Why Harry’s marrying Meghan – and not any of his (countless) former flames
A tantalising insight into the Prince’s complex psychology by Britain’s top royal writers
By Now, just two weeks before the wedding, the bride-to-be is usually a bundle of nerves. The dress, her weight, her hair...so imagine what Meghan Markle is going through as her marriage into the Royal Family, before a global audience of millions, approaches.
But this time it is the bridegroom, Prince Henry Charles Albert David, who is the more nervous of the two. Indeed, friends report that Meghan is having to calm Harry down.
‘She’s telling him everything will be fine,’ says one of their circle. ‘She’s nervous too, but she’s brilliant at hiding it. It’s what he loves more than ever about her — that worldly composure and assurance. He knows he’s found someone on whom he can rely.’
Meghan has settled into her new life remarkably quickly, confident enough to go out and about without Harry. Just the other evening she was with a group of girlfriends having dinner at Electric House, a private members’ club in London’s Portobello Road, apparently in great form.
‘She was completely relaxed,’ says a fellow diner. ‘It seemed like a normal night out for her, no special treatment.’
one thing was different for the sociable American actress (retired), though — the presence of two police bodyguards, one male, one female, nearby.
For the moment at least, Nottingham Cottage, Harry’s bijou, creeper-clad bachelor pad at Kensington Palace — where he proposed on one knee on a ‘cosy night in’ last November as they roasted a chicken — will continue to be their home. But not for too long.
Soon after their engagement, the Queen’s cousin Richard — the Duke of Gloucester, 73 — whose three children are now grown up, offered to vacate his splendid 21-room Apartment 1 at the palace so Harry and Meghan could have it — it is next door to William and Kate. The question was, where would the Gloucesters go?
Now the problem has been solved with the departure of the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt. This has freed up his smaller but very comfortable apartment, seen as ideal for the unfussy Gloucesters, who still carry out many official duties. The Queen has allowed father-of-two Sir Christopher, 56, to stay on for six months at the prestigious address until the end of the school year.
So when will Harry and Meghan move in? Well, it was more than a year after their wedding before William and Kate moved into Princess Margaret’s old home.
Right now Meghan and Harry are content with the intimate comforts of Nottingham Cottage, with its open fire and chintzy furnishings. Meghan’s influence is everywhere — cashmere throws, scented candles and vases of fresh flowers.
‘They are putting off as long as possible the dreaded time when they will have to have umpteen servants,’ says a royal aide. ‘They borrow staff from Clarence House to help out when they really need them for dinner parties. Neither of them is a very good cook.’
This extends to cleaning the cottage. Rather than have their own staff, they are using contract cleaners Mitie, the company that ‘does’ the royal palaces.
At the same time, they have been slipping away from the bustle of London to the relative peace of Windsor, where a bolthole at the castle has been made available for their occasional use as they prepare for what will be one of the most microscopically observed occasions of recent times.
Windsor is, of course, where they will marry on Saturday, May 19, in St George’s Chapel.
How times have changed for Meghan from the days when the actress was being nominated by golfer Rory McIlroy for the ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’ and batting off sleazy footballer Ashley Cole’s entreating tweets for her to go on a date with him.
Somehow, it all seems to have happened so quickly. But has it? By the time they exchange vows it will be the best part of two years since Meghan and Harry were brought together on a blind date engineered by a mutual friend, designer Misha Nonoo.
It is quick compared with brother William, certainly — he and Kate had known each other for ten years when they married at Westminster Abbey in 2011 — but pedestrian compared with his father. Prince Charles was engaged to Lady Diana Spencer five months after their first date and married at St Paul’s Cathedral five months later.
In Diana’s view, that’s why the marriage was a disaster. ‘I barely knew him,’ she said.
The dinner date that brought Meghan and Harry together was at the beginning of July, 2016. By the time the evening was breaking up Harry had her phone number, and over the next few days she was inundated with his text messages.
