Since they were born, Prince William and his younger brother, Prince Harry, have had many titles. Two unofficial, but impactful ones are “heir” and “spare.” While it may seem silly, these hierarchical designations have long majorly impacted royal siblings, leading to rifts and rivalries like the one apparently rocking the British royal family.

While it may sound cruel to dub a second-born child a “spare,” childhood mortality rates meant that additional children ensured a royal family’s power and lineage would continue.

In modern times, the “spare” has occupied a more nebulous space in the royal hierarchy. Recent royal siblings like Princess Margaret, Prince Andrew, and Prince Harry have seemingly found it difficult at times to navigate their tricky roles as royal superstars with no real endgame. 

“They’re famous from birth, whether they want it or not. With an heir and spare dynamic, you get one child who’s born for the top job, and the second who probably grows up feeling like the understudy,” says Heather Cocks, coauthor of The Heir Affair and The Royal We and cofounder of the pop-culture website GoFugYourself.com. “Learn the lines, know the role, but understand you’ll probably never get called to do it. And if your personality more naturally pushes you toward the spotlight, that would be really hard on the spare.”

This position can lead to a life of decadence, despair, or disillusion. “It’s obviously rife with opportunities for dramatic conflict—which is great when you’re writing a novel but probably not so great when it’s your actual real life,” Cocks’ coauthor and GoFugYourself partner, Jessica Morgan, notes.

But in the past, the life of the spare could be downright deadly, especially in England. According to royal historian and author Leslie Carroll, the reason is simple. “In a word: primogeniture. The centuries-old system of the firstborn son inheriting 100% of an estate—which, where monarchies were concerned, meant the throne—was a recipe for catastrophe as well as sibling rivalry.” 

One of the most blatant breaches between the heir and spare occurred during the 12th-century reign of King Richard the Lionheart. When the king went to fight in the Third Crusade, his younger brother John (the future King John, forever demonized in the Robin Hood tales) attempted to usurp the throne. When Richard was captured by Austrian forces, John mismanaged funds that had been raised to pay the king’s ransom. However, Richard made his way back to England and forgave his brother. According to Carroll, he stated, “Think no more of it John; you are only a child who has had evil counselors. Now, what can I give you for dinner?”

Not all family feuds ended in such a benign fashion. When King Edward IV ascended the throne in 1461, he made sure to enrich his heir, George, Duke of Clarence. According to Thomas Penn’s The Brothers York: A Royal Tragedy, he believed this would make the duke loyal to him.

But this was not to be. The charming and spoiled George was “aggressively resentful of any perceived slight done him, and of favour shown to others,” Penn writes. He would attempt to overthrow his brother four times, twice by raising an army. According to Carroll, he also spread rumors that his brother was illegitimate. 

“At this point, Edward could no longer afford to be magnanimous to his kid brother. He eventually charged George with treason and imprisoned him in the Tower of London,” Carroll says. In 1478, he was believed to be drowned, on the king’s orders, in a vat of Malmsey, his favorite wine. 

Another British spare was also imprisoned in the Tower, but this time for a crime she did not commit. According to biographer Jane Dunn, in 1554 the future Queen Elizabeth I was sent to the notorious fortress by her sister, Queen Mary. The paranoid Mary, who had long resented Elizabeth, suspected she had played a part in the ill-fated Wyatt’s Rebellion. 

Though the conspirators had allegedly planned to put Elizabeth on the throne in Mary’s place, it was her sister’s overwhelming popularity with the people that the queen saw as the real threat. “What disquiets [Mary] most of all is to see the eyes and the hearts of the nation already fixed on this lady as successor to the Crown...,” one contemporary observed, per Dunn’s Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens. 

Luckily, Elizabeth survived her life in the tower and became a ruler far more respected and beloved than her sister.

As life expectancies grew longer, spares became known for more personal forms of rebellion. For example, 18th-century King George III’s brothers were constantly making poor choices, with spare Edward considered “fast-living, fast-talking and seriously committed to folly.”

