The Royal Family really shines each November around Remembrance Day celebrations. This year’s highlights include Prince George’s first official appearance at Saturday night’s Festival of Remembrance commemoration at Royal Albert Hall, alongside his mother, Catherine, The Princess of Wales.
The event precedes Remembrance Sunday – the 9th, always the most solemn day in the Royal Family’s calendar – and what the Brits call Armistice Day observances, celebrated on November 11. The day specifically marks the end of hostilities on the Western Front during the First World War. The entire trio of royal Remembrance Day events serves to honour veterans of all wars, and those lost to all wars.
As it is in Canada. Ahead of Remembrance Day this year – 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the second World War – Prince Harry’s two-day trip to Canada last week further underscored our connection to Commonwealth values and joint service in that war. Harry was invited to Toronto by the True Patriot Love Foundation and The HALO Trust. The prince has a deep history with the latter. In 2019, he travelled to Angola to recreate the walk his mother Diana, Princess of Wales, had made in 1997 across a live minefield to draw awareness to HALO’s mission of eradicating lethal devices left behind in war-torn countries.
Arriving in Toronto just after the end of the hotly contested World Series, during which California-based Harry attended a game at Dodger Stadium in a cap supporting the hometown team, the lead story surrounding his visit was his apology to Canada, where his father, King Charles III, is Head of State. He quipped that he was “under duress” in his wife’s hometown and as a guest of the L.A.-based baseball team. Donning a proffered Blue Jays’ cap, he told a reporter, “I am truly sorry for wearing a Dodgers cap,” which was greeted with warm applause, professing his love of Toronto, the city, he said, that “gave me a wife.” He then insisted he was rooting for the Jays ’til the bitter end.
The next day, in an appearance at the Veterans Centre at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre – the largest program of its kind in Canada, specializing in art therapy for veterans of WWII and the Korean War – residents presented Harry with a helmet painted to commemorate his passion project, The Invictus Games, when they were held in Vancouver last year.
Harry himself is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and beyond his long-term Invictus commitment, he has always been dedicated to military-support causes. He published an essay on the official website of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex timed to his Canadian mini-tour, entitled “The Bond, The Banter, The Bravery: What it means to be British.” In it, he says that while he currently lives in the U.S., “Britain is, and always will be, the country I proudly served and fought for.”
From the essay: “Every November the world, for a moment, grows quieter. We pause, together, to remember.” The point is not to glorify war, he says, but rather that remembrance is “to recognize its cost: the lives changed forever and the lessons paid for, through unimaginable sacrifice.”
The British press was quick to point out that Harry’s trip coincided exactly with his brother, Prince William, landing in Brazil ahead of 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30, and his own signature initiative, The Earthshot Prize. These kinds of “conflicts” are tricky in royal public life, as the tradition has always been that major royals – the sovereign and the heir – are not to have their press attention stomped upon.
Harry, of course, is now a private citizen, paying his own way in the world. He is still a star in his own right, son of Diana and the King. The Telegraph waded straight into the crux of the issue, talking about how this quasi-royal mini tour might just be a gesture to Charles about the kind of good he could still do, representing the family. The Queen had, after all, intended for Harry and Meghan to be Commonwealth ambassadors, the Commonwealth having been a chief objective and passion of her long reign.
The Telegraph called this “grown-up statesman-like Harry” a “subtle pitch” to his father: “See how useful I could be?” The late Queen Elizabeth II firmly rejected Harry and Meghan’s 2019 half-in, half-out plan, whereby they would make their own money and run their own schedule but still represent the Crown in some capacity. This led to their stepping down as working royals.
The philanthropic arm of the Sussexes soldiers on and it now becomes clear that Harry has deep attachment to his homeland, the Commonwealth and his life’s work prior to his marriage. British observers persist in pointing out that his new life in Montecito, tied up in American celebrity, was also apparent when he returned to California and attended Kris Jenner’s 70th birthday party held on the weekend at Jeff Bezos’ palatial spread.
Meanwhile, back at the Palace, Armistice Day celebrations continue apace. The image of King Charles laying a wreath at the Cenotaph on Whitehall on Sunday was poignant. Some 10,000 soldiers marched in the parade, but only 20 of these served in WWII, the last living memory of those battles. Charles wore his field marshal’s uniform. Still undergoing cancer treatments, the King did not ride in the parade.
Having this be a big debut for Prince George, now 12, provided some new depth to the royal ranks, as well as support for his parents and grandfather as they hold the institution on their shoulders. The royals excel at pageantry, all the bold banners, gilded carriages and deftly coordinated manoeuvres of Trooping of the Colour, for instance. But it is through the three solemn events for remembrance each November that they reinforce the soft power of the Crown, to create a sense of unity and that almost-lost feeling that we are all in this together.
