The dashing thirty-one-year-old prince who walked through the door and beheld the seductive vision of a starlet named Meghan was at a complicated juncture of his life. Ostensibly, he was on a roll. He had never been more popular with the British public. While William was losing his hair and being swallowed by the bourgeois maw of domesticity with Kate, Harry was the sexy royal wild card with the Brad Pitt stubble. He had charmed the world standing in for his brother at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics, proved himself impressively brave with his second tour in Afghanistan as an Apache helicopter pilot, and launched the Invictus Games, his wildly successful initiative for wounded and injured veterans.
Just two months earlier, he had opened the second Invictus in Orlando with Michelle Obama, his improbable buddy and Meghan’s idol. When the Obamas offered up some smack talk over which country would bring home more gold medals, Harry pulled out the big gun—the Queen—to respond. Grandmother and grandson, sitting side by side on a floral sofa, taped a video in which the Queen, her comic timing impeccable, responds to the Obamas’ challenge, with a dry “Oh really?” Message: Harry could even make the Queen have fun.
He had enough goodwill in the bank that the front-page embarrassment of being surreptitiously snapped in August 2012, just a month after the Olympics, playing strip billiards in a high-priced hotel suite in Las Vegas stark naked with a posse of party girls did not tarnish his national appeal. (“Harry Grabs the Crown Jewels!” the Sun headline crowed.) While the tabloids roasted him (with a wink) for his loutish lapse of decorum, the British public adored him for it. It was “a classic example of me probably being too much army and not enough prince,” was his brilliantly quotable apology for the behavior, no doubt fed to him by the adroit Paddy Harverson. Good lad, Harry! was the verdict in most British pubs. He was a bloke like them on a bender, not some stodgy Goody Two-shoes like his princely brother. Everyone, including the Queen, forgave Diana’s naughty boy. Bookings to Vegas shot up after the free publicity.
But if his public life was peak Harry, privately he was falling off a cliff. Ever since he left the army in 2015, he had been acting belligerent, carousing all night. Coming out of uniform is often a traumatic experience for those who thrive inside military structure. For Captain Harry Wales, the army had been his hiding place and refuge for ten years. He felt respected, protected, and encircled by a tight band of trusted fellow officers. “He was so much happier there,” a close acquaintance of Harry’s told me.
He used to go away for a long period of time. Being in a regimented life with structure and one aim, to kill the enemy. So all your pent-up fury can go down the barrel of a gun. He loved the chaps, was physically brave, and needed the structure. So it was very tough to be brought back and put on a suit and tie and told to do his duties….They pulled him out too early.
It’s a commonly held sentiment that Harry should never have left the army, period, but that position is unrealistic. To rise in the ranks requires constant intellectual growth and reassessments at staff college. Instead of the operational assignments at which Harry excelled, military advancement meant desk jobs in the Ministry of Defence, a dismal prospect for a Flashman prince who rarely cracked a book.
With William on a clear path to kingship and his grandmother approaching ninety years of age, Palace advisers deemed there would be plenty for Harry to do, representing the Queen on foreign tours and partnering with his brother on work for the Royal Foundation that they had formed together in 2009 to house the charities of which they were president or patron.
Yet Harry was lost without the army’s sense of purpose. Civilian life forced him to contend with the reality of his declining position in the line of succession. He only had to observe his Uncle Andrew’s flailing for relevance and income to see the mirror of his own impending fate. The cruelty of primogeniture was more personal in Harry’s case. The bond between Charles and Andrew, separated by a twelve-year age gap, had never been tight. With only two years between William and Harry, the inevitability of Harry being pushed aside gave rise to a sorrowful tension that was more like that between Elizabeth and Margaret in their younger years. As “the boys,” they had been indivisible, and the public had loved their double act. Their mother even dressed them alike when they were young. But their identical treatment had set up unrealistic expectations. The boys were not, and could never be, equal.
Just as Harry was missing the fraternal ties with his army chums, he also mourned his us-against-the-world bond with William. Though they were still “incredibly close, living next door to each other [at KP], sharing the same office, and hanging out an awful lot,” according to a former aide, their relationship hadn’t been the same since William married Kate. In May 2015, the Cambridges produced a second child, Princess Charlotte, and Kate made no secret about wanting more. Harry felt displaced by their bougie family unit, and couldn’t understand his brother’s obsession with his Middleton in-laws, whose Bucklebury world bored Harry to tears.
The Palace communications team would get them to do things together, the three of them. And then, after a while, they stopped, because it was so awkward for Harry. “Much though he loved Kate, he would just find himself looking like a third wheel,” a friend of his told me.
