The royals have been traveling up to Scotland for their summers for many decades now, but for some members of the royal family, they haven’t always been happy holidays.
For Prince Harry, the sprawling Balmoral estate evokes “complicated memories” from the past and he previously revealed that visiting was difficult.
While writing in his tell-all memoir, Spare, which was released at the beginning of the year, the Duke of Sussex, who now lives in Montecito with his wife Meghan Markle, spoke of how a visit to Balmoral in the wake of a tabloid scandal was not a pleasant experience.
The 38-year-old was recalling the moment he was photographed playing strip billiards at a hotel in Las Vegas in 2012. The royal was snapped in the nude and the photos soon grabbed headlines globally.
But it was after this incident in the summer that prompted a trip to Balmoral to visit the family, and it’s this moment that evoked some complicated emotions from the past.
The father-of-two recalled the hotel moment in detail and, although wrote about it with a humorous tone, he explained the sense of shame he felt.
“I berated myself: How had I let it happen? How had I been so stupid? Why had I trusted other people?” The Duke continued: “My sense of guilt and shame made it hard at moments to draw a clean breath.”
Speaking of Balmoral and his view on it, he added: “I fled to Scotland, met up with my family at Balmoral. It was August and they were all there. Yes, I thought, yes, the one thing missing from this Kafkaesque nightmare is Balmoral, with all its complicated memories and the pending anniversary of Mummy’s death just days away.”
However, at the time, it seems Prince Harry was met with a sense of empathy from his father, King Charles, about the incident in Sin City. “Soon after my arrival I met Pa at nearby Birkhall,” he wrote, adding: “To my surprise, to my relief, he was gentle. Even bemused. He felt for me, he said, he’d been there, though he’d never been naked on a front page.”
As Harry mentioned in the book, Balmoral holds traumatic connotations for him with it being the residence where he and his brother received the tragic news of their mother, Princess Diana’s death from a car crash in August 1997.
Since then, however, the residence, considered a favourite by the late Queen Elizabeth II, continues to be the summer holiday location of choice for many of the senior members of the royal family.
It was previously reported that this year, guests will likely include the Prince and Princess of Wales and their three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis, as well as the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh and Princess Anne, and the Duke of York.
However, it’s not clear whether the Sussex family will make the trip from Montecito to Scotland over the summer.
While Harry and Meghan reportedly enjoyed some time with the Queen at Balmoral shortly after their royal wedding in 2018, it’s not known whether Archie, four, and two-year-old Lilibet have ever visited.
