Prince Harry flew over 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) to see his father when King Charles III was stricken with cancer. However, Harry did not see his estranged brother, William, during a brief 24-hour visit.
The emotional and physical distance between the royal brothers remains vast.
British media revealed photographs of Harry at Heathrow Airport on Wednesday afternoon, barely a day after he arrived on a flight from Los Angeles.
He appeared to be returning to California following a brief visit to his father at Clarence House, the king’s London residence. Any meeting between the brothers would usually be approved by royal officials.
William returned to public responsibilities for the first time since his wife, Kate, underwent stomach surgery in a London hospital on January 16. She spent about two weeks in the prestigious London Clinic and is now recovering at home. William presented medals to notables and local heroes at a Windsor Castle ceremony in the morning and was scheduled to attend a charity dinner for London’s air ambulance service on Wednesday evening.
Images from the day provide fresh grain for the popular British media tropes: diligent William and flyaway Harry.
Behind that simplistic statement are two royal brothers who were bereaved by the death of their mother, Princess Diana, when William was 15 and Harry was 12 years old, and whose trajectories have diverged radically.
While William, the heir, was born to be king, Harry, the fifth in line to the throne after his brother and William’s three children, has frequently seen to struggle with the more ambiguous role of “spare.”
In his 2023 book, “Spare,” he described a lifetime of brother grudges, including William having the better bedroom at Balmoral Castle and a fierce argument when Harry claimed William pulled his jewelry and knocked him down over a dog bowl.
In the book, Harry claimed that the British media portrayed him and his wife, Meghan (also known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex), as villains in comparison to the saintly William and Kate, and accused palace officials of lying to protect his elder brother.
The Sussexes cited the media’s prejudiced treatment of Meghan, who is biracial, as well as a lack of palace support, as factors for their 2020 decision to leave royal duties and relocate to the United States.
In an explosive interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, the pair presented the royal family as unconcerned about Meghan’s mental health issues and claimed an anonymous family member made a racial remark to Harry prior to the birth of their son, Archie. Harry referred to his relationship with William as “space at the moment.”
The brothers’ encounters after then have been formal and brief. They were seen temporarily putting their strained relationship aside to attend their grandfather Prince Philip’s burial at Windsor Castle in 2021. The two did not walk side by side behind Philip’s coffin, but were seen speaking and walking together after the service.
In September 2022, the brothers marched together behind Queen Elizabeth II’s casket before her state funeral. William later stated that it brought back memories of doing the same at Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997.
In May, Harry visited the United Kingdom for his father’s coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey. He was assigned to sit two seats behind his brother, came to the abbey alone, and left alone. The brothers were not seen speaking or even acknowledging one another.
Harry’s efforts to control the British tabloid press have strained relations with his family members. He defied the royal family’s history of not engaging in litigation by suing the news media for hacking his phone and other privacy violations.
In court filings, Harry alleged that Charles had commanded palace workers to tell him to withdraw his lawsuit because it was bad for the family. He also claimed that William quietly settled his own hacking charges against Rupert Murdoch’s magazines for a “huge sum of money” in 2020.
In “Spare,” Harry alleges that after Philip’s funeral, their father begged them: “Please, boys — don’t make my final years a misery.”
According to royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith, repairing rifts within the royal family would require more than a single visit.
“I don’t think we should engage in too much magical thinking about this,” said Bedell Smith, who is the author of “Prince Charles: Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life.”
“There are some very, very deep, hurts (Harry) has inflicted on the family,” she went on to say. However, she went on to say: “King Charles, by nature, he wants to heal not only the world, but I think his impulse would be to try and heal the family.”