The Gist
Even back in the 2000s—when Prince William was still in his 20s—he was beginning to go bald, royal butler Grant Harrold says.
Staffers knew it was understood to not mention the future king’s “bald patch.”
That said, William had a good sense of humor about it all and knew how to take a joke at his own expense.
One fact about Prince William? He has a sense of humor—even when it comes to something most would be insecure about.
During the time that royal butler Grant Harrold served the royal household—from September 1, 1997 (the day after Princess Diana’s untimely death) to just days after William married Kate Middleton in 2011—Harrold saw a lot, including, um, William beginning to lose his hair. In his new book The Royal Butler: My Remarkable Life in Royal Service, out on September 23 in the U.S., Harrold writes that staff were told of William, “Don’t mention the bald patch.”
Kate Middleton and Prince William in Wales on February 26, 2025
One time, Harrold was speaking with William and Kate at Highgrove—Prince Charles’s country home—about getting older. “I said that surely the worst thing about aging was losing your hair and going bald,” Harrold writes. “Kate started sniggering and William gave me a look that said, ‘Thanks for that.’”
“It hadn’t occurred to me that, of course, by then he was starting to lose his hair,” Harrold continues, adding that the future king “always took any comments, intended or otherwise, in good humor.”
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Prince William on March 11, 2025
When asked by InStyle exclusively what Harrold wishes everyone knew about the royal family, he first says “how hard they work,” citing specifically Charles and how “he’d be up before me and he’d go to bed after me, and he’d still be working.”
But they make time to have fun, too—at least in the golden era, as Harrold puts it, that he served the royal household. There’s a “humorous side, the fun, the comedy behind closed doors,” Harrold says. “Everyone over the years has talked about the issues, the problems, the bullying or upsets or this or that. I’m thinking, ‘What the hell? Why are they not talking about the 95 percent of the time we’re all killing ourselves laughing, we’re playing silly jokes at each other.’”
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Prince William, Queen Camilla, King Charles, and Prince Harry in 2014
“There was laughter, there was jokes,” Harrold says of the Highgrove he knew. “All these comedy things—if they did a comedy show in the royal family, it’d be a hit. And that’s what I wanted to get across in the book—one, get across [that they’re] very hardworking. But more importantly, the comedy is great, the laughter, the fun.”
Read the original article on InStyle