There was time for just three dates before Meghan had to return to Toronto, where she was filming the television series Suits, in which she played paralegal Rachel Zane.
Those three dates, two of them back-to-back, were enough for Harry — he asked her to come with him on holiday to Botswana, the Southern African country he views almost as a second home. They were also enough for Meghan — she said yes.
As he said, eyes shining, in their engagement television interview last November: ‘We camped out with each other under the stars.’
It was August 2016. Not for the first time, Harry had fallen headlong in love. Nobody would have bet then that in the glamorous divorcee three years his senior, he had met the woman he’d marry.
But he knew it. He had been poleaxed by the sassy American. For her part, the ease with which Meghan blended into his life suggests that, with one failed marriage behind her, she had at last found her ideal man.
Not only did she take that holiday with him after just three dates, but two months after their first meeting she accepted his invitation to Balmoral, the Queen’s most private home, where they celebrated his 32nd birthday.
When she had to return to Toronto, where Suits was being filmed, he was on the phone to her all the time. She flew back and forth between there and London — and sometimes, so was he.
They had been seeing each other for just five months when Kensington Palace issued that extraordinary statement reprimanding the
media for their overenthusiastic interest in Meghan. ‘This is not a game — it is her life and his,’ it declared. That said it all about the future. ‘She has everything he could possibly wish for,’ says a royal cleric who has known Harry since he was born. ‘She isn’t only beautiful and intelligent but was already involved in humanitarian and charity work, a made-to-measure royal wife. And I can tell there is one other crucial factor — intuitively, he knows this is the woman his mother would have said a resounding yes to.’ But it has been a long and winding road to marital contentment for Harry. Flicking through the lengthy roll-call of young women with whom his name was — mainly briefly — involved, you have to stop at two. One is Chelsy Davy and the other Cressida Bonas. He would have mar-
ried either of them, if they had wanted to marry him.
Surprisingly, he was only 19 and barely beyond his wild early years of drugs and pub lock-ins when he began his seven-year courtship of lively Chelsy, the Stoweeducated daughter of a Zimbabwean landowner.
Most princes blessed with his tall good looks and impish humour would have fled from the prospect of settling down at that age.
But while Harry was masquerading as a playboy, shrewd Palace observers could perceive in him a certain insecurity — that same young boy of 12, walking desolately behind his mother’s coffin.
‘Despite all the girls who have been linked with Harry over the years, he has always been happiest in stable relationships,’ explains the cleric. ‘In the circumstances, I’m hardly surprised.
‘I understand from the family of one of his exes that he was really nice but clingy and just a bit too desperate to please.’
His on-off relationship with Chelsy began in early 2004, while he was in Africa on his gap year before going to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. She was at Cape Town University doing a degree in economics. Her mother Beverley was a former Miss Rhodesia, while her father Charles ran a game farm.
Polo-playing Harry was besotted with her, and impressed with her physicality. Chelsy could ride bareback and matched his pals in the bar drink for drink.
FoR two years, while he was at Sandhurst and she was in Cape Town, their relationship was long-distance, with frequent flights to see each other.
‘It was definitely love,’ says one of Harry’s former bodyguards. ‘His first serious love, though something of an on-off affair, as they were on different continents and Harry’s appetite for attractive women, well, it was always there.’
What the young prince appreciated more than anything about Chelsy was her complete lack of interest in his royal status.
Yet it was that royal status which meant the love affair was always doomed even as it continued, off and on, over the years when she came to Britain to study law at Leeds University — until finally, in 2011, they both knew it wasn’t going to work.
Chelsy, who trained as a lawyer and now runs her own jewellery company, says she found the media attention ‘tough and uncomfortable . . . I couldn’t cope.’
Now 32, she remains unmarried, a businesswoman dividing her time between Southern Africa and a home in West London.
