Prince Harry Calls Royal Family A 'Death Cult' in Memoir: 'Depraved'

Prince Harry has called the royal family a "death cult" in his new memoir Spare, reflecting that his own "finest moments" and memories have been "built on death."

The prince's highly anticipated and polarizing book has now been published globally, promising readers a "raw" and "unflinching" account of his life story to date, including many personal revelations concerning members of the royal family.

One relationship which is examined in great detail is the one between Harry and his brother Prince William.

Harry makes a number of personal descriptions of his brother, including a section in the memoir's prologue, in which he writes: "I took it all in: his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me; his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own; his famous resemblance to mummy, which was fading with time."

In a section of the book focused on an argument which took place after Prince Philip's April 2021 funeral, Harry recalls a previous Spanish partridge hunting trip with William as a bright spot in their relationship, reflecting that many of the pair's formative moments have been marked by death, both by virtue of belonging to the monarchy and through losing their mother when they were aged just 12 and 15.

"I now saw that even our finest moments, and my best memoires somehow involved death. Our lives were built on death, our brightest days shadowed by it," he wrote.

Referencing the entire Windsor royal family, Harry continued that: "We christened and crowned, graduated, married and passed-out [military graduation] and over our beloved's bones.

"Windsor Castle itself was a tomb, the walls filled with ancestors. The Tower of London was held together with the blood of animals used by the original builders a thousand years ago to temper the mortar between the bricks."

"Outsiders called us a cult," he said of the royals. "But maybe, we were a death cult, and wasn't that a little more depraved?"

"Even after laying grandpa to rest, had we not had our fill? Why were we here, lurking along the edge of that 'undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns'?"

The release of Spare comes after the contents of the book were leaked to the press after U.K. newspaper The Guardian and U.S. gossip site Page Six obtained copies, shortly followed by British tabloids who acquired Spanish translations which had been put on sale early.

The most controversial stories to have emerged from the book so far include an account of a physical attack against Harry by Prince William in 2019 over Meghan Markle's treatment of staff at Kensington Palace, as well as Harry's allegation against his step-mother Queen Camilla that she "sacrificed" him on her "PR alter" in order to gain tabloid and public favor.

Despite these, the prince has revealed in a recent interview promoting his book that he still believes in the monarchy, telling ITV's Tom Bradby: "Knowing the monarchy as I know it from something that I was brought up in, for me it's always been about uniting people."

The royal said he was unsure whether he and his wife would attend King Charles' coronation in May.

So far, Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace have declined to comment on Prince Harry's book or the claims made within it.

Newsweek approached representatives of Prince Harry for comment.

James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek's royal reporter based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.

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