'Spare' Absolves Meghan Markle Of Blame For Prince William, Harry Rift: Royal Expert

Prince Harry's newly released memoir seemingly showed that his issues with Prince William had existed long before Meghan Markle came into the picture, according to a royal expert.

Royal historian Gareth Russell weighed in on the Duke of Sussex's revelations and claims about his relationship and falling out with his older brother in his book "Spare," which was released Tuesday.

He cited an unnamed colleague as saying that the book seemingly absolved Markle, whom Prince Harry married in 2018, of all blame for the rift between King Charles' two sons.

"She said, 'I feel like in many ways this exonerates Megan from the accusation that she stirred up all this trouble between them,'" Russell told Us Weekly Wednesday. "It's very clear, if you read the book, that Prince Harry has been keeping score in his head for decades before he met the future Duchess of Sussex."

Prince Harry spoke about his childhood "sibling rivalry" with Prince William in his book and his recent interviews promoting the tome.

The "Do Let's Have Another Drink!" author recalled learning about their sibling dynamic while writing his novel on Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. He claimed that the two princes' mother Princess Diana thought that Prince William and Prince Harry's great-grandmother favored the older brother over the younger.

"[Princess] Diana did think that the queen mother favored William," Russell told the outlet. "She did think some of the elder generation showed a bit more favoritism towards William."

The royal historian acknowledged that Prince Harry's memories of being considered the "spare" child were "not totally without foundation." However, Russell felt that some of Harry's complaints — like Prince William having a larger room when they were kids — only painted him in a negative light.

"To be tracking score of that, you know, 20, 30 years later that bit didn't work," the royal expert claimed. "That's probably some of the bits [in the book that] in Britain would've landed least sympathetically."

Prince Harry discussed his sibling rivalry with William in his interview with Anderson Cooper for "60 Minutes."

During the interview, the Duke of Sussex said that his memoir was not intended to hurt his family but explained that it "does give a full picture of the situation as we were growing up and also squashes this idea that somehow my wife was the one that destroyed the relationship between these two brothers."

Harry told the CNN anchor that while the media portrayed them as having a close bond growing up, he and his brother grew apart after their mother died.

He claimed that when they were in Eton, Prince William allegedly told him to "pretend we don't know each other" in school, which Prince Harry said "hurt" him at the time.

"I couldn't make sense of it," Harry told Cooper. "I was like, 'What do you mean? We're now at the same school. Like, I haven't seen you for ages, now we get to hang out together.' He's like, 'No, no, no, when we're at school we don't know each other.' And I took that personally."

"Like, we had a very similar traumatic experience, and then we-- we dealt with it two very different ways," he added.

Prince Harry was 12 and Prince William was 15 when Princess Diana died after a car crash in Paris in 1997.

"Spare" was released Tuesday.