Losing her was undoubtedly a blow. While Harry had Chelsy, he hadn’t felt envious of William’s engagement to willowy Kate Middleton, the girl he met at St Andrews University and started dating at around the time Harry was getting together with Chelsy.
Nor did he need to envy William’s welcome into the warmth of family life with the Middletons — something neither prince had enjoyed when they were small boys.
Chelsy’s family, too, were warm and welcoming and Harry looked forward to joining them at their holiday retreat in Cape Town or their main home in Durban.
The year that saw the end of Harry and Chelsy was the one in which William and Kate were married at Westminster Abbey. Chelsy was at the wedding. To this day, she and Harry remain good friends and, of course, she has been invited to his wedding.
It was the following year that Harry — by then aged 27 — was introduced to Cressida Bonas by his cousin Eugenie. Incredibly pretty, though rather quieter than the often boisterous C he lsy, actress and model Cressida, then 24, had also been at Stowe and Leeds University and, just like Chelsy, was a young woman of independent mind.
She was, in so many ways, everything Harry was now looking for.
And there was also her family life, in which, as with William and the Middletons, he found comfort.
Even though her parents were divorced, Cressida was devoted to her mother, Lady Mary-Gaye Curzon, and to her businessman father Jeffrey Bonas.
And she was close to her four siblings, the result of Lady MaryGaye’s four marriages.
Soon Harry was a familiar face at the Chelsea house of Lady MaryGaye, the socialite daughter of the 6th Earl Howe, enjoying intimate family dinners. He and Cressie were also spending weekends with her father at his remote Norfolk farmhouse, where the pleasures included shooting and golf.
How reminiscent it was of William and Kate pictured embracing on the ski slopes at Klosters, when Harry and Cressida were photographed doing exactly the same thing in Verbier on her 25th birthday.
Friends knew he was in love again. ‘He would quite definitely have married her if she would have had him,’ says a family friend.
But Cressida, like Chelsy, could not face the prospect of life in the Royal Family’s relentless spotlight. only after they parted in 2014, having been together for two years, did she admit to friends: ‘Yes, we loved each other.’
Indeed it is possible that Harry found the spotlight on him and Cressie tough, too. He preferred nights in at Kensington Palace, ordering takeaways, rather than going out with her and possibly being photographed.
Nottingham Cottage then was very much a bachelor flat, described as ‘typical army officer digs’ by a visitor from those days.
A friend of Cressie’s says: ‘She found him so much fun to be with but she just couldn’t deal with the harsh attention that came with it. ‘Cressie is a sweet and sensitive girl and she hated the way her mother’s past life always had to be part of her story.
‘She also knew marrying Harry would have to mean the end of her acting career, on which she had only just started out. She wants to be a success on her own terms.’
In recent weeks she has been appearing at the Jermyn Street Theatre in The Dog Beneath The Skin, a revival of a 1935 poetic drama by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.
on the romantic front, she has returned to the man she was seeing before Harry turned up — old Harrovian Harry Went worth Stanley, estate agent son of the Marchioness of Milford Haven.
Meghan Markle, of course, was already a successful actress when she met Harry, but she had no hesitation in giving up her career for him, whatever it meant.
Unlike those first two loves, she seems to thrive on being in the royal limelight. Her extraordinary self-confidence has taken some of Harry’s circle by surprise, so different is she from anyone else he has dated. At the same time, they feel her composure is probably what he has been subconsciously seeking for years.
‘Had he married either Chelsy or Cressie, he knows they would have leant on him,’ says one. ‘Now he can lean on Meghan.’
THE young Harry was certainly wild. Incidents such as the one at the Beaufort Hunt Christmas ball at Badminton House, in Wiltshire, were already earning him a reputation as a hard-partying womaniser — and he was still only 17.
He had started the evening, like William, wearing a dinner jacket, but it wasn’t long before it was off — and so was his bow tie. His shirt was unbuttoned to the navel.
