Towards the end of episode seven of The Crown season six, Prince Harry (Luther Ford) and Prince William (Ed McVey) share an emotional moment.
"What's going on with you and Pa?" William asks. "He found out about the weed, didn't he?" Harry replies, "Went ballistic. Said I could have got myself expelled. Now he wants me to go to a treatment center to spend the day with some addicts."
Harry continues, "'Bit of a reaction,' I said. 'Remorse and responsibility,' he said. Thanks. 'Cause it'll be in all the papers. And make me look like a lost cause. Again. People will say, 'Poor boy, ever since his mother died...' But I guess it's all working out perfectly. 'Cause there's no need for a number two in this family. Excerpt as entertainment. I can't be normal or a success, can I? And eclipse you in any way. That would make a mockery of the whole show. So it's Willy Gold Star, Harry Black Sheep. Willy Saint, Harry Sinner. Willy Solid, Harry Lost... A fucking treatment center! Can you imagine how people would freak out if you were the one who was going to a treatment center? It would be like the temple was falling down. With me, it's just what people want. Fucking up. 'Ah that's Harry Wales's job.'"
William, with tears in his eyes, just looks at his brother throughout the monologue. This scene takes place during December 2001, when William is home from St. Andrews and Harry is home from Eton. Harry is 17 years old at the time.
But did Prince Harry really go to a treatment center? No, he just visited one, and Prince Harry denied being sent to the center in his memoir, Spare.
But let's back up: In January 2002, the BBC reported, "Prince Harry was sent to a drugs rehabilitation clinic for a day after he admitted smoking cannabis and drinking alcohol. Prince Charles decided to shock his 17-year-old son after learning he had taken drugs in the grounds of his Highgrove home, and drunk heavily at a local pub, said the News of the World."
The story went that Charles sent Harry to Featherstone Lodge Rehabilitation Centre in London. The chief executive of Featherstone said Harry "came for a couple of hours on a day in late summer and talked to several people in recovery - heroin and cocaine addicts mostly. As we understood, it was an opportunity for the Prince of Wales to teach Prince Harry about our work and the consequences of taking drugs."
A St. James's Palace spokesperson did not deny the reports, saying Harry had "experimented with the drug on several occasions" and that "this is a serious matter which was resolved within the family, and is now in the past and closed."
In Spare, Harry writes about this—but his account is very different than how The Crown portrays it, and the news accounts at the time.
In fall 2001, Mark Dyer, a royal aide nicknamed Marko, visits Harry at Eton. Harry recounts he told him, "I've been asked to find out the truth Harry... about whether or not you're doing drugs." Harry says it's "lies" but instead of Prince Charles's office burying the story in the tabloids, his "spin doctor" (Mark Bolland) discovered a "shiny consolation prize" for Charles: "No more the unfaithful husband, Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad coping with a drug-addled child."
Back at Eton in January 2002, Harry writes, and "I woke to the actual nightmare. A blaring front-page headline: Harry’s Drugs Shame. January 2002. Spread over seven pages inside the newspaper were all the lies Marko had presented to me, and many more. The story not only had me down as a habitual drug user, it had me recently going to rehab. Rehab! The editor had got her mitts on some photos of Marko and me paying a visit to a suburban rehab center, months earlier, a typical part of my princely charitable work, and she’d repurposed the photos, made them visual aids for her libelous fiction. I gazed at the photos and read the story in shock. I felt sickened, horrified. I imagined everyone, all my countrymen and countrywomen, reading these things, believing them. I could hear people all across the Commonwealth gossiping about me."
He continued, "I felt heartbroken at the idea that this had been partly the work of my own family, my own father and future stepmother. They’d abetted this nonsense. For what? To make their own lives a bit easier? I phoned Willy. I couldn’t speak. He couldn’t either. He was sympathetic, and more. (Raw deal, Harold.) At moments he was even angrier about the whole thing than I was, because he was privy to more details about the spin doctor and the backroom dealings that had led to this public sacrifice of the Spare."
The Crown's Peter Morgan said he didn't Prince Harry's memoir Spare before working on season six, so none of Harry's denials of going to a treatment center would've factored into the plot of the show. Morgan told Variety, "I didn’t want [Harry's] voice to inhabit my thinking too much. I’ve got a lot of sympathy with him, a lot of sympathy. But I didn’t want to read his book."
Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram.
