University of Oxford

Oxford University stands in the novel as the emblem of Prince Henry's intellectual formation — the place where he earned a degree in English literature and acquired the literary sensibility that colors nearly everything he says and writes. When Alex Claremont-Diaz first prepares for their initial meeting, the briefing sheet notes that Henry studied English literature at Oxford and plays classical piano, details Alex already knows from hate-reading Henry's Wikipedia page. The university is thus established early as a defining fact of Henry's identity, one of the few substantive items in a file otherwise filled with trivia Alex cannot imagine will matter in an interview. Yet Oxford proves far more consequential than the briefing suggests: it is the wellspring of Henry's wit, his self-deprecating humor, and the cultural fluency that becomes the private language of his romance with Alex.

Oxford as Intellectual Inheritance

Henry's Oxford education is not a passive credential but an active force in his personality and his correspondence. In an email to Alex, he recalls that when he went to Oxford to get a degree in English literature, people always wanted to know his favorite English author. The press team compiled a list of acceptable answers, rejecting George Eliot because she was actually Mary Anne Evans under a pen name, Daniel Defoe because he was a dissenter from the Church of England, and Jonathan Swift because he was an Irish political satirist. They finally settled on Dickens, which Henry finds hilarious, noting that what could be gayer than a woman languishing in a crumbling mansion wearing her wedding gown every day for the drama. The fruity truth, he confesses, is that his favorite English author is Jane Austen, and he borrows a passage from Sense and Sensibility to tell Alex: "You want nothing but patience—or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope." The anecdote reveals how Oxford trained Henry to think in literary terms, but also how the institution's prestige is managed by the royal press machine — even his academic tastes are curated for public consumption, leaving his genuine preferences a private rebellion.

Classical Learning and the Language of Love

Henry's Oxford-bred knowledge becomes the vocabulary of his intimacy with Alex, most strikingly in the museum scene where he shares the story of King James I and George Villiers. Standing in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Henry reflects on the irony of the cursed gay heir contemplating Queen Victoria's love of sodomy laws, then recounts how James's most beloved favorite was George Villiers, called "the handsomest-bodied man in all of England." He recites a French poem by de Viau — "One man fucks Monsieur le Grand, another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre, and it is well known that the King of England, fucks the Duke of Buckingham" — and explains that the King James translation of the Bible exists because the Church of England was so displeased with James flaunting his relationship that he commissioned the translation to appease them. James stood before the Privy Council and said, "Christ had John, and I have George." The anecdote, delivered with Henry's characteristic blend of erudition and mischief, transforms Oxford's classical curriculum into a queer historical lineage, giving Henry and Alex a precedent for forbidden royal love and a language to speak about their own situation.

Oxford in the Correspondence

The university also appears in the lovers' written exchanges as a marker of their different worlds. When Alex, fired from the campaign and exiled to his bedroom, writes to Henry about Alexander Hamilton's letters to John Laurens, he jokes that Henry would probably be disinherited for revolutionary sympathies — a jab that implicitly contrasts Alex's American founding-father studies with Henry's Oxford-bred loyalty to the crown. Henry's reply, signed with mock formality, continues the banter. The correspondence reveals how Oxford functions as shorthand for the cultural distance between them, even as their shared love of literature bridges it. Alex's discovery of the Pyramus and Thisbe note — Henry's cursive on hotel stationery reading "Dear Thisbe, I wish there weren't a wall. Love, Pyramus" — draws on the same classical tradition Henry absorbed at Oxford, the myth of lovers from rival families speaking through a crack in a wall. The reference, which sends Alex searching for the story and then impulsively buying plane tickets to London, shows how Henry's literary imagination, cultivated at Oxford, becomes the very mechanism that reunites them.

The Institution Behind the Scandal

Oxford's significance extends beyond the personal into the institutional machinery that surrounds the royal family. The nondisclosure agreement Alex signs before his first weekend with Henry — at least fifteen pages of text covering confidential information about the prince's personal wealth, royal residences, and private life — is standard protocol for protecting the royal family's reputation, a system in which Henry's Oxford education and his public persona are assets to be managed. When Zahra Bankston later discovers the affair, she points viciously at Henry and asks whether she needs to make him sign an NDA, and Alex offers that he has already signed one. The university, like the NDA, is part of the apparatus that polices Henry's image — the place that certified him as a suitable heir even as it gave him the tools to subvert that role. When the Waterloo Letters scandal breaks, the Washington Post reports that the emails were named for a reference to the Waterloo Vase in the Buckingham Palace Gardens, and the affair is exposed as a threat to two nations' diplomatic relations. Oxford's literary training, which enabled Henry's eloquent and revealing correspondence, thus becomes entangled in the political crisis, the private intellectual inheritance colliding with the public machinery of state.

Narrative Significance

Throughout the novel, Oxford operates as a quiet but persistent presence — less a setting than a sensibility. It explains Henry's voice, his humor, his way of seeing the world through literature and history. It distinguishes him from Alex, whose education is American and whose references run to Hamilton and Harry Potter, even as it gives them common ground in the stories they share. The university is where Henry learned to love Jane Austen and to recite French verse about gay kings, where he absorbed the classical myths that become the couple's private code. In a story about two young men navigating the impossible demands of public life and private desire, Oxford represents the intellectual freedom that the crown cannot fully contain — the education that taught Henry to think for himself, and ultimately to love on his own terms.