Princess Diana "Insisted" Prince Harry and Prince William Buck One Tradition That Prince George Is Facing
The late princess took control when it came to this aspect of her sons' lives.
Where Prince George will go to school next has become a bit of an obsession in royal circles these days, not unlike a period roughly 30 years ago with Prince Harry and Prince William. Eleven-year-old George will enter his final year at Lambrook School in Berkshire this September, and whether he ends up at Eton like his father and uncle or Marlborough College like mom Princess Kate remains to be seen. However, when it came time for Harry and William to continue their educations, Princess Diana had a very clear vision for her boys.
In the new book Dianaworld: An Obsession, released April 29, author Edward White wrote that Princess Diana was particularly hung up on the idea of her sons being educated in a different way than Prince Charles and his siblings or 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.
Prince William is pictured at Eton College in 2000.
The author continued that like with Prince George today, "something that occupied the attentions of rather a lot of people in the late eighties and early nineties" was where Prince Harry and Prince William would be educated.
Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward all attended Gordonstoun in Scotland, and it's said that even though he had a rough go of it there, Charles wished for his boys to be educated at the then-all-boys school. Gordonstoun's headmaster, however, "publicly urged that the princes be educated at a state comprehensive."
Princess Diana "rejected all these suggestions" for Harry and William "and insisted the boys be sent to board at Eton College," White penned. In her view, "the Englishness that Diana wanted to install in her children was aristocratic rather than royal," the author continued.
Prince William signed in on his first day at Eton College in 1995.
After all, 20 British prime ministers had been educated at Eton, along with Diana's father, the 8th Earl Spencer, and brother Charles, the current earl. "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 wrote.
By sending William and Harry to Eton College, the author noted that Princess Diana made "her sons more typical of the English upper classes than her ex-husband has ever been." Prince William broke royal tradition by becoming the first senior royal—and future monarch—to have ever been educated at the school.
While Prince George could follow in his dad's footsteps—and Eton is conveniently located just 1.6 miles from the Wales family's Windsor home—a final decision has yet to be announced. But if he does attend Prince William's alma mater, it's surely a decision that George's late grandmother would have approved.