In the 20th century, Princess Margaret would continue this hell-raising tradition. While she was close to her older sister, Elizabeth, their world was forever changed when their uncle Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936. According to Sally Bedell Smith, author of Elizabeth the Queen, upon hearing the news Margaret asked Elizabeth: 

“Does that mean that you will have to be the next queen?” 

When Elizabeth replied in the affirmative, Margaret quipped, “Poor you.”

However, Margaret grew jealous of the attention paid to her older sister. “She would always remain resentful that her older sister received a better education,” Bedell Smith writes in Elizabeth the Queen. “She had asked to join Lilibet’s tutorials with Henry Marten, but was told by the tutor, ‘It is not necessary for you.’”

The naturally performative and glamorous Margaret also believed she was queenlier than her dour, serious sister. “Margaret often reminded her older sister that she would be better at being queen because she was the one who had the outgoing personality and was a natural born leader,” Carroll says. “Elizabeth didn’t necessarily disagree with Margaret but kept reminding her that the succession didn’t work that way. The British monarchy isn’t a talent contest.”

This fact became glaringly apparent in 1953, following the death of King George VI, and Elizabeth became queen. Bedell Smith writes: 

Princess Margaret had a slightly glazed look, and by one account, during the Queen’s investiture “never once did she lower her gaze from her sister’s calm face.” But at the end of the service, she wept. “Oh ma’am you look so sad,” Anne Glenconner said to the princess…“I’ve lost my father, and I’ve lost my sister,” Margaret replied. “She will be so busy. Our lives will change.”

Change they did. “Then there was the whole Peter Townsend affair, and the queen was persuaded by her advisers to tell her sister she couldn’t marry him,” says royal author and commentator Penny Junor. “Very difficult for her, and I think the queen probably felt she had scuppered her sister’s chance of happiness. Margaret started behaving badly and imperiously and because of the guilt, her behavior went largely unchallenged.”

As Margaret dropped further down the line of succession, she lived an increasingly unmoored existence. She begrudgingly carried out royal duties and used the privilege of her title and fame to pull rank and behave poorly at parties the world over. “Margaret felt like she should’ve had the spotlight and would have thrived in it, and so she sought her own adulation and attention in a way that became self-destructive,” Cocks says.  

Indeed, the role as the spare has become increasingly unimportant over the years, which has led some, like second-son Prince Andrew, to compensate with puffed egos and pomposity. “He’s always had this role that kind of meant nothing,” says Nigel Cawthorne, author of Prince Andrew: Epstein, Maxwell and the Palace. “That is the position they’re in, that they have no role and they really can’t do anything else. I mean, what sort of business can you go into?”

And it’s said that inherent tensions between the heir, spare, and the throne remain. “In royal families, the heir can never help wondering whether his ‘spare’ is not secretly feeling that ‘he wants to be me,’” Robert Lacey writes in Battle of Brothers: William & Harry, The Inside Story of a Family in Tumult.  

In fact, according to Cawthorne, during the early 1990s, Prince Andrew engaged in some medieval-type plotting against his brother Charles, which helped sour the brothers’ already fraught relationship. “When the whole Princess Diana fiasco was going on, Andrew had this plot that he would shuffle Charles aside and become regent until William was old enough to take the crown,” he says. 

However, Junor believes that we may read too much into the stereotypical tropes of the heir and the spare. 

“I think there is a touch of chicken and egg here. Or nature versus nurture. In Princess Margaret’s case, I think the queen felt sorry for her sister…. When their father died at such a young age, and Elizabeth suddenly became queen, it inevitably changed the nature of their relationship,” Junor says. “Andrew is a different matter. He is one of three spares and none of the others have his arrogance or sense of entitlement. Anne and Edward get on and do a really good job and work hard…So, I think with Andrew, it is the nature of the man and not the fact that he is a spare.” 

