The possible heartbreaking explanation as to why Prince William and Prince Harry attended a different school to their father, King Charles, and grandfather, Prince Phillip, can be explored in Netflix’s The Crown.
During his younger years, the monarch attended Gordonstoun, a Scottish independent boarding school in Moray.
In 1962, Charles enrolled at the school and stayed there for five years, after Prince Phillip had also studied there and is said to have loved it.
The King resided in the Windmill Lodge, which is now a boarding house for female pupils.
The then Prince reportedly did not enjoy the school’s regime, which he later characterised as “Colditz in kilts”.
Published letters dating back to 1964 revealed the young Prince’s dislike of the school and homesickness.
He wrote: “It’s such hell here, especially at night. I don’t get any sleep practically at all nowadays.
“The people in my dormitory are foul. Goodness, they are horrid, I don’t know how anyone could be so foul.”
The monarch’s tough time at Gordonstoun was explored in season two of the series and could also point to the reason neither of his children went there.
He later praised the school, stating it had taught him “a great deal about myself and my own abilities and disabilities”.
He said in a 1975 interview he was “glad” he had attended Gordonstoun and that the “toughness of the place” was “much exaggerated”.
But it seems Charles’s difficult time at the Scottish school might have been for a sad reason that later Prince William and Prince Harry went to Eton College.
Charles could have attended Eton himself but his father reportedly argued it was too close to Windsor and London and therefore he wouldn’t have had any privacy.
When William was first enrolled at Eton in 1995, he became the first senior royal to attend the school in Berkshire. Harry soon followed his brother’s footsteps and went to Eton in 1998.
Other members of the Royal Family have attended the school over the years including the late Queen Elizabeth’s cousins, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and Prince Michael of Kent.
