A butler who worked at Clarence House under then-Prince Charles has appeared to contradict claims made by Prince Harry about his relationship with his stepmother, Queen Camilla.
Since leaving the royal family as a senior working royal in 2020, the Duke of Sussex has been vocal about his relatives via interviews and his memoir, Spare.
In the book, which was published in January 2023, Harry said he and brother Prince William urged their father not to marry the then-Duchess of Cornwall.
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Then-Prince Charles with Prince William and Prince Harry, in happier times, in 2005. (Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images)
He alleged that Camilla leaked stories about the royal family to improve her image and “sacrificed” him “on her personal PR altar”.
In Spare Harry wrote: “We support you, we said. We endorse Camilla, we said. ‘Just please don’t marry her. Just be together, Pa.’ He didn’t answer. But she answered. Straight away. Shortly after our private summits with her, she began to play the long game, a campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the Crown (with Pa’s blessing, we presumed).”
Prince Harry was overly critical of the then-Duchess of Cornwall, now Queen Camilla, in his memoir. (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)
In an interview to promote his memoir, Harry went on to describe Camilla as “dangerous” and a “villain” who left “bodies in the street”.
However, former royal butler Grant Harrold paints a very different picture about that time in his own book about working for the royal household.
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His memoir titled The Royal Butler is an account of the seven years he spent at Highgrove – King Charles’ private home – from 2004 to 2011.
Then-Prince Charles married Camilla in April, 2005. (AAP)
Writing about the day Charles and Camilla married in April, 2005, he described the happy scenes as the newlyweds prepared to travel from Windsor to their country home, Birkhall, in Scotland.
Harrold wrote: ”We all went outside to wave them off and laughed as we saw William and Harry had decorated their car with ‘Just Married’.
“As they drove off through the arches to cheers, the boys raced after the car.”
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“The four of them, I promise you, got on so well,” Harrold told The Telegraph UK, of that period in the lives of Charles, Camilla and the two princes.
“And that’s why I don’t understand what Harry’s said, I really don’t understand. Because I saw them. I saw them having dinners together, I saw them having drinks together, I saw them going to parties together.”
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Harrold also wrote about Prince Harry’s close relationship with his sister-in-law, Catherine, describing the two as being close and again, contradicting the account given by Harry.
In Spare, Prince Harry was critical of the now-Princess of Wales, portraying her as cold and claimed she did not go out of her way to make his now-wife, Meghan, feel welcome when joining the royal family.
Harry also wrote at length about Prince William, describing the tension that had grown between them since childhood. Harry suggested he often felt left out once William met Kate.
Prince William and Kate, with Prince Harry, at a joint engagement promoting mental health in 2017. (UK Press via Getty Images)
Harrold wrote: “They involved him. He used to go out with Kate. William would be away and Kate and Harry would be off doing stuff together. They’d go shopping together, they’d go to pubs together.
“I think when people say ‘oh he was left out’, he really wasn’t. But also he was with Chelsy [Davy, the Prince’s former girlfriend]. Chelsy was always around. And Chelsy and Kate got on really well.”
Elsewhere in the book, Harrold described watching the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan from the lawn in front of St George’s Chapel.
“Once all the formalities were over, we watched as the happy couple, and then the other members of the royal family, filed out of the chapel,” he wrote.
“When Prince Philip came out he turned to the Queen and said, ‘Thank f— that’s over.'”
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