In the family tussle between the claims of a brother and loyalty to a wife, it was clear who would win. The Cambridges had become a tight unit, and William a full-on Windsor country bumpkin. On weekends when he wasn’t chez Middleton, he was tramping the grounds of Anmer Hall, the redbrick Georgian mansion on the Sandringham Estate that the Queen gave the couple as a wedding present, wearing a flat cap and tweed jacket like his “turnip toff” Norfolk farmer friends. All he needed were George VI’s plus fours.
For his part, William felt that Harry’s unabated Jack the Lad behavior was getting tiresome. He was less amused than the British public by either the strip billiards debacle in Las Vegas or Harry’s ceaseless boozy nightclub forays with his rowdy friends. His younger brother’s recklessness exasperated him. Harry was always complaining about the invasion of the press, but at the Vegas hotel he was so wasted on Grey Goose he had got naked with a group of women he had picked up in a hotel bar—unvetted by his protection officers—one of whom was bound to (and did) sell a cell phone picture to the celebrity scandal site TMZ. What was he fucking thinking? The Palace went into overdrive (unsuccessfully) to prevent publication in Britain. Harry was snapped standing outside the hotel nervously checking his mobile about an hour after the picture surfaced on TMZ.
The brothers’ jokey persona in joint appearances at this time concealed resentments greater than is widely known. Kate’s joining their foundation changed the working dynamic. Friction between the brothers escalated over their professional assignments. William knew he had to be respectful of hierarchy when it came to his father’s ownership of the environmental platform, but he was less willing to accede to his younger brother. “The problem was their interests were very close,” a Palace source told me. They would agree on territories that they would operate in, and then William would feel that his brother was breaching the agreement.
From Harry’s point of view, William was simply “hogging the best briefs,” a friend of both of them told me. The younger prince seemed not to have gotten the memo that the future king would always get the juiciest patronages. The friend continued:
Harry felt very frustrated and shortchanged as William definitely moved in, as Harry saw it, on Africa and the environment. Harry hung on to veterans, which he’s very good on, but equally he felt that with his work in Lesotho, he should somehow combine elephants and rhinos and HIV and poverty. Harry still has Sentebale, but that’s a tiny little bit of Africa….He very much wanted the (African conservation charity) Tusk Trust (unreasonably, since William had been royal patron since 2005), but he got bulldozed off pitch by William, who also felt strongly….So Harry was a very, very angry man. I think those were absolutely Olympic rows.
Unhelpful to Harry’s argument was the fact that floating around online were pictures of him triumphantly posing with a water buffalo he slaughtered on a big-game hunting trip in Argentina in 2004 with Chelsy Davy, which, though perfectly aboveboard, was not a good look for a conservationist. A member of the brothers’ circle told me, “Harry had done stuff in sub-Saharan Africa that William was always just really nervous about.”
There were other tensions, said the source. William exhibited more than a tinge of competitive envy. Harry’s Invictus Games had taken off like a bucking bronco. Harry had been nervous that not enough spectators would come for the first event, held at the 80,000-seat Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in 2014. In fact, more than 65,000 people showed up. Invictus was perhaps the most immediately impactful new royal initiative since Prince Philip launched his Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards in 1956.
In his last year in the army, Harry had spent much of his time visiting recovery centers, NHS hospitals, and armed forces charities around the country, bolstering his expertise on wounded veterans. “Having been a soldier, having traveled back, God forbid, with body bags all around him on that aircraft, Harry could stand up on a stage in front of fifteen thousand people and speak with absolute authority about what that means. He knew because he lived it,” Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton told me. Invictus elevated Harry’s star power around the world in a way none of his previous efforts on behalf of his grandmother had.
William’s causes, however, somehow felt more shaped from the top, less reflective of personal passion, less well-defined, and therefore less engaging to the public. It became increasingly clear that for all the elder brother’s soundness and self-possession, the younger one had a more natural touch with the public. Like his mother, Harry had an easy ability for what the royals call “the chat,” while his brother sometimes stiffened behind the podium. “If William makes a speech, everything from ‘Good evening’ onwards has to be typed out and handed to him,” a charity board member told me. “When he came to our dining club one evening, as soon as he got up to speak, he froze.” That never happened to Harry, who, like Prince Philip, always knew how to break through an awkward silence with a joke.
Major General Buster Howes cited Harry’s spontaneous playfulness on their visit to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado. After Harry’s two expert football passes, “he looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Watch this.’ And the next ball, he threw right into the middle of the expensive cameras. Which was him being mischievous.”
Harry was also making a point. He was not constrained by any need to engage with the press, which he hated so much that any encounter made the blood drain from his face. Harry looked at Howes once and said, “Do you want to swap?”
