Princess Diana Insisted That Prince William and Prince Harry Forego This Royal Tradition
A new royal book, Dianaworld, chronicles Princess Diana's insistence that her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, attend Eton College, as the men in her family had.
By sending her sons to Eton, Diana bucked royal tradition of sending the men in the family to Gordonstoun in Scotland, where Prince Charles attended.
A similar debate is reportedly occurring about whether to send Prince George to Eton or to Marlborough College (where Kate Middleton attended) when he changes schools in 2026.Princess Diana was groundbreaking for the royal family in many ways—for starters, the way she parented and the way she wasn't afraid to show her emotions in public. Perhaps nowhere is her enduring legacy still felt on the royal family more than the way she parented, which—not an overstatement—truly broke the mold for royal parenting. It can be seen in the way that both of her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, parent their own children up to the present day.
As the 'Eton versus Marlborough' debate rages on about where the Prince and Princess of Wales' eldest child, Prince George, will attend school next year, a new book looks back at how Diana bucked royal tradition when it came to where to send William and Harry to school. In Dianaworld: An Obsession (which came out April 29), author Edward White shares that Diana 'insisted' that William and Harry be educated differently than their father Prince Charles and grandfather Prince Philip had been.
'Once her sons were born, she was firmly of the mind that her responsibility was to shape them as new types of Windsors, providing a new style of kingship,' White wrote (via Marie Claire).
William and Harry's educational future was 'something that occupied the attentions of rather a lot of people in the late eighties and early nineties,' White continued—not unlike George's future is capturing the royal zeitgeist today.
When William and Harry ultimately attended Eton College, it was a tradition-breaking move, as Charles and Philip, as well as Charles' brothers Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, all attended Gordonstoun in Scotland. To put it mildly, Charles had a miserable time at Gordonstoun, but even still wanted his own sons to be educated there.
But Diana 'rejected all these suggestions' for her sons 'and insisted the boys be sent to board at Eton College,' White wrote. In the Princess of Wales' mind, 'the Englishness that Diana wanted to install in her children was aristocratic rather than royal.'
After all, Eton was where the men of Diana's family, the Spencers, attended—her father and only brother both were Etonians (as were 20 British prime ministers). 'When Diana spoke of raising princes who were in touch with 'the man on the street,' she meant by making them more like the men in her family,' White added.
When William and Harry enrolled at Eton—William becoming the first senior royal and future monarch to be educated at the school—White wrote that Diana made 'her sons more typical of the English upper classes than her ex-husband [Charles] has ever been.'
Diana's edict won out, and now it remains to be seen whether George will follow in the Eton tradition, or buck it and start a new tradition of his own at Marlborough (which is his mother's alma mater).
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