In his 2023 memoir Spare, Prince Harry wrote that he and his older brother, Prince William, had “complex feelings” about their father’s decision to remarry in 2005—but former royal butler Grant Harrold says that wasn’t clear to people viewing the brothers from the outside.
In an interview with The Telegraph ahead of the publication of his own memoir of royal life, The Royal Butler: My Remarkable Life of Royal Service, Harrold described the day Charles married Camilla, saying that it was the “happiest” he ever saw the now-King, and adding that William and Harry seemed genuinely happy about the union, too.
“Charles and Camilla were catching a flight to head straight to Birkhall [on the Balmoral estate],” Harrold wrote of the events following the couple’s civil ceremony. “We all went outside to wave them off and laughed as we saw William and Harry had decorated their car with ‘Just Married.’”
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King Charles and Queen Camilla posing for an official wedding photo with Prince Harry, Prince William, and Camilla’s children, Laura and Tom Parker Bowles in 2005.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Harrold went on to add that William and Harry “raced after the car” as Charles and Camilla “drove off through the arches to cheers.”
The former royal butler’s account of the day differs significantly from the one Harry recounted in Spare, in which he described trying to convince his father not to formalize his relationship with Camilla.
“‘We support you,’” Harry wrote in Spare of his and William’s conversation with Charles about the wedding plans. “‘We endorse Camilla,’ we said. ‘Just please don’t marry her. Just be together, Pa.’ He didn’t answer. But she answered. Straight away.”
Harrold made it clear that, if there was any strain or even awkwardness between King Charles and his sons at this time, it didn’t show. In fact, Harrold said that, during his time serving as a butler for the royal family, he saw “no animosity” at all between Harry and any of his now-estranged family members.
“I saw them having dinners together, I saw them having drinks together, I saw them going to parties together,” Harrold explained. “The King used to do things to make them laugh and giggle,” Harrold said, adding that Charles was always “very calm” and “didn’t once raise his voice” in his presence.
“He works hard and he doesn’t suffer fools,” Harrold said of his personal impressions of the King. “He gets on with everyone. He does get perceived as out of touch, and he’s not.”
Harrold’s book, The Royal Butler: My Remarkable Life of Royal Service, is set to be released on September 23.