That was when he spotted Suzannah Harvey, 23, the curvaceous model daughter of a local businessman, and walked across to her table.
‘I couldn’t believe it when he made a beeline for me,’ Suzannah told us at the time. ‘I had noticed him sitting near by but he and William had an entourage of girls who were falling over themselves to be near them. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t really taking any notice that he came up to me.’ on the other hand, it may have been that she was a shapely 34DD.
They danced to several numbers by the band Nobody’s Business and sat down together, drinking champagne. Then Harry suggested they ‘get some air’.
All this was just a few weeks after Harry’s humiliation at being caught with drugs at the Rattlebone pub near Highgrove. No drugs now, as Harry, clearly with other things on his mind, shepherded Suzannah, in her £1,500 ballgown, into the cool night air.
‘It was very romantic,’ said Suzannah. ‘He took my hand and, as we were talking, he suddenly kissed me. It was very nice, but as we were kissing I started to get worried that his bodyguards would be looking for him. I didn’t want to get him into trouble.’
To her surprise, Harry said no one would miss him. ‘I’m not the important one,’ he told her, suddenly looking ‘really sad’.
Suzannah said: ‘I got the sense that he felt really insignificant, which is so awful considering he lost his mother, and that partying was some kind of escape.’
By the time they returned to the marquee, Suzannah’s dress was muddy from walking in a field. They carried on dancing and, at the end of the evening, went their separate ways.
These days Suzannah, now 39 and the mother of twin sons, is a highly successful businesswoman. She used to run a model agency but is now CEo of Cotswold Airport, where the Red Arrows used to be based. As for her night of romance with the teenage prince, that, perhaps understandably, is something she says she no longer wishes to discuss.
The girls came and went. Harry was photographed apparently caressing the breasts of Natalie Pinkham, the Sky sports presenter who previously dated former England rugby captain Matt (A Question of Sport) Dawson. Harry was reported to have sent her a feathered G-string. Now 41, she is happily married to a Welsh businessman, has two children and is still a friend of Harry’s.
According to glamour model Cassie Sumner, a former girlfriend of Russell Brand, Harry cuddled up to her and nuzzled her earlobe ‘which made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck’ after meeting her in Chinawhite, the louche West End nightclub.
‘I could feel his hands running up and down the inside of my thighs and I gave him a playful slap,’ said Cassie. ‘I began giggling, so he snuggled up close and started whispering in my ear, telling me how sexy I looked and asking repeatedly is there anywhere we could go. I told him not to be silly.’
Now 35, Cassie is married to Portuguese footballer Jose Fonte and has two children.
AND there was aristocratic lingerie model Florence BrudenellBruce, yet another former Stowe schoolgirl and a descendant of the 7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade. Now 32, she is married to a banker, Henry St George, and has a daughter.
There is no doubt Harry enjoyed the thrill of the chase. The interior designer Catherine ommanney gave a breathless account of how, having got talking with friends to Harry in a South London pub in 2006, he lifted her off her feet and gave her a ‘long, lovely kiss’.
He was 21 and she 13 years his senior. At the time, the prince’s on-off girlfriend Chelsy was said to be revising for exams.
Ms ommanney, who later appeared in the U.S. reality TV show Real Housewives of D.C., said nothing else happened and that after an evening of ‘flirting’ and play-fighting, his police bodyguards drove her home. But her nanny, Monica Herrero, later claimed the two met several times, with the prince sending a chauffeur-driven car to collect Ms ommanney twice in one week.
Then there was the Norwegian rock singer and actress Camilla Romestrand, whom he met after his break-up with Chelsy. She told friends she stayed over at Clarence House and that Harry served her breakfast in bed.
The list of girls seems almost endless — but none of them lasted. And as Harry matured it was becoming obvious to those close to him that, roughly speaking, he wanted what William now had.
‘In a way,’ says one long-term courtier, ‘that’s what he’s always been looking for. Some purpose and stability.’