Prince William ‘angered Harry by asking Diana’s brother to halt marriage to Meghan’

The once-close relationship between princes William and Harry was fractured when the former asked their uncle to stop his younger brother rushing into marriage with Meghan Markle, a new book claims.

According to Battle of the Brothers: William and Harry by historian Robert Lacey, the Duke of Cambridge called in Princess Diana’s brother Earl Charles Spencer after getting “brusque” and “peppery reactions” to his own attempts to convince Harry not to rush the relationship.

“For his part, William was worried that his brother was going too fast in his courtship and he didn’t shrink from saying so when Harry started talking about getting hitched,” Lacey writes in an extract published in the Daily Mail.

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“William couldn’t understand how Harry could contemplate marrying this still unknown and untested quantity less than two years after their first meeting,” the book continues.

But “the result of the Spencer intervention was an even more bitter explosion”, according to Lacey, although Harry “understood why Diana’s brother should want to help” and “didn’t blame his uncle”, who walked with the princes and their father behind Diana’s coffin at her funeral, in 1997.

“Yet he was furious with his elder brother for dragging other family members into the row,” the author claims.

In a press release about the book, to be published on 15 October, Lacey says that “these two brothers - once inseparable and now separated by much more than mere distance - have been acting out the contradictions that go back into their childhoods and even before that: into their parents’ ill-fated marriage”, People magazine reports.

“We have seen conflicts between heir and spare in every recent generation of the Royal Family - but nothing so profound as this,” he adds.