If Harry was discontented with his royal duties, he was even more unhappy about the state of his love life. An auspicious two-year affair with Cressida Bonas, the delicate blond daughter of Lady Mary-Gaye Curzon, fell apart in 2014. According to a guest I spoke to, Prince Charles expressed his regret at a Buckingham Palace function sometime after the young couple split. “I don’t know what to do about Harry. We so miss Cressida,” he told her ruefully.
By contrast, all of Harry’s old carousing mates—Tom “Skippy” Inskip, Charlie van Straubenzee, Guy Pelly, and Charlie Gilkes—were engaged or prancing up the aisle with heiresses and “It” girls at destination weddings. Kate was always suggesting new girlfriends to him at the must-have-Harry-over roast chicken dinners she cooked at the Cambridge apartment in Kensington Palace. Harry was a devoted uncle and always brought gifts for Prince George and baby Charlotte. He started to feel like the royal version of Bridget Jones. He blurted out slightly pathetic-sounding comments in interviews about wishing he could settle down. “I would love to have kids right now,” he said dolefully. “But there is a process one has to go through. Hopefully I’m doing all right by myself. It would be great to have someone next to me to share the pressure but the time will come and whatever happens, happens.”
“Harry will tell anyone who will listen that he is fed up with being single,” a member of his set told a journalist. “But girls are wary about dating him.”
They should have been, after seeing Cressida Bonas’s turbulent experience. There was general agreement that Ms. Bonas had all the makings of a perfect partner for Harry, who was madly in love with her. She was of his world but not obsessed with it, a beauty but not a preening one, with a burgeoning career as an actress on stage and TV after leaving the University of Leeds. (In 2016 she starred as Daisy Buchanan in a production of The Great Gatsby at the reputable Leicester Square Theatre.) She was athletic too, winning a sports scholarship to Prior Park College in Bath before attending the co-ed boarding school Stowe like his old flame Chelsy Davy. One of her closest friends was the Yorks’ daughter Princess Eugenie, who is said to have introduced her to Harry at a music festival in Hampshire. She drank rum straight up, Tatler approvingly reported and, when embarrassed, was heard to exclaim “Cringe de la cringe!”
Cressida was encircled by a discreet but entertaining extended aristocratic family. Her ever-vivacious mother, Lady Mary-Gaye, was the matriarch of a Mitfordesque tribe, most of whom were already known to Harry. There were four more gorgeous-looking half siblings with triple-barreled names from Mary-Gaye’s four marriages. As a guest at Sandringham for shooting weekends, Cressida blended easily with Harry’s friends. She passed the Africa test on a successful vacation together in the Okavango Delta.
Cressie, as she is known, was amused and forgiving at first when Harry came to stay with her family in the country after the Las Vegas incident with “his tail between his legs, looking like a puppy who had peed on the carpet,” as another guest put it. But as their relationship progressed, she found his frat-boy antics beneath him: “Cressida is the kindest, most loving little thing. But she’s bossy,” a family friend told me. “And I remember her saying to him, ‘I just want you to stop being so laddish.’ Because he was always one of the boys with their stupid jokes. And Cressida’s far too intelligent for that. She said, ‘I just want the whole world to be as proud of you as I am.’ ”
Harry’s habitual mood, however, was increasingly truculent. When he wasn’t venting about William, he was pouring out resentments about Charles. Father and son mostly communicated through their private secretaries. Harry was especially disgruntled about how his father handled the choice of a present for his thirtieth birthday. Charles, apparently, sent a message through his office asking “What would you like for your thirtieth? Would you like another dinner jacket?” Harry, said my source, sent back the message, “Ok.”
So the man from Savile Row came to measure him and when it arrived…one arm was shorter than the other and one leg shorter than the other, so it was picked up and returned in a box which seemed kind of analogous to their whole relationship.
I.e., no communication, and when there was, it went wrong.
Harry also felt perennially aggravated by the power wielded by Camilla, who made him feel like a visitor at Highgrove. He was sensitive about being as excluded by his father’s relationship with her as he was from the bond between William and Kate. Their interdependence exacerbated the void left by his mother, whose affection could never be replaced. “I can feel the hugs that she used to give us,” he reflected in Nick Kent’s documentary, when Harry was thirty-three. “I miss that, I miss that feeling. I miss that part of a family. I miss having that mother to be able to give you those hugs and give you that compassion that I think everybody needs.”
