heirs, Harry didn’t become close with his great-aunt. When Harry learned Margaret’s health began declining in 2002, he immediately wished “there’d been more time to get to know her. But we were well past that.”
Prince Harry wondered if he’d become ‘the next Margaret’ before asking Queen Elizabeth if he could marry Meghan Markle
Also in Spare, Harry revealed thoughts of his “Aunt Margo” popped into his head before asking his grandmother for permission to marry. “Was I doomed to be the next Margaret?” he thought to himself, realizing it might not be simply a formality as he originally thought.
Royals sixth and under in the line of succession must get the queen’s permission before marrying. When Harry proposed to the Duchess of Sussex in November 2017, he’d been fifth behind King Charles III, the Prince of Wales, Prince George, and Princess Charlotte.