But for Princess Diana, the difference between the heir and the spare was all too apparent. She was delighted that Prince William was remarkably protective of his baby brother, Harry, and encouraged the two of them to forge a bond as brothers first, royals second. Lacey writes of Diana’s complicated views on the matter: 

“Royal firstborns may get all the glory,” said Diana in one interview, ”but second-borns enjoy more freedom. Only when Harry is a lot older will he realise how lucky he is not to have been the eldest.” She made a careful point…that the two boys should be photographed together as equals as much as possible—and then she gave interviews talking nonstop about the difference between the heir and the spare.

According to Lacey, the fact that William had more freedom and less responsibility than his brother was not lost on young Harry. In Battle of Brothers, Lacey recounts a reported conversation between the two boys: 

“You’ll be king one day,” said the four-year-old Harry. “I won’t. So I can do what I want.” ”Where the hell did he get that from?” asked Diana. If the future King William V was already coming to appreciate and act upon his destiny, so was his younger brother. Welcome to Harry the Hellraiser—the don’t-give-a-fuck, apparently lifelong ”spare.”

As Cocks notes, as the boys became teenagers, they began to be treated differently by the media.  

“It wasn't until they grew up and into heartthrobs that you started to see things diverge a little, and I’m sure the palace P.R. machine had a hand in that. It would be important to them to see William the heir portrayed as more serious, for example, so they negotiated limited press opportunities in favor of the media leaving him alone to live his life at university,” Cocks says. “Whereas Harry, because he had a bit more freedom from expectations, may not have gotten the same shield and so stories would leak out about his more raucous side. And as they grew older, the press coverage began to amplify those differences, and it’s possible the boys themselves did as well.” 

As a young man, Harry’s career in the army would give him a sense of purpose (much like it had given his uncle Andrew, who was commended for his service in the Falklands War). “He found himself in the army. Having always been the spare, the less good-looking one, the less clever one, the less important one, he discovered something he was spectacularly good at and, as a result, gained confidence in himself which I think he had never had before,” Junor says. 

According to Lacey, Harry was also inspired by another spare, Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, who had found purpose working with children and AIDS patients. The two founded the charity Sentebale in 2006.

In 2014, Harry found further purpose in his life when he held the first Invictus Games, a sporting event for wounded, injured, and sick veterans. “Before he married Meghan [Markle], I think he had discovered, largely through the Invictus Games, just what a difference he could make as an HRH, and as a result had embraced his destiny to be his brother’s wingman,” Junor says. 

However, the fallout from Harry’s courtship and subsequent marriage to Meghan would change all that. William’s reported efforts to temper the fast-paced relationship may have been seen by Harry as a portent of things to come. “The pattern is always the same,” Lacey writes. “Childhood closeness and naïve fondness are changed to adult alienation by the functional difference between the pair, since the moment inevitably arises when, for one reason or another, the elder sibling feels they must pull rank.”

But Harry followed his heart. “Although their situations were somewhat different, unlike Princess Margaret, Harry was able to overcome the noise, distractions, and detractors to marry the person he loved,” Carroll says. “And that’s the way to be a successful spare.”

Harry, now a comfortable sixth in line to the throne, has forged his own path, looking for a life not dominated by his status as the second son. In breaking away from the royal family, he may finally have broken the curse of the spare, while his uncle Andrew’s life lies in tatters. “Why on earth should William’s younger brother want to be the next Prince Andrew?” Lacey writes. “Harry has found himself a better way.”

This article has been updated

— Met Gala 2021: See the Best-Dressed Stars on the Red Carpet
— The Trials of Diet Prada
— Emmys 2021: See All of the Red-Carpet Looks
— Anthony Bourdain’s Longtime Director and Producer Releases Memoir
— The 2021 Met Gala’s American Theme Winners: Who Did It Best?
— Inside the Hermès Workshop That Makes Its Iconic Bags
— Love Is a Crime: Inside One of Hollywood’s Wildest Scandals
— The Best Beauty Moments From the 2021 Emmys
— Ted Lasso: How to Dress Like Keeley and Rebecca
— From the Archive: Influencers on the Coast of Utopia
— Sign up for “The Buyline” to receive a curated list of fashion, books, and beauty buys in one weekly newsletter.