More challenging for all was Harry’s ever-boiling paranoia about the press. Cressida understood the historical reasons why he hated journalists but believed that he should, like William, come to terms with his royal fame. If the couple emerged from Kensington Palace and Harry saw five press people waiting, he would get white-knuckled. As a close friend said:
Cressie was a normal twenty-five-year-old who wanted to go out to dinner and touch knees under the table. Harry would walk four paces ahead of her, instead of holding her hand. When they went to the theater, he left at the interval to get out without a hassle. She was either being dragged through the streets being yelled at or ignored while he threw a hissy fit.
It was not as if he showered her in jewelry, either. Harry upheld the Windsor tradition of being tight with a buck. Invited as a couple to Guy Pelly’s Tennessee wedding to the Holiday Inn heiress Lizzy Wilson, Harry casually told Cressida, “My office has got my ticket, you get yours,” which Lady Curzon’s daughter reportedly found not only cheap but disrespectful, especially when she learned he would be off for half the weekend at Pelly’s bachelor booze-up. While Cressida kept reading about herself as the glamorous aristocratic girl in a romantic love affair with a prince, the bizarre reality of date nights was glumly eating takeout and watching Netflix at Nottingham Cottage, Harry’s tiny and none-too-tidy two-bedroom grace-and-favor bachelor pad on the grounds of Kensington Palace. “Nott Cott,” as the house is known in the family, was once inhabited by the Queen’s governess Crawfie, until the Queen Mother booted her out. The ceilings are so low that when William lived there with Kate, he had to stoop to avoid hitting his head.
A family friend told me she knew the relationship wouldn’t last when there was a blow-up on Valentine’s Day. En route to the restaurant, they were driving down Kensington High Street when Harry got word that there was a photographer lying in wait. He slammed on the brakes, did a spin turn in the middle of the street, and gunned it back to Nott Cott for a Valentine’s night of pizza. It was like Sean Penn in the old Madonna days.
At Christmas, more unnecessary drama. The couple was staying in the country with Cressida’s half sister Isabella and others in the family, and decided to go for New Year’s Day lunch to a small local pub in Kidlington, outside Oxford. There were very few guests and they secured a table at the back. A person privy to the incident said:
Suddenly as they were leaving, this quite elderly, sweet-looking gentleman came out and said, “Oh, sir, so sorry, I know it’s Christmastime, but could I just take a photograph to give to my wife who isn’t well?” And so Cressida opened her mouth and said, “Oh, of course.” And Harry said, “Get out of my way” and went bright red in the face and stormed off in a huff.
Cringe de la cringe.
Their friends expected an engagement announcement at any time, but incidents such as this gave Cressida serious qualms about sharing her life with Harry. It was daunting enough to join the Royal Family with all the restrictions that were sure to hurt her career. Images of Kate and William conquering crowds in New Zealand with the eight-month-old Prince George in tow reportedly spooked Cressida. She found it unimaginable to drag a future baby of her own off on a hectic royal tour, especially with Harry’s explosive temperament. Without his army mates to cut him down to size, his sense of entitlement was out of control. His outbursts were ever more frequent and childlike. He took up boxing because, as he later said, he was always “on the verge of punching somebody.”
Cressida began to have serious worries about his mental health. It is not widely known that it was she who first persuaded Harry to see a therapist. “She got him to accept he had problems, and see a psychoanalyst,” a family friend told me. To find the right therapist, he turned for suggestions to both his mother’s old friend Julia Samuel, who worked as a bereavement counselor in the NHS pediatrics department of St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and to the advice of British Secret Intelligence Service MI6, whose team of therapists, it was thought, would be an excellent resource. A person close to Harry at the time told me, “There was a need for someone who would be incredibly discreet and who understood what it’s like to have a public version of your life and a private version of your life. Therapists at MI6, that’s what they do.”
“You need to feel it in yourself,” Harry told The Telegraph’s Bryony Gordon. “You need to find the right person to talk to as well and that’s been one of my biggest frustrations over the past few years—how hard it is to find the right person, the right remedy, because there’s so much stuff out there.”
Harry has said that he eventually found a therapist who helped him start to excavate the trauma of his mother’s death. He has since said he now counts himself very lucky that it was “only two years…of total chaos” before he learned how to talk about it. “I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I just didn’t know what was wrong with me.” But he said: “It’s all about timing.” When Cressida suggested he get help, Harry finally agreed.
His meltdown had been a long time in the making. Therapy unlocked the years of buried grief about his mother’s death. He at last understood his own evasion of sorrow in tactics that ranged from champagne hooliganism to “sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum, because why would that help?” In the Kent documentary, he said he had only cried twice in the twenty years since she died. He had been expected to hide his anguish while the whole world expressed theirs. “Every time I put a suit on and tie on…having to do the role, and go, ‘Right, game face,’ look in the mirror and say, ‘Let’s go,’ ” he said in 2021 on the Apple broadcast The Me You Can’t See. “Before I even left the house I was pouring with sweat.”
