Royal residences often boast endless rooms with Buckingham Palace racking up a grand total of 775 and Balmoral Castle having over 50 bedrooms inside. So, it may come as a surprise that Prince Harry and Prince William were forced to share a room inside the Scottish property when they stayed each summer…
In the Duke of Sussex's tell-all memoir, Spare, he recounted the room he once shared with his brother, whom he has since fallen out with.
In one of the chapters, he penned: "Balmoral had fifty bedrooms, one of which had been divided for me and Willy. Adults called it the nursery. Willy had the larger half, with a double bed, a good-sized basin, a cupboard with mirrored doors, a beautiful window looking down on the courtyard, the fountain, the bronze statue of a roe deer buck. My half of the room was far smaller, less luxurious. I never asked why. I didn’t care. But I also didn’t need to ask. Two years older than me, Willy was the Heir, whereas I was the Spare."
In the same chapter, the dad-of-two also vividly describes the interiors of the iconic Balmoral residence, writing: "Balmoral. Closing my eyes, I can see the main entrance, the paneled front windows, the wide portico and three gray-black speckled granite steps leading up to the massive front door of whisky-colored oak, often propped open by a heavy curling stone and often manned by one red-coated footman…"
"And inside the spacious hall and its white stone floor, with gray star-shaped tiles, and the huge fireplace with its beautiful mantel of ornately carved dark wood, and to one side a kind of utility room, and to the left, by the tall windows, hooks for fishing rods and walking sticks and rubber waders and heavy waterproofs — so many waterproofs, because summer could be wet and cold all over Scotland, but it was biting in this Siberian nook — and then the light brown wooden door leading to the corridor with the crimson carpet and the walls papered in cream, a pattern of gold flock, raised like braille, and then the many rooms along the corridor, each with a specific purpose, like sitting or reading, TV or tea, and one special room for the pages, many of whom I loved like dotty uncles, and finally the castle’s main chamber, built in the nineteenth century, nearly on top of the site of another castle dating to the fourteenth century."
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Giving a glimpse into what life was like there when Queen Elizabeth II was alive, Harry wrote: "Whenever Granny headed up to her bedroom on the second floor, corgis at her heels, she preferred the lift. The corgis preferred it too. Near Granny’s lift, through a pair of crimson saloon doors and along a green tartan floor, was a smallish staircase with a heavy iron banister; it led up to the second floor, where stood a statue of Queen Victoria. I always bowed to her as I passed."
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Harry didn't join the royal family at Balmoral this summer, but perhaps it wasn't the family rift behind the Duke's decision. And that's because Prince Archie attends pre-school in the US, near their Montecito mansion, and unlike the UK, the term times in the US tend to commence in August, so there's a possibility that their son was already back at school when the royal Balmoral summer took place.
Archie's cousins Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis, they didn't return to their school, Lambrook, until early September.