Ingrid Seward is still promoting her latest royal book, My Mother and I. The “my mother” in the title is Queen Elizabeth II and “I” is King Charles. It’s very odd. Even weirder is that, judging solely from Seward’s promotional interviews, the book is more about Charles and his sons, not Charles and his mother. Prince Harry’s Spare really shook up the royalists’ fever-dream books, especially since Harry wrote at length about how much his father means to him. There were so many moments in Spare where Harry’s appreciation and love for Charles just leapt off the page. Charles still apparently refuses to read Spare, and I can only imagine that Seward was authorized to write this pro-Charles drivel and revisionist history. Some highlights from Seward’s interview with Fox News:

Harry & Charles were close: “Prince Harry and King Charles were very, very close. They got on incredibly well. I think Charles probably regrets that he wasn’t strict with Harry and [his older son] William. He went on with [Princess] Diana’s freestyle of bringing up children. Diana allowed them to do, more or less, what they wanted, which was very fashionable in those days. You let children just get on with things. I think Charles probably regrets that he wasn’t a bit stricter, because it might’ve given both boys a few more boundaries.… Children all need boundaries, and I don’t think they had too many.”

On Harry’s escape to California: “I don’t think that the king would worry about Harry living halfway across the world, because it is not that difficult to get from LA to London, as we know. But I think what’s sad for him is that he doesn’t see his grandchildren and that Harry has been such a disruptive force to the whole royal family. That doesn’t stop Charles [from] loving him. But I think he’s very upset by Harry’s behavior and especially upset by Harry’s remarks about his wife, about Camilla … Charles just has to be there with open arms. Otherwise, it’s just going to make things much, much worse. And I’m sure he wishes that William and Harry were on better terms, but there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s between them. But he did say, ‘Please boys, don’t make my last years miserable,’ which is exactly what they have done.”

On Diana’s death: “I think Charles was in shock, in enormous shock, and was probably … trembling himself. So what he did was just sort of patted Harry on the shoulder, which is what you might do when you are in shock. It’s quite hard to suddenly let emotions go and hug someone. . . . You are quite mechanical. So I completely understood why Charles was like that, but obviously Harry held it against him.”

[From Fox News]

“So I completely understood why Charles was like that, but obviously Harry held it against him.” The first fifty pages of Spare are heart-wrenching not because Charles didn’t hug his 12-year-old son when telling him that his mother had died. Spare is heart-wrenching because Harry describes being left alone for hours to process his mother’s death, and describes how no one would just come and sit with him at any point and tell him that it would be okay, or talk about grief or what have you. The profound neglect of this 12-year-old child was the story. Harry had to tell himself that it would be okay and he created a years-long magical-thinking belief system that his mother wasn’t really dead.

As for Charles’s potential regrets… like, one son moved to a different country, and the other son is a 41-year-old man-child who throws violent tantrums. Maybe stricter parenting would have changed some of that, but who even knows. As Harry wrote in Spare, it didn’t seem like Charles had any idea how to be a father. And from what we’ve seen of him for decades, his priority was always Camilla, not his sons.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Avalon Red.