The fall release of Prince Harry’s yet-to-be-titled autobiography is allegedly making Buckingham Palace very nervous. Even Prince Harry’s statement about the book, set to be published by Penguin Random House, could be seen as a shot against the palace. “I’m writing this not as the prince I was born,” he revealed, “but as the man I have become.”

It is said that his royal family members are both worried and angered over his refusal to share details with them about the autobiography’s contents. Reports indicate that Prince Charles even “iced out” his son during a recent visit after Harry remained mute on the book, ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer.

Charles’s reported anger is ironic, considering that he publicly revealed family secrets and grudges during the epic “War of the Wales” that erupted in the early 1990s between himself, Princess Diana, and their various supporters. In fact, both of Harry’s parents collaborated with authors to get their side of the story out.

Gossip about the Wales’ mismatched marriage, stories of infidelity, and whispers of the royal family’s treatment of Diana had been tabloid fodder for years. By the early 1990s, the unhappy couple decided to independently set the record (as they saw it) straight.

But while Harry is taking ownership of his memoir, his parents did so covertly, paying lip service to the old royal adage “never complain, never explain.”

In 1992, Charles was reeling from the breakdown of his marriage to Diana and the publication of Diana: Her True Story, Andrew Morton’s incendiary tell-all. Diana had secretly given interviews to Morton (which was not revealed until after her death) and painted Prince Charles as a harsh, spineless cheater. Public opinion seemed firmly on the beloved princess’s side.

Charles was well aware that Diana was behind Morton’s biography. Egged on by his then private secretary, Richard Aylard, the prince chose journalist Jonathan Dimbleby as his collaborator on both a TV special and a biography.

As biographer Sally Bedell Smith, author of Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, notes, Charles’s decision to publicly fight back was not surprising. “From an early age,” she writes, “Charles felt compelled to express his fervidly held opinions in speeches and articles—often out of deep conviction, at other times to attract attention and to compete with Diana’s magnetic presence.”

But according to The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown, palace officials were dismayed when they discovered the project was to be more than a puff piece celebrating the 25th anniversary of Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales. She writes:

Dickie Arbiter, the savvy voice in the press office at Buckingham Palace, had originally seen the twenty-fifth-anniversary film idea as something bland and harmless. He was in the process of setting up such a project when the Prince’s private secretary, Commander Richard Aylard, told him, “The Prince has decided he wants to do something different: Dimbleby! What do you think?” Arbiter told him, “I think it sucks. It’s going to be warts and all.” But Aylard, a yes-man to his shiny shoes, replied, “That’s what he wants.”

“It still sucks,” Arbiter retorted.

The royal family was allegedly horrified and worried about what the prince would reveal. “Charles had ignored proverbial wisdom: ‘If you seek revenge, dig two graves,’” Kitty Kelley writes in The Royals. “But Charles discarded the advice of his family, his friends, and his mistress, who had warned that nothing good could come of his candor. His beloved grandmother said she would have nothing to do with the project.”

First up was the ITV documentary, Charles: The Private Man, the Public Role, which featured fawning clips of the prince overseas and skiing with his sons. But the almost two-and-a-half-hour broadcast, which aired on June 29, 1994, made headlines not for the prince’s good works, but for his complaints. In a sprawling, sit-down interview with Dimbleby, he eviscerated the press and his schedule and complimented his “great friend” Camilla Parker Bowles. But most dramatically, he revealed that he had been unfaithful to Diana with the following words:

When asked by Dimbleby if he had been faithful in his marriage, Charles dithered. “Yes,” Charles replied, “until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.”

Luckily, the palace knew what was coming. Queen Elizabeth was given an advance copy of the documentary and watched stoically. The Duke of Edinburgh’s reaction was reportedly not so calm. Kelley writes:

[The Queen] raised her eyebrows when he complained about his staff’s overworking him, and she sighed when he bad-mouthed her staff. “They drive me bonkers,” Charles said of the Queen’s courtiers. Philip reportedly exploded when he saw the documentary. “Oh, God,” he said, listening to the interview. He muttered something about his son’s brain being sucked dry. Then he added caustically, “Maybe he’s the ‘missing link.’”

According to Brown, the exasperated queen commented further, pursing her lips and murmuring, “So, it’s come to this.”

While headlines around the globe screamed that Charles was indeed an adulterer, his estranged wife, Diana, began to lay the groundwork for her controversial 1995 tell-all interview with Martin Bashir, who, it was later discovered, used forged documents to obtain the interview. “Absent Dimbleby,” Brown posits, “Diana would have never planned her retaliation by agreeing to give an incendiary, irrevocable interview to Martin Bashir of the BBC’s Panorama program.”

