Prince Harry Once Wanted Archie to Be ‘Best Friends’ With Prince William’s Kids

Long before a royal exit was on his mind, Prince Harry wanted Archie close to Prince William’s kids. At least that’s according to a forthcoming royal biography, Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family, by Harper’s Bazaar royal expert, Omid Scobie, and Buckingham Palace correspondent, Carolyn Durand. The duo’s book is out in August 2020, and it promises to unveil the “true story” of Meghan and Harry’s life as a royal couple.

A revelation about Harry’s goals for his family is just the tip of the iceberg—but it’s what we’ve got for now. According to Scobie and Durand, Prince Harry, now 35, once shared his dreams about kids with Meghan, 38, a few years ago with a friend. He reportedly “had an image of getting married and spending time with William and Kate, the two couples together, their children best friends,” reads Finding Freedom. Yet things didn’t go quite as planned for the Duke of Sussex.

Nowadays, we know that the Duke and Duchess are living away from the rest of the royal family. Following their watershed announcement of their plan to step back from the royal family in January, the pair spent the earlier months of 2020 wrapping up life as they knew it in the U.K. The royal couple has since packed up and moved to Los Angeles in April, where they currently live now with their 1-year-old son, Archie, and Meghan’s mother Doria Ragland. Living over 5,000 miles away from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their three children—Prince George, 7, Princess Charlotte, 5, and Prince Louis, 2—who all live at Kensington Palace definitely makes it more difficult for those dreams of a tight-knit clan to come true.

Buy: Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family $17.51

Yet according to Finding Freedom, Harry’s dreams of friendship between Archie and the Cambridge brood began shattering even before his family’s move to the United States. Harry and William’s feud allegedly roiled before the Duke of Sussex wed Meghan in September 2018. To that point, Finding Freedom reveals that in the 10 months that the Sussexes lived in Oxfordshire, the Cambridges didn’t visit once even though “the invite was there,” a source says in the book.

Source: Instagram

Harry, meanwhile, was beginning to feel like his relationship with William, 38, and his family was simply becoming “too much.” According to a source, “He was at a point in his life where he was working with his brother, doing the foundation with his brother and living by his brother. It was too much.” As such, the prince traded closeness with his brother for a fresh start in the States—if only at the expense of the dreams he had for son Archie being able to grow up close to his cousins. There’s always the future, though. Anything’s possible.

Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family is out August 11, 2020, and is available for pre-order now.

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