From the queen's June 4, 2022 jubilee celebration, marking her extraordinary seventy years on the throne in England, to her September 19, 2022 funeral, my feelings toward her grandson, Harry, underwent a drastic change (leaving aside the machinations of Madame Diva Meagan Markle).  The pettiness and cruelty displayed by the royal family toward him went from churlish at the jubilee to total destruction at the funeral.  The world essentially witnessed a psychological snuff film. 

How else can one explain what manner of people these are?  His father, now King Charles, and his consort, his older brother, the heir now known as Prince William, and wife Princess Kate totally ignored Harry and his wife.  Kate, who was once like a sister to Harry, now looked upon him as a leper with her pursed lips and steely, hateful gaze.

The put-downs and attempts at humiliation never stopped.  From the onset, Harry was not informed in a timely fashion that the queen, his beloved grandmother, was dead; from their ghosting and non-communication to being seated in the equivalent of the cheap seats, to the petty insults of not allowing Harry to wear his military uniform, to finally allowing him to wear the uniform for a brief time (albeit with Her Majesty's initials removed), to not being allowed to salute the queen's coffin even though he had served in the military for a decade, to being uninvited to a private reception after purportedly having been invited in error, the king knives were definitely out.

Throughout, Harry's visage was one of profound grief, Markle's stoic.  But they never raised a word of complaint and bore their humiliation with quiet dignity.

Thus, the announcement of Harry's book, Spare, is well understood by Anglophiles.  For years, Harry's older brother Prince William was called the heir, and Prince Harry was known as the spare.  All attention was lavished on William as the future king, and Harry was treated as the back-up — the spare just in case something happened to William.  Harry was not treated with respect for himself personally, but just as a spare battery in case the battery in the remote control died.  And yet despite his wild child years, Harry went on to live a life of valor and dignity.  He served in the military for ten years with two spells in Afghanistan and founded the Invictus Games, an Olympic-style event for athletes with disabilities.

Making the facts of birth rank and royal succession more painful for Harry was the constant buzz about his parentage.  His father Charles had a thing with now-wife Camilla Parker Bowles from a young age.  But Camilla wasn't one to wait forever and married someone else, with whom she had children.  That union seemingly damned her forever as ineligible to subsequently marry Charles.  Charles went on to marry the innocent, unblemished, virginal, and beautiful Diana, of whom his parents approved.

Although they had two children, their marriage was doomed from the start because Charles was unwilling to part with his obsession for Camilla.  Eventually, Diana knew the truth and, after bearing the heir and the spare, sank into a depression from which she finally broke out and became a global icon.  Charles, a two-timer and jealous, could not compete with Diana's beauty, charm, empathy, and warmth.  Moreover, aware of Charles's duplicity, Diana began a series of her own affairs, one of which to this day causes titters regarding Harry's paternal genesis, a conflict that might contribute to Charles's hateful behavior toward his own son, as Harry bears a striking resemblance to one of Diana's lovers, James Hewitt.  But historians swear that Diana didn't meet Hewitt until two years after Harry's birth.

Regardless, Harry's choice of book title shouts volumes.  He appears to be addressing the hurt of forever being called the spare, of seeing photos on his grandmother's and father's desks of Queen Elizabeth; Prince Charles; Prince William; and William's first son, Prince George.

Any child would be hurt by such omission — a hurt multiplied exponentially on the world stage.  One hopes the book will provide Harry a catharsis of sorts and the facilitation of new paths to explore and conquer.