1
HARRY’S DILEMMA
‘These Windsors don’t make great husbands’
Captain Harry Wales, formally styled His Royal Highness the Prince Henry Charles Albert David Mountbatten-Windsor, knows as well as any of his royal namesakes that the course of true love never did run smooth. At the very moment he might have expected his relationship with Cressida Bonas to move perceptibly closer to being solemnised at Westminster Abbey she slipped through his fingers – for the time being, at least.
By long-standing tradition love and marriage have been notoriously difficult for members of the Royal Family despite the exemplary union of the Queen and Prince Philip. That Harry struggled to come to terms with Cressida’s independence and her reluctance to sacrifice her hard-won career was evident from the start. Add to that the media frenzy that engulfed the couple from the moment they appeared in public and the path to matrimony headed steeply uphill until the North Face of the Eiger might have seemed easier to climb.
Cressida was just five when her parents Jeffrey and the Hon. Mary-Gaye Bonas (née Curzon) divorced. Her mother took her and her siblings to live at the grand Hampshire home of Christopher Shaw, a merchant banker, whom she married in 1996. This was the very year the divorce between Harry’s mother and father, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, was being finalised.
Both Harry and Cressida are from broken homes, a member of her family told this author.
As children, both were profoundly hurt by the conduct of their parents. Both are determined not to visit such suffering on children of their own. Hence we see the extreme manner in which they are, or were, as it now appears allowing their relationship to develop.
So what went wrong? Harry was still running the tape through his head as the big metal Music Gates swung open. His limousine motored up the curved driveway to the two stone lions guarding the portico of one of the most famous homes in the world: Elvis Presley’s ‘Graceland’. Compared with any of the Royal Family’s piles, the two-storey colonial-style mansion, set among towering oaks in fourteen acres of rolling countryside at Whitehaven on the outskirts of Memphis, was a modest enough residence. But it had a history that was oddly appropriate to Prince Harry’s situation. When I first met Elvis in 1965 he was with his very own princess, Priscilla Beaulieu Presley and she was even wearing a tiara! Following their breakup in 1972, ‘Graceland’ became a monument to his lost love (and a prison in which he drugged himself to an early death).
Harry took in the gaudy grandeur of the main rooms and would have noted among the glittering rock regalia a photograph of young Elvis proudly posing in his military uniform. For like Harry, the Army had been the making of Elvis. He had been called up as a conscript in 1958 and had spent two years in Germany with the United States Third Armoured Division. Army life had shown him the outside world, given him discipline and self-confidence, and turned him into a solid American patriot. But it’s a fair bet that as he paused to pay his respect at Elvis’s graveside, Prince Harry’s thoughts were not on the King of Rock ’n Roll at all, but on a slim girl far away.
***
The summer of 2014 was a testing time for Harry. As he approached his 30th birthday on September 15, he faced a dilemma: what should he do with the next thirty years? Already regarded by many as the most popular member of the Royal Family. He is a national hero both on and off the battlefield, a credit to his late mother and a tower of strength to his grandmother, Her Majesty the Queen. Yet, Harry was in great need of a new challenge.
Just a few months earlier, having given up the job he had proved to be so good at, flying military helicopters, he had taken a temporary desk job in Whitehall. But that was never going to be enough. There was plenty to do for the many charities he patronises. He had brought to the UK the Warrior Games which had so impressed him when he saw the wounded servicemen and women in action during his first official visit to America the previous year. The Paralympic-style Invictus Games, as they were named for the British event, promised to keep him busy for the four days leading up to his birthday.
Sentebale, the African charity set up in his mother’s memory, was another of the good causes to which he and his brother, Prince William, devoted a lot of attention. But these were causes which he could largely handle by telephone from the desk he occupied in Horse Guards. This was a man who had recently been engaged in active war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the previous winter had undertaken a gruelling 200-mile trek to the South Pole with a group of injured servicemen – his Walking With The Wounded comrades.
