Prince Henry

Prince Henry is the initially guarded British prince in Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue — Henry George Edward James Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor, fifth in line to the British throne, whose public role as a perfect royal figure conceals a private self that is warmer, funnier, and more tortured than any tabloid coverage suggests. His forced friendship with American First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz becomes something neither of them anticipated.

McQuiston writes Henry with the specific pressures of royal life rendered compassionately — the expectation that every public action carries institutional weight, the impossibility of private feeling in a role defined by public performance, and the specific history of LGBTQ suppression within the British royal family that makes Henry's situation not simply personal but historically grounded. His love of poetry and literature is not affectation but genuine, expressed in the letters he writes to Alex that are some of the novel's finest writing.

Henry's arc — from performing the role expected of him to understanding what he is willing to fight for — is the novel's most emotionally affecting thread, and his relationship with his family's expectations gives the romance its highest stakes.

A standalone novel. The Amazon Prime Video film starred Nicholas Galitzine.