6 debunked claims Harry made about the royal family

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Between his 2023 memoir, Spare, and his interviews, Prince Harry has made a slew of allegations about his experiences in the royal family. But over time, some of those claims have been challenged and, in some cases, contradicted or debunked — including these six.

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Prince Harry alleged in the opening pages of Spare that brother Prince William grabbed him by the collar and knocked him to the floor — injuring his back and breaking a dog bowl — during an argument at Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace over Meghan Markle’s alleged treatment of staff.
But palace sources have pushed back on the Duke of Sussex’s claim the fight turned physical. According to sources who spoke to author Russell Myers for his new biography, William and Catherine: The Monarchy’s New Era: The Inside Story, Harry’s version of events was “massively overblown” and a “cheap shot,” Britain’s Daily Express reported.

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Meghan Markle told Oprah Winfrey in a 2021 interview alongside Prince Harry that aired on CBS that she and her husband privately exchanged vows in front of the Archbishop of Canterbury shortly before their public May 2018 royal wedding. “Three days before our wedding, we got married. No one knows that, but we called the archbishop and we just said, ‘This thing, this spectacle is for the world, but we want our union between us,'” the Duchess of Sussex said. “So the vows that we have framed in our room are just the two of us in our backyard with the Archbishop of Canterbury.” Added Harry, “Just the three of us.”

Later, then-Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby contradicted that claim, stating that he “signed the wedding certificate, which is a legal document,” confirming the Sussexes were legally married on the date of their public vow exchange. Welby did, however, confirm he had private meetings with the couple before that, though wouldn’t disclose what took place.

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Accounts about whether Queen Elizabeth II supported Prince Harry and Meghan Markle naming their daughter Lilibet “Lili” Diana Mountbatten-Windsor in 2021 have varied. While the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s camp has maintained they wouldn’t have used the late monarch’s deeply personal nickname, Lilibet, without her approval, later accounts from royal biographers and palace sources claimed the queen, who died in 2022, was furious.

In the 2024 biography Charles III: New King, New Court: The Inside Story, author Robert Hardman reported that a palace staffer shared that the monarch was “as angry as I’d ever see her” after the Sussexes claimed she was “supportive” of their decision to use her childhood moniker. According to a 2021 post on X by BBC royal correspondent Jonny Dymond, “Palace source says the queen was ‘never asked.'”

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Meghan Markle suggested that her son with Prince Harry, Prince Archie, was initially denied his birthright — the title of “Prince” — and that the decision went against protocol. In their 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, the Duchess of Sussex said she was never given a reason why “the first member of color in this family [was] not being titled in the same way that other grandchildren would be,” with Harry further claiming there were conversations within the family about “how dark” Archie’s skin would be.

Under protocols established by King George V in letters patent in 1917, Archie was not automatically entitled to be called “Prince” at birth because he was the great-grandchild of a sovereign at the time. The policy states, “The grandchildren of the sons of any such sovereign in the direct male line (save only the eldest living son of the eldest son of the Prince of Wales) shall have and enjoy in all occasions the style and title enjoyed by the children of dukes of this realm” — meaning that Archie would have been entitled to his title when grandfather King Charles III ascended the throne.

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In Spare, Prince Harry described receiving a call at Eton College informing him that his great-grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, had died on March 30, 2002. “At Eton, while studying, I took the call. I wish I could remember whose voice was at the other end; a courtier’s I believe. I recall that it was just before Easter, the weather bright and warm, light slanting through my window, filled with vivid colors,” he wrote, as reported by the U.K.’s Daily Express.

But resurfaced photographs from that weekend place the Duke of Sussex on a ski vacation in Klosters, Switzerland, when the Queen Mother passed away.

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Another detail from Spare that has been flagged as inaccurate is Prince Harry referring to King Henry VI as “my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.”

But Henry VI had only one son, Edward of Westminster, who died — before having any children — during the Battle of Tewkesbury, so Harry could not be his direct descendant. The Duke of Sussex’s six-times great-grandfather is actually King George III, the grandfather of Queen Victoria, who died in 1820.