Prince William and Kate Middleton met as first-year students at the University of St. Andrews. As their relationship moved forward, Kate Middleton made Prince William meet her family—father Michael, mother Carole, and siblings Pippa and James. Then, Prince William grew very fond of the Middleton family, several royal authors have shared.
Now, royal author Tina Brown claimed that Prince William’s younger brother Prince Harry apparently “couldn’t understand William’s obsession” with the Middletons. After Prince William and Kate Middleton married, Prince Harry felt “displaced” by William’s new family unit, the author claimed in the 2022 book ‘The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor’.
Distance between the brothers increased after Prince William's marriage and birth of Princess Charlotte. Prince William and Harry were still “incredibly close” when both lived at Kensington Palace, Tina Brown said, as they shared the same office and spent ample time together. But Prince Harry “mourned his us-against-the-world bond with William” after William married.
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“Harry felt displaced by their bougie family unit and couldn’t understand his brother’s obsession with his Middleton in-laws, whose Bucklebury world bored Harry to tears,” she wrote, adding, “The [now Waleses] had become a tight unit, and William a full-on Windsor country bumpkin. On weekend when he wasn’t chez Middleton, he was tramping the grounds of Anmer Hall, the red-brick Georgian mansion on the Sandringham Estate that the Queen gave the couple as a wedding present, wearing a flat cap and tweed jacket like his ‘turnip toff’ Norfolk farmer friends.”
{{/usCountry}}“Harry felt displaced by their bougie family unit and couldn’t understand his brother’s obsession with his Middleton in-laws, whose Bucklebury world bored Harry to tears,” she wrote, adding, “The [now Waleses] had become a tight unit, and William a full-on Windsor country bumpkin. On weekend when he wasn’t chez Middleton, he was tramping the grounds of Anmer Hall, the red-brick Georgian mansion on the Sandringham Estate that the Queen gave the couple as a wedding present, wearing a flat cap and tweed jacket like his ‘turnip toff’ Norfolk farmer friends.”
{{/usCountry}}William “felt Harry’s unabated Jack the Lad behavior was getting tiresome and was also decidedly less amused than the British public when details of Harry’s partying were unearthed," the author also claimed.
Meanwhile, Joe Little, managing editor at Majesty Magazine, said, “William fitted into the Middleton family very quickly, and they took to him as a future son-in-law. I think also a bit of stability and grounding and a bit of normality that William perhaps wasn’t too familiar with when growing up because clearly his parents’ marriage was facing difficulties when he was a child, and he was very aware of that—and eventually their marriage disintegrated. With the Middletons, he got stability and a bit of normality, so for that William will forever be grateful.”