Once unburdened, he wanted to share the relief. He had learned that support poured forth once he talked about the concealed torment. No one was more thankful than William that Harry had finally sought professional help. For years, his elder brother had keenly felt Harry’s unmoored distress. He knew Harry was having panic attacks. Whatever their territorial tensions, he desperately wanted to help him as he always had when they were growing up. “My brother, you know, bless him,” Harry said in his 2017 interview with The Telegraph’s Bryony Gordon about mental health, “he was a huge support to me. He kept saying this is not right, this is not normal, you need to talk to [someone] about stuff, it’s OK.”
William, it should not be overlooked, had suffered grievously himself. His sanctuary was family life. Harry might mock his bourgeois existence with Kate, but the Duke of Cambridge told Alastair Campbell in an interview at this time that he could not do his job without his domestic cocoon. “I have never felt depressed in the way I understand it, but I have felt incredibly sad,” he told Campbell. On the days when he feels most weighed down by the trauma of the past, he continued, “I have never shied away from talking about it and addressing how I feel. I have gone straight to people around me and said, ‘Listen, I need to talk about this today.’ ”
In his work as an air ambulance pilot, he said, he found that arriving at the scene of a child’s death in a car crash “penetrated [his] armor” because he immediately felt it from the parents’ point of view. “Anything to do with parent and child, and loss, it is very difficult, it has a big effect on me, it takes me straight back to my emotions back when my mother died.” He talked with unusual emotion in the 2021 podcast William: Time to Walk, about the devastating impact of a rescue call to a car crash with a seriously injured child, Bobby Hughes, nearly the same age as Prince George. It “was as if something had changed inside me,” he said. “It was like someone had put a key in a lock and opened it without me giving permission to do that….You just feel everyone’s pain, everyone’s suffering. And that’s not me. I’ve never felt that before.” He has stayed in touch with Bobby and his family ever since.
Shared fraternal grief expressed itself in renewed purpose. Harry’s acceptance that he needed help brought the brothers closer for a short time. In May 2016, they launched Heads Together, a high-profile initiative from their foundation suggested by Kate, who saw the thread of combating mental illness in much of the charitable work they undertook. The campaign, whose goal was ending the stigma attached to mental illness, was well-timed, four months after Prime Minister David Cameron’s £1 billion pledge for a mental health care “revolution” in England.
Ultimately, the intense focus on Harry’s problems to the exclusion of her own was too much for Cressida. To Harry’s chagrin, she moved on, later rekindling a romance with another aristocratic Harry, the “towering blonde god,” as Tatler called him, Harry Wentworth-Stanley, son of the Marchioness of Milford Haven. She married him in 2020, adding to the store of family multi-hyphenates.
“When [Prince Harry and Cressida] broke up,” a friend of theirs told me, “he wrote her a sweet letter saying I admire you, I wish you well and above all thank you for helping me to address my demons and seek help.”
“He became very bleak in his outlook,” a Palace source told me. “He was convinced he was going to be single for the rest of his life.”
The night of July 1, 2016, Harry was in an especially sober mood after returning from a trip to France for the commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, the deadliest battle of the First World War, in which a million men were wounded or killed.
It had been a classic day of royal ceremony and national meaning, with the Firm out en masse. Prince Charles and Camilla, Prime Minister David Cameron, Prince Harry, and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge—she looking impeccably royal in a cream-and-black lace dress—attended a service of commemoration at the Thiepval Memorial in France, close to the battlefields of the Somme, and a military vigil the evening before. “It was in many ways the saddest day in the long story of our nation,” Prince William said at his address at Thiepval. “Tonight we think of them….We acknowledge the failures of European governments, including our own, to prevent the catastrophe of world war.” Prince Harry, with a veteran’s gravitas, read the poem “Before Action”—“By all the days that I have lived, make me a soldier, Lord”—by Lieutenant W. N. Hodgson, published two days before he fell in the carnage of the Somme. It was a sacrament of royal duty at its most meaningful. “Not forgetting,” maintaining an unbreakable thread between the nation’s history and its present, is perhaps above all what monarchy is for.
But the trip’s solemnity lifted from Harry’s shoulders when he walked through the door at Soho House and was “beautifully surprised” by the sight of his future wife. “I thought, ‘Okay, well I’m really gonna have to up my game,’ ” he later said. It was as if both felt a lack that the other swiftly answered.