Customer Reviews

William & Harry: The People's Princes

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Ingrid Seward is known for her writing and editing of Majesty Magazine. Her writings for Majesty and her other books show a marked preference for Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles and with that, brings in negative comments about Diana. Ms. Seward praises Mrs. Parker Bowles to the skies in her columns in Majesty and has indeed been invited to soirees organized by the Prince and Mrs. Parker Bowles. That being said, William and Harry is an interesting look at two splendid young men coming of age, but shows an obvious negative slant towards their remarkable mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. This book would have gotten three stars had Ms. Seward adopted a "kinder and gentler" attitude towards Diana and been as sympathetic to her as she was to Charles in this book. Whatever Ms. Seward's feelings towards the late Princess, she is still the mother of a future King of England, and deserves some respect (especially because Diana is no longer around to defend herself).

Everyone has flaws, even Charles and Diana, but from this book, Diana comes out the worst. Seward at various times describes Diana as: manipulative, disagreeable, and at one point calls her a "child woman." What bothered me was the way Seward treats the Camilla-Charles affair. At one point Seward admits that "their relationship had a devastating effect on his marriage." However, on the same page, she implies (based on flimsy evidence) that Diana cheated first with Sgt Mannakee (this was also printed in Seward's The Queen and Di) so "naturally" Charles turned to Mrs. Parker Bowles. Fortunately for Ms. Seward, Sgt. Mannakee and Princess Diana are no longer around to defend themselves. In other sources (including books by those close to the Princess), deny anything more than friendship between the two. Earlier, Seward hints that Diana's "obsession" over Camilla "only succeeded in allowing Camilla into her husband's life to stake her claim on his affections." I am not surprised by Ms. Seward's spin on the Charles-Camilla relationship; right now a campaign in underway to get her accepted as consort to Charles. The author does not mention that long before Diana came on the scene, Charles was involved with the married Camilla Parker Bowles. He had this attachment to Mrs. Parker Bowles to the devastation and frustration of Princess Diana. It is a cheap shot to trash the wife to make the mistress acceptable.

Later William is said to be "embarrassed" by Diana's admission of her affair with Hewitt. Nothing is said about William's possible embarrassment over the Camillagate tapes and Charles' own admission of adultery on television. If William had been embarrassed about Charles, it is not said in Ms. Seward's book. Only Diana gets the blame.

I also wish, for Prince Harry's sake, Ms. Seward had left out the ugly implications that Hewitt is Harry's father. Seward refutes this obvious lie, but why bother to mention it at all? It is malicious gossip, hurtful to an impressionable young man.

In her next book about the Royals, I hope Ms. Seward eases up on her criticism of Princess Diana. If you just read Seward's portraits of the Princess, you will see a vindictive, manipulative, unstable woman. If you find objective accounts of the Princess, you discover a remarkable, intelligent, and vibrant young woman who not only was mother to William and Harry, but was active in charity work and was a popular and memorable individual.

The story of the two sons was interesting, when the spin about their parents was avoided. I enjoyed particular the stories of childhood and school days of the two princes. Both seemed to flourish in the schools chosen for them by their parents.Seward does draw on the recent account by Ken Wharfe and some of the stories he told in his book are repeated here.

Even though they are young, they represent the continuation of the Windsor dynasty. William from childhood knew about his heritage and future as king. Harry, the "spare" is more funloving. The two have been surrounded by turbulence of their parents' marriage and great sorrow at the loss of their mother, but have grown mindful of the influence of both parents and their heritage as Royals. There will undoubtedly be more written about William and Harry over the next few years. It will be interesting to read over the years more about these young men.

This book about the lives of William and Harry starts off with the meeting of their parents Prince Charles and Diana Spencer and into their early married life.

After this it goes into the lifes of William and younger brother Henry (Harry) from their early lives to school and their relationships with their parents after their infamous split and the death of Princess Diana in 1997 in Paris.

This book is very detailed because the author had spent alot of time with both boys and their mother. It is a very well written book with fun stories about the two young Princes

I thought it was a pretty good book. There was a lot about Charles and Diana that should have been left out. I have been following William all my life, and there were a few stories about him and his brother in this book that I have not heard of yet. It gives you a very well insight about the marrige but more about that than the boys.

The author made several comments that were maddening to me. One was "Firearms are commonplace in the USA" when referring to William on a ranch for vacation. Firearms are not commonplace in the US. I don't own a gun, no one I know owns a gun.That is an unfair comment.