Behind palace walls there had been talk of him succeeding Sir Peter Cosgrove as the next Governor-General of Australia. But a man in such a position needed a wife and Harry seemed to have blown his chances of marrying the woman he was in love with: the eminently-suitable Cressida Bonas.
The realisation had hit him hard on the night of Thursday May 2 when he settled into his bed at the Peabody Hotel on Union Street, Memphis. The Peabody is just a few blocks from Sun Studios in which Elvis had cut his first records. He was in the music world’s capital with Prince William for the wedding of their friend Guy Pelly to an American socialite (and hotel heiress) Elizabeth Wilson. He had been far from his high-spirited self on the flight across the Atlantic. During a stopover in Miami he joined the others to dine on stir-fried Chilean sea bass, Bahamian lobster and cocktails in the Fontainebleau Hotel’s Hakkasan restaurant. But even the fine fare appeared to do nothing for his sullen mood. When, at 1am, the group slipped out of the hotel to go to the LIV nightclub, he went with them but according to another clubber, he drank and danced alone.
Reaching Memphis, the Prince had little to offer the turnout of fans who called themselves Harry-etas. One, Rachel Silver, said she had flown from California as soon as she heard the royal would be in Tennessee: ‘I would follow him anywhere,’ she said, ‘but this time he wasn’t himself. It was like he wasn’t there. Sorry, but for me, it wasn’t worth the trip.’
And when he got back to the Peabody after the outing to ‘Graceland’ he went to bed early, according to a member of staff, leaving William and the others to romp through the hotel lobby wearing lit-up hats while downing champagne cocktails and shots. What had driven him into this spiral of deep depression? The informative member of the Peabody staff, says ‘I handed the Prince a letter which had been delivered to the hotel by a courier. All I can tell you is that I believe it was from England. Of course I don’t know what was in the letter but my girlfriend who was standing nearby said he took it into a corner and read it and it made him weep. She said it was so sad and she wanted to go and put her arm around him but of course that would not have been right. All I can tell you from what I witnessed is that the courier’s message I’d handed him obviously did not bring His Royal Highness happy news.’
So for Harry, the Peabody had turned into Heartbreak Hotel. No one can recall him ever being in such a depressed mood. After the 6pm wedding the following day, it was William who was the life and soul of the party for 400 guests staged in tents in the grounds of the Memphis Hunt and Polo Club. It was the future king who hit the dance floor all night. He even jumped on stage to join in with the Jimmy Church Band’s rendition of ‘Shout’. Royal training teaches its students one simple lesson: bury the hurt and show a brave face. But a seemingly forlorn Harry divided his time between the bar and a corner table.
On the evening of April 27 he and Cressida had quarrelled bitterly and that evening she made a series of calls to those close to her to say, ‘It’s over. We’ve split up. It’s terminal.’ The quarrel ensued after she told him she had changed her mind about joining him on the American excursion. She regarded it as a ‘boys’ outing’, a ‘glorified stag party’, and she had never been over fond of the company he kept. Guy Pelly was a nightclub entrepreneur and other members of the party were those with whom he had associated in the days when partying till dawn was the norm.
Cressida now had a job in theatre marketing which paid her just £20,000 a year (she had long ceased accepting hand-outs from her well-off parents) and £640 for the plane fare to Memphis was an extravagance she was not prepared to indulge in. As part of his bid that they should be a normal couple, they had already agreed that they should go ‘dutch’ on their meals out. Cressida dutifully handed over her half share after each bill was settled (and he often argued with the waiter about those). Even when they went to the cinema, it was usually Cressida who got the tickets and paid for them. Her Prince had no money worries, of course. On his forthcoming birthday he stood to inherit his next half of the £20 million sitting in the trust fund left to him and William by their mother (£17 million of which had come from Prince Charles via their divorce settlement). He faced a £4 million tax deduction unless he made a considerable donation to charity, but that still left him £6 million better off.
But petty differences about money were not at the heart of the matter when Harry and Cressida decided to go their separate ways, for the time being at least. The secrets of the heart are known only to the couple themselves, but love was there....
