Princess Charlotte of Wales seems to already be coming to grips with a grim reality, writes Daniela Elser. Photo / AP
OPINION
Would you want to be a prince or princess?
On paper, the royal game sounds pretty good. There are the palaces, the staff, the hot and cold running scones, the being allowed to ferret around in a vast jewellery vault on rainy afternoons.
But if there is one thing that the last several decades of the world's longest running soap, Keeping Up With the Windsors, has taught us is that the reality is far – far – less appealing than Cinderella et al have led us to believe. (Though why anyone would trust a person who wore glass slippers, I will never know...)
That's a bleak lesson that Princess Charlotte of Wales would seem to already be coming to grips with. The little girl might only be 7, but at a time when her classmates are busy daydreaming about being astronauts or racing car drivers or TikTok influencers with lucrative Louis Vuitton sponsorships, Charlotte already knows exactly what her future holds.
She is "The Spare".
A new book by longtime royal reporter Katie Nicholl has revealed that by the time the princess was only 6, she was already "aware of the order of succession and [knew] that like her uncle Harry she is now the spare".
Just think about that for a minute. At the age of only 6, a child already knowing that her life is defined and limited by what she is not and will never be.
There is something so profoundly sad about a kid in Year 1, who should be able to, eyes wide, look at the world as full of wonder and possibility but instead is already painfully aware of her second-class status.
Nicholl's book, The New Royals, offers a fascinating look at the never-ending drama machine that Buckingham Palace has become in recent years and also into the lives of William and Kate, Prince and Princess of Wales' children, Prince George, Charlotte, and Prince Louis that is both fascinating and, to me, all a bit depressing.
Sure, the kidlets might have all the ponies and Penguin biscuits a prep-schooler could dream of but the illusion long, and perhaps overly optimistically, peddled by William and Kate that they are giving George, Charlotte and Louis a "normal" childhood has started to crumble.
Take one of Nicholl's other revelations, and which made waves earlier this week, namely that George once wheeled out this impossibly spoiled line to his young chums: "My dad will be King so you better watch out." Charming.
Then, there is that Charlotte "spare" eye-opener.
What is so striking, if not more than a bit startling, is that already George and Charlotte are keenly aware of their relative future importance and what lies ahead for each of them. The three Waleses might be being raised side-by-side but when one child is going to be King and the others left to the dubious fate of The Spares, that illusion of equity can only hold for so long. (No word on what the impish, havoc-generating, meme-machine Louis, 4, might understand yet.)
What Nicholl's reporting shows is that George and Charlotte understand the invisible dividing line of the throne that already separates them. One will get it and one will be doomed to forever slide further and further away from the top rung.
That is a weight that even in adulthood another Spare, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, has struggled to bear. In another book doing the rounds this week, highly respected royal reporter Valentine Low's Courtiers: The Hidden Power Behind The Crown, he recounts how Harry's awareness of his fate affected him in his 20s and 30s.
Low writes that Harry had a "long-held fear that his time was running out and that once Prince George turned 18 he would become irrelevant". A source told him that the fifth in line to the throne was "fixated" on concerns about his "shelf life".
"He would compare himself with his uncle [Prince Andrew]," the source has said. "He would say, 'I have this time to make this impact. Because I can.' Until George turns 18, was the way he was thinking about it. 'Then I will be the also-ran.' He was genuinely thinking of it as, 'I have this platform now, for a limited amount of time. I want to move forward, move forward.'"
What both Nicholl's and Low's Harry, George and Charlotte lines betray is the inherently tragic architecture of royalty – of one child eternally being hived off and lumped with incredible responsibility and the weight of history and duty and the others left to flounder in the undefined No Man's Land of overly-titled, under-educated, ever-diminishing relevance.
The House of Windsor today might be busy trying to stay relevant by hiring social media managers and producing YouTube channels and hashtagging with a vengeance but on this particular heir/spare front, nothing has changed since longbows were the hot new thing.
The heir is forced into a job they have no choice over and the spare is destined for a life of ever-increasing inbuilt obsolescence.
Goodo, then. Another scone?
If the last century has proven anything conclusively about the royal family it is that a) it is conveniently easy to lose the phone numbers of German relatives and b) that the spare has always, and will always, have a rum old time of it.
In the 1930s the Duke of York was forced onto the throne so Edward VIII could go and moon over a dour Wallis; in the '50s, Princess Margaret, faced with the prospect of penury and exile if she married Group Captain Peter Townsend, gave him up and then spent the rest of life in a restless, whisky-soaked wilderness; and Prince Andrew has thoroughly proven himself to be morally bankrupt and grasping.
Then there is Harry. Poor old bloody Harry, a man for whom happiness would seem to have become his white whale.
And this is now the future that Charlotte faces.
She has a title but no definitive role. She will likely, given the lack of other members of the royal family, have to take on at least some royal responsibilities whether she wants to or not but will only earn about 1.15 per cent (based on current figures) of what George will pull in as Prince of Wales. Her fashion, relationships, and life choices will be eternal fodder for the ravenous press and public.
Whether Charlotte fully understands this yet or not, there is no denying the fact that her life will never truly be her own.
Given this, and given that George and Charlotte are already cognisant of their looming, different roles, how in the hell can William and Kate try and maintain their fiction of giving their children a "normal" childhood?
The Prince and Princess of Wales' well-intentioned commitment to ferrying their kids around in a station wagon, to live in a home with no live-in staff, and to fly budget airlines when they go on holiday to Scotland will ground George in some semblance of ordinariness. But the fact that George and Charlotte already understand what lies ahead for each of them and how their destinies will differ fundamentally undermines Project Normal.
William and Kate might want so very much to be able to truly give their kids the space to grow up, play and dream that millions of other British kids enjoy but that is already off limits for George and Charlotte by dint of the genetic hands they have been dealt.
No matter how many times that George, Charlotte and Louis eat sandwiches out of plastic lunch boxes on the grass at the polo, as they were photographed doing back in 2019, the notion that they can ever have any sort of truly commonplace upbringing is fanciful.
A few crustless Marmite sangers eaten on the grass of the Cowdray Park Polo Club can only go so far when destiny and the history books are set to come calling in the not too distant future.
• Daniela Elser is a writer and a royal expert with more than 15 years' experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles.
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