The Heir Apparent
The Heir Apparent
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Rebecca Armitage on The Heir Apparent
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A face in the crowd at a royal weddingArmitage was covering the 2018 Harry and Meghan wedding as a working journalist, not a fan in the stands, which meant she was watching more closely and more skeptically than most. Something in Harry’s expression kept snagging her attention, and she couldn’t file it away.
The very first idea for The Heir Apparent was planted in my brain in 2018 during Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan’s wedding. They were obviously in love and thrilled to be together, but I kept catching glimpses of something in Harry’s face that left me wondering if he was stressed or upset. Now we know that there was a lot of tension between him and his family, but at the time, I had no idea what was going on. Even then, I was left wondering, what happens when you’re born royal, but you don’t want it?
The specific question of the monarchy’s purpose sharpened over years of reporting on it. Covering three monarchs’ worth of ceremony, Armitage noticed a structural absurdity at the heart of the institution: the workload has shrunk to near-nothing while the scrutiny has grown to encompass everything.
If you were King Henry VIII, your role is pretty clear because you’re the head of government. You’re a tyrant. You can do whatever you want. You’re England. But these days, there are some slack constitutional responsibilities, but it’s largely just symbolic, and you are a tourism draw card. And so there must come a point where you have all this attention and all this pressure on you, but what really is the purpose of your life, beyond being a symbol of a nation?
Lexi, the book’s protagonist, is loosely modeled on Harry, but Armitage made a deliberate choice to write her as a woman. That decision opened a second line of inquiry beyond any one royal’s story, one rooted in the gap between the princess fantasy sold to girls and the physical reality of living inside it.
Every character in the book has a real-life counterpart, so she’s very loosely inspired by Harry. But I deliberately made her a woman because I wanted to explore what it’s like to have a female body that is on public display. And obviously, we know that Diana really struggled under that spotlight. She lost, you know, a huge amount of weight. She struggled with eating disorders for much of her youth purely because of the intensity of that spotlight and the tabloid focus on their bodies. I really wanted to explore, you know, girls are told from birth, we watch Disney movies, we’re told that there’s no greater thing than being a princess. But what is the actual reality of that?
How she wrote it
700 words a night by the fireFive years passed between the first idea and the first sentence. The obstacle was not time or access but a specific fear: that starting would only expose the limits of what she could do. The way she finally broke through was to lower the stakes of each individual session to the point where failure felt almost impossible.
The greatest challenge was my own lack of self confidence. I truly believed I would not be able to finish a whole book. I had the idea for The Heir Apparent in 2018, but didn’t sit down to write it until 2023 because I thought that I would write a few chapters and give up and then I’d feel like a failure. Finally, I decided that I needed to just give it a go, if only so the book could exist somewhere outside myself.
The 700-word daily target came from her journalism training, but the ritual around it was something she engineered to mark the shift from one kind of writing to the other. She described the setup in the Authors on the Air podcast, where the detail of the fire makes clear that the boundary was physical as much as mental.
I needed that sense of transition from professional life to artistic life. So I would sit by the fire with my laptop and, as soon as I had hit 700 words, I would give myself permission to log off if that’s all I had inside me. [paraphrased from audio]
The fictional House of Villiers, the royal family at the center of the novel, is built on a foundation she had spent years accumulating at work. Her understanding of how palaces manage information flow, specifically how leaks function as a form of internal communication, went directly into the plot.
I used the scaffolding of the House of Windsor, which I’ve written about a lot as a journalist, to build the fictional House of Villiers. It feels like a world you know, but one that’s occurring in a slightly alternate universe.
Setting Lexi’s escape in Tasmania, Armitage’s own home, was a choice with more weight than biography alone explains. She wanted a location whose history would hold Lexi’s questions about the monarchy in an uncomfortable light, and Tasmania’s particular colonial past made it the right pressure point.
I liked the idea that Lexi grew up in the heart of her family’s empire, but when she rethinks the monarchy, she flees to its very outer edges. Tasmania is also a very haunted place. The legacy of colonialism feels present all over Australia, but in Tasmania specifically, entire nations of Indigenous people were slaughtered with genocidal intent. You can feel the loss here. So it felt like a fitting location for Lexi to reflect on the very real consequences of her institution’s actions.
She held off reading Harry’s memoir Spare until after she’d finished her own draft, not wanting his account to shape hers. The book that did sit on her desk throughout was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which she returns to every few years and keeps nearby as a cure for writer’s block.
Armitage built the villain, Prince Richard, with the same deliberateness she brought to Lexi’s psychology. Writing him became one of the book’s pleasures, but she set herself a specific craft goal beyond simply making him repellent.
I loved writing the villain, Prince Richard... He is entitled and greedy. He has shady friends who keep him in the luxurious life to which he has become addicted. He is jealous of everyone who outranks him and is desperate for the throne. I had a lot of fun constructing such a flamboyantly awful character, but I also really enjoyed trying to explain this man, so while you’ll absolutely loathe him, you will also understand why he walked such a dark path.
What she wants us to sit with
The price you pay for loving anythingThe emotional argument at the heart of the novel is built around a line Armitage borrowed rather than invented. She traces it to its source and is explicit about why it belongs to someone else, which makes the way she deploys it as the book’s thesis feel more considered, not less.
My main message in this book is that grief is the price of love. I wish that was my line, but it’s actually something Queen Elizabeth II used to say, and I think it’s a very wise, beautiful quote. We are put on this Earth to love each other, but the price of those connections is inevitable loss. Lexi spends most of her time trying to elude love so she can protect herself from grief, and she eventually must realise that this is no way to live her life. I hope readers can carry this message with them. Even though grief and heartache awaits us, we must love with abandon anyway.
Beyond the emotional arc, Armitage wants the book to work as a prompt for harder structural questions: about what old power is actually for, about how celebrity distorts truth, about what duty costs the person it is owed from. She named those ambitions in a single sentence before quickly pulling back to say what she would settle for.
I hope readers reflect on the value of long-running power structures, on the perils of fame, on duty, and the way the modern media environment can obscure the truth as much as it can reveal it.
She added, without irony: “I mostly just hope to sweep readers away for a little bit. If I entertain you, I will be absolutely thrilled and honoured.”