LONDON—As news broke that Prince Harry was returning to live in the U.K., his elder brother, Prince William, arrived at Balmoral Castle for the royal family’s annual Scottish retreat.
Hosted at King Charles III’s private estate in Aberdeenshire, the vacation is normally a time for the wider royal clan to get together, decompress, have barbecues and go hunting, away from the public eye.
But this year, the quiet has been shattered by the creation of a fresh public-relations minefield for the royal household: The return of a prodigal prince who has a bitter feud with the heir to the throne.
Prince Harry is due to land in the U.K. as soon as this week, accompanied by his wife Meghan Markle , Duchess of Sussex, and their two children. Their arrival will end the couple’s self-imposed exile in California, but won’t necessarily heal the fractures with the rest of the family that prompted them to leave the U.K. six years ago.
The Sussexes haven’t said where they will live, what they will do once in Britain, or even how long they will stay. But one thing is certain: No love is lost between Prince William, heir to the throne, and his younger brother.
The fraternal fallout is well documented. Megxit was a watershed moment for the brothers, after Harry cashed in on his royal status by airing a number of private, and at times embarrassing, tales about the family in both a biography and a Netflix production.
Harry described William in his book “Spare” as his “beloved brother and archnemesis,” and documented a physical fight between the two in which, by his account, William pushed him to the floor. The brothers aren’t known to have spoken in years, and haven’t been photographed together since King Charles’s coronation in 2023, when Harry sat several rows behind his older brother at Westminster Abbey.
In Harry’s absence, William and his wife, Catherine, Princess of Wales, took over the mantle in polling as Britain’s most popular royals. The couple have devised a low-wattage approach aimed at not rocking the boat in a bid to show that unshowy duty is what Britons want from their royal family. Despite this demure exterior, former employees say the Sussexes and the Waleses have spent years monitoring one another from afar on social media, jostling to capture favorable headlines.
In California, Prince Harry could be treated as a faraway problem and was largely ignored by palace courtiers, who routinely refused to comment on the verbal grenades launched by the man fifth-in-line for the throne. The Sussexes’ return to the royal threshold means this strategy will likely have to be revised.
Once back in Britain, royal watchers say, there will be growing pressure for William to extend an olive branch to his younger brother while their father, who is 77, continues to undergo treatment for cancer. A poll released Monday in the U.K. showed that 58% of those surveyed in Britain wanted the royal siblings to reconcile, further adding pressure on the royal family to bring the king’s younger son back into the fold.
“It is unprecedented in a modern sense,” Andrew Roberts, a British historian and royal biographer, said of Harry’s return. The Windsors have traditionally dealt with awkward family members by keeping them abroad, he added, as was the case with Edward VIII after he abdicated and lived out his days with his American divorcée wife in France.
The big question now, Roberts said, is whether the Sussexes try to steal the limelight in England, casting themselves as a trendier celebrity alternative to the establishment royals—a modern version of a rival court. “Under those circumstances, William might have cause to be worried.”
A person close to the Sussexes said the notion that they would set up a rival court was “utterly ridiculous.”
Kensington Palace, which represents the Prince and Princess of Wales, declined to comment.
The Sussexes won’t undertake formal royal engagements, Buckingham Palace says. But already 2027 looks set to be a big year for Prince Harry in the U.K. The Duke of Sussex will front the Invictus Games, a popular sports event for wounded servicemembers, which he helped found. Another important milestone will arrive: 30 years since William and Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, died in a car crash in Paris.
There is plenty of scope for awkward potential snubs for the tabloids to feast on. Will the Sussexes be invited to the royal Christmas get-together at Sandringham? The issue was previously skirted by pointing out they were in California. Will Harry, who served in Afghanistan, be offered a role in the Remembrance Sunday events for fallen soldiers this November? There is also the long-running debate over whether U.K. taxpayers should foot the bill for the Sussexes’ security, a privilege that ended—much to Harry’s displeasure—after the couple moved across the Atlantic.
Meghan’s career trajectory meanwhile will also be closely monitored. Rumors that she would star in a new season of Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series “The Gentlemen,” briefly dominated headlines last week but weren’t confirmed by the couple’s spokesman. The caper follows an aristocrat who is sucked into a drug-dealing underworld. Meghan will continue to run her lifestyle brand As Ever from the U.K., according to a person familiar with the matter.
Megxit was designed precisely to avoid this kind of headache. In 2020, the royal family held negotiations, known as the “Sandringham Summit,” to stipulate that Prince Harry and Meghan couldn’t represent the royal family while also pursuing commercial interests. The Sussexes were stripped of their patronages and military titles. They agreed not to use their titles “His Royal Highness” or “Her Royal Highness” in public, but Queen Elizabeth II, who died in 2022, allowed them to keep their peerage titles (the Duke and Duchess of Sussex).
In practice, though, the Sussexes continued to leverage their royal sheen both to sell content and promote good causes. They have undertaken charity work and recently conducted a number of pseudo-royal tours, including of Jordan and Australia, where they carried out public engagements.
As with many family feuds, the issue now seems to be who should apologize first. Harry has previously said the royal family should say sorry for the way its members treated him and his wife. “It would be nice to have that reconciliation part now,” Harry said last year. “If they don’t want that, that’s entirely up to them.”
William, for his part, has said nothing publicly on the matter since the Sussexes announced their return to British shores. But longer-term, the heir to the throne has leverage over his brother. Should he become king, William might choose to prune the royal family tree, removing the HRH titles from the Sussex children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, though not cutting them out of the line of succession.
“Harry’s historical irrelevance in the long run is guaranteed,” wrote Prince Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton in a recent Substack. “How many people could name King George VI’s four brothers or his sister? How many people under 30 could pick out Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, or Prince Edward, in a lineup?”
Write to Max Colchester at Max.Colchester@wsj.com