But worse was to come on November 4, 1994, when Dimbleby’s authorized Charles biography, The Prince of Wales: An Intimate Portrait, was published. In addition to sitting down for private interviews, Charles had given Dimbleby access to his numerous diaries and letters.

In the book, Dimbleby described Charles as “an individual of singular distinction and virtue.” He also claimed that Charles had been pressured to marry Diana by his father, and would have been happier as a bachelor if he had not had to produce an heir to the throne. According to Dimbleby, once they were married, Charles discovered his young wife was a bulimic who indulged in “self-pity” and mercilessly ridiculed him.

Reviews of the autobiography were scathing, as its contents were called the whining complaints of an out-of-touch, privileged man. The Guardian called it “a foolish and sorry authorized version,” and the Daily Mirror labeled it “the prince’s crowning act of treachery.”

In her review for the Los Angeles Times, “The Bottom of the Royal Barrel,” critic Margo Kaufman eviscerated both Dimbleby’s autobiography and Morton’s sycophantic follow-up, Diana: Her New Life, while Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote, “If you didn’t know the names of the famous ex-couple portrayed in these two books, you’d think they were just another pair of guests on Oprah or Donahue: victims of dysfunctional families and a bad marriage, who are given, alternately, to bouts of self-pity and New Age searches for meaning and self-esteem.”

But more ominously for the crown, the press also started to question Charles’s fitness to be king. “They’re tolling the bells at Buckingham Palace,” The Guardian wrote. “The ‘authorized’ biography of the Prince of Wales is a disaster for the queen, the duke, the House of Windsor, and all who sail in that leaky barque. It is bleak irony that the man who would be king has himself contrived to provide the greatest impediment to his ever ascending the throne.”

Public opinion was also firmly against Charles becoming king. According to Kelley, The Sun conducted a telephone poll, and the results were dire: Two thirds of the respondents said they thought he was unfit to sit on the throne.

On a personal level, the effects were also devastating. Charles revealed his cold, lonely childhood, during which he was a magnet for ridicule, including from his father, Prince Philip, who was presented as an abrasive bully. “As a little boy,” Dimbleby wrote, Charles was “easily cowed by the forceful personality of his father.”

The queen was also in the line of fire, described as a passive and absent mother. The sensitive, artistic prince was said to have felt “squashed and guilty” when his family laughed at his love of Leonardo da Vinci.

“Through Dimbleby, Charles made it clear that Diana was nothing more than a hired womb,” Kelley writes. “His level of contempt disappointed people who expected their future King to be high-minded and big-hearted. Through Dimbleby, Charles tried to put his case forward and set right the real and imagined wrongs he felt had been done to him. But he came across as petty and small, and he offended his wife, his parents, his sister, his brothers, his children.”

According to Bedell Smith, the book’s characterizations hurt his parents and angered his siblings. All three of his siblings reportedly confronted Charles over the book, with Princess Anne exclaiming publicly that the assertion that the queen was not caring was “just beggars’ belief.”

“When asked about the controversy, the Queen Mother signaled her disdain with a wave of her hands and exclaimed, ‘That Jonathan Dimbleby!’” Bedell Smith writes.

Philip was particularly furious and uncharacteristically responded when confronted by the press about the autobiography, according to United Press International: “I’ve never discussed private matters and I don’t think the queen has either,” he said. “You’ll just have to read it and make your own conclusions. I’ve never made any comment about any member of the family in 40 years and I’m not going to start now…If I wasn’t occupying the position I do, I would feel very free to discuss this, but I don’t think it’s fair for me to give my views.”

According to Brown, Diana also fought back against Dimbleby’s claim that Charles never loved her. In retaliation, she leaked photos to News of the World showing her and Charles happily playing on a Bahamian beach during a trip to Eleuthera in 1982.

In trying to get his side of the story out and understood, Prince Charles had damaged his relationship with his family and tarnished his public image. It appears he eventually realized his folly. Bedell Smith writes:

Several months later, Charles and Richard Aylard were at a dinner party when Natalia Grosvenor, the wife of the 6th Duke of Westminster, asked the prince why he had confessed [to his affair with Camilla]. “He pointed across the table at his private secretary and angrily said, ‘He made me do it!’” recalled another dinner guest.

In Penny Junor’s book The Firm, Aylard is quoted as defending the decision to move forward with Dimbleby’s book. “It wasn’t being honest to Jonathan that was the problem. If you want to start placing blame, the fault was getting into the relationship [with Camilla] in the first place.”

Revenge isn’t always so sweet.

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