The author also explains that with her affair, Diana didn't take seriously her marriage vows, yet in the paragraph above, Charles and Camilla have arranged to spend Sunday's together. Double standard? Or is it an author kissing up to the next monarch and going after someone who can't defend herself. The author writes that she had had discussions with Diana, I am sure where ever Diana is now, she regrets ever speaking with this woman.

Don't waste your money as I did. I am done purchasing anything by this author.

As a Prince Harry fan, I was excited about reading a book that I believed would tie his life experiences in with his brother's as the author took on the huge task of jamming two biography's into one book. I soon found out that it was really easy for the author to write two biographies in one book when one of the biograghies is only mentioned when it boosts the others. In other words, Harry is rarely mentioned unless it seems to help William. This is a Prince William biography. The only reason Harry's name was mentioned in the title is to boost sales because, like me, I'm sure many people think it would be great to read about how the two famous brother's relate to each other. You will not get that here. I literally feel like I learned more about Harry in the first couple pages of the Introduction then in the rest of the book. She actually talks more about Diana (even after her death) then Harry. And at the end of the book she gives up pretending that the book has anything to do with Harry and doesn't even talk about him in the last couple chapters.

In addition, the author is RUTHLESS toward Princess Diana. I am not a Princess Diana fan and I actually like Prince Charles but man did she work Di over in this book. Plus she hands Charles a pass on anything he ever did. She attributes all the bad in marriage to her and all of the attempts to heal the marriage to Charles. Not some, ALL. Plus she gives the worst account of her as a mother I have ever heard. In her account, the boys seem to love and want their nannies more than their mother and the only time Diana stepped in to do anything with the children was to fire their nannies if the boys loved them too much. She works over Diana so much that when Diana dies in the car crash (I am not joking when I say this) I actually felt that William and Harry seemed so brave because they were glad their physco mother was died! This is not the author's assetion but after 12 chapters of Diana bashing you can't help but feel sorry for the boys. It is definetly a one-sided picture of life at Highgrove.

The only thing I appreciate about the book is that the author names her sources, she doesn't just make huge claims without any kind of back up. Almost everything that she asserts has someone's name and job title behind it.

If you are a Prince William fan, you might like this book, it has a whole lot of information on him. But other than that, the book doesn't do justice to anyone else in it.

For your money you get quite a bit of the same old stories, some new information (the Prince Harry drugs episode told differently to what I'd read before)and a lot of bias.
Seward doesn't really spare anyone, managing to come up with something unflattering about each of the players in the story, but somehow the Princess almost always seems to come out worse than Prince Charles (and for a book about the two boys there is too much material about their parents).
It seems that every rumor about Diana's love life is taken as fact while the official version (how many people really believe that?)about Charles is taken as fact. William and Harry get a lot told about them of course, some of it not flattering and mostly old news but in the end Seward seems to think well of them.

Once again Ms. Seward has went out of her way to misrepresent her subjects. Much as she did in "The Queen and Di."
Her attemps to make the Spencer family look beneath contempt have backfired because her readers know otherwise. For instance she wants us to think that members of the Royal family do not have affairs with the hired help when of course it is common knowledge that they do.
In fact those incidents go back as far as King William III and an ancestor of Camilla Parker Bowles, 16 year old Arnold Van Keppel, who was the King's homosexual lover.
Seward's sources are, for the most part, non-existent.
The general public knows as much about Princes William and Harry as Seward does because just about the only accurate information in the book has to do with their birth places and dates, schools attended and what is already known about them from other sources available to all. Thus she has deliberately manufactured a load of nonsense in order to cash in on the popularity of two young men who deserve a better chronicler.

This book is good but at the being its all about di and slowly she drifts out as you read along but its good and worth geting

What a dissappointment, if you are a fan of Diana, Princess of Wales then this is not the book for you. I was hoping for an autobiographical picture of the two Princes, no such luck. Ingrid Steward has devoted a large portion of this book to attacking Diana, who she obviously dislikes. Prince Charles is also attacked gently, but Steward maybe saved her worst venom on the lady unable to defend her self anymore. God forbid she fall from favour with the living. I was disgusted with the book and would not recommend it to anyone other than a fan who see's no wrong in the warped world that is the House of Windsor.

I read this book ,two days ago,thanks to a friend who was polite enough to gave it to me before he was throwing it away.In this Book Ingrid continues the saga of the hate against Diana,and instead of writing about William and harry and how dreafull they have both come out,full of problems,while Diana is absent for 6 years and the boys were raised by Charles and Camilla,she again blames everything on Diana.She has become a joke to the world of journalists and her suck up to Charles and Camilla is disgusting,i recomend people to buy this book and burn it.

Ingrid Seward to Ingrid Selling my own mother for a royal kissass Seward.