King Charles and Prince Harry’s once-close father-son bond took a dramatic downturn following the release of Harry’s memoir, Spare.
One of the most controversial moments came when Harry labeled Camilla the “wicked stepmother” — a comment that hit Charles particularly hard. To royal insiders, that moment marked a breaking point.
In January 2023, roughly three years after stepping back from royal life with Meghan Markle and relocating to the US, Prince Harry published Spare, a deeply personal account of his life inside the monarchy.
While the book included multiple revelations, the passages and interview comments about Queen Camilla reportedly stung King Charles the most.
Harry wrote that he and his brother had urged their father not to marry Camilla. “Despite Willy and me urging him not to, Pa was going ahead,” he said in Spare. “We pumped his hand, wished him well. No hard feelings.”
He then acknowledged Charles’ decision stemmed from love, adding: “We recognized that he was finally going to be with the woman he loved, the woman he’d always loved.”
Still, Harry was honest about his emotional struggle adjusting to having a stepmother, admitting he had once feared Camilla might be “just as cruel to him as all the wicked stepmothers in storybooks.” He also noted that William had “long harbored suspicions about the Other Woman.”
The Royal ‘Red Line’
Although Camilla was not a core focus of Spare, Harry expanded on his feelings in interviews promoting the book. He alleged that Camilla was “dangerous” and part of a wider effort to “rehabilitate her image” through strategic media connections. He also accused her of leaking private stories to the British press, suggesting it was part of a long PR campaign tied to the fallout from Charles and Diana’s broken marriage.
