Battle of Brothers: William, Harry and the Inside Story of a Family in Tumult by Robert Lacey

Author:Robert Lacey [Lacey, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008408527
Google: E_3rDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2020-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

William’s wariness derived from the example of his parents’ disastrously failed marriage. By this point he was old enough to have dipped into several of the vast library of books about Diana and to have glanced at some of the newspaper articles on her – though he hated them all. He had also begun to get a taste of the remorselessness of the royal system, and he was determined not to be prematurely pressured towards the altar as his mother and father had been.

So in the summer of 2004, with just a year to go until his graduation, William rather welcomed the mischievous suggestion of Guy Pelly that he might leave Kate at home and join his friend on a ‘boys only’ sailing trip to Greece. And Pelly being Pelly, he made another suggestion: that the yacht might be staffed and operated by an all-female crew. Kate was not impressed and she made sure William knew it.

Mischief was Guy Pelly’s middle name. He had been one of the original and most rowdy ringleaders of the Glossy Posse and a stalwart presence at Club H. As the son of Diana’s friend Lady Carolyn Herbert, Pelly had been close to both princes from childhood. When St James’s Palace had wanted to suggest a ‘bad influence’ who might have led Harry astray in his 2002 ‘Drugs Shame’, it was Pelly’s name that it floated to the newspapers – most irresponsibly, as it turned out. Pelly had actually been in Australia in the weeks when the News of the World was gathering its incriminating evidence of Harry’s pot smoking. But this did not save him from being asked to leave Cirencester’s Royal College of Agriculture, after which he had had to redirect his land management studies via Newcastle University.

The naked injustice of this, and the good-humoured fortitude with which his friend had picked himself up and moved forward, had endeared Pelly to Prince William still further. There was – and is – a case for saying that Guy Pelly is the oldest and closest male friend of our future king. Never underestimate a man who is wise enough to play the fool. When Pelly went into the nightclub business in his twenties, both William and Harry would make a point of visiting their mate’s boîtes regularly until they all got established. And in 2018 William would invite his friend Guy to be a godfather to his and Kate’s third child, Prince Louis.

It did take some time, but Catherine’s acceptance of Pelly’s godparenting showed how she had moved on from the all-male cruise suggestion that she certainly had not welcomed in the summer of 2004.

‘At the time I wasn’t very happy about it,’ she admitted to ITV’s Tom Bradby in 2010. ‘But actually it made me a stronger person. You find out things about yourself that maybe you hadn’t realised.’

‘In that particular instance, we did split up for a bit,’ agreed Prince William. ‘We were both very young. It was at university. We were both finding ourselves as such and being different characters and stuff.

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