The Royal Family has as many secrets and skeletons in its palatial-sized closets as any soap opera dynasty, and that’s particularly true of anything concerning brothers Prince William and Prince Harry, who’ve effectively been the protagonists of the world’s most popular soap for the past 30 years.
The two brothers have suffered a shocking falling out, their fair share of controversial “storylines,” and they even have a secret sister. Royal rumor addicts may also be aware of the age-old scuttlebutt that has surrounded the birth of Harry, and whether King Charles is his biological father after all. This is something that the Duke of Sussex himself has addressed, revealing an eye-opening truth about his childhood in the process.
So who is James Hewitt, the man that the world — and Prince Harry himself — believed was his “real” dad?
Princess Diana and James Hewitt had an affair in the 1980s
It’s a matter of public knowledge that the then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s marriage was not exactly a love match, with both husband and wife embarking on extramarital affairs. Charles infamously had a relationship with now-Queen Camilla while Diana is known to have had a romance with military officer Major James Hewitt for a period of years across the 1980s.
Hewitt first met the Princess of Wales when he was with the Household Cavalry and had been assigned to help Diana with riding lessons, as she was afraid of horses — not a particularly fashionable trait to have among the equestrian-obsessed Royal Family. The pair went on to have a passionate affair for five years, something which became well known to the public in the 1990s due to a series of tell-all books, including Princess in Love, for which Hewitt was the primary source.
So happy were the lovers that their affair only ended when Hewitt was shipped off overseas, being promoted to the commander of a tank squadron stationed in Saudi Arabia. “Diana felt betrayed: he had chosen his career over her. At first, she did everything she could to prevent him from going, even threatening to speak to his commanding officer,” wrote Diana’s bodyguard, Ken Wharfe, in his book, Diana: Closely Guarded Secret. “When James refused to give up his career, Diana let the affair wane.”
The fact that Hewitt had the same red hair as Harry, not to mention a reputation as a party-going playboy, very much like Harry during his twenties, has long spawned much speculation that the second son was the result of Diana’s tryst with Hewitt and not her marriage with Charles. Shockingly, Harry has admitted that he himself was under this impression for the longest time — until he discovered the truth.
Prince Harry grew up suspecting James Hewitt was his “real” father
In Harry’s own memoir, Spare, Harry addressed the rumors of his parentage for the first time. Unsurprisingly, he made clear that he had heard about Hewitt potentially being his father his whole life. Perhaps surprisingly, though, the Duke admitted that he strongly suspected they were true, and only came to understand why that couldn’t be the case a decade ago.
“I spent years questioning and believing if it was true. It was only later I learned they met after I was born,” Harry wrote, clarifying that he belatedly discovered the timeline of his mother’s relationship with Hewitt in 2014.
It’s true; all the evidence points to Diana and Hewitt not meeting until 1986, while Harry was born two years earlier in 1984. As for his red hair, Diana always maintained that this was simply a trait inherited from her side of the family rather than the Windsors, dubbing him her “little Spencer.”
While Harry himself was not aware of the timeline, he firmly believes that the many tabloid reporters that furthered rumors he was Hewitt’s child were fully comprised of the facts. “They were hurtful, mean and cruel. I was always left questioning the motives behind the stories,” he shared. “Were the newspapers keen to put doubt into the minds of the public so I might be ousted from the royal family?”
Charles joked that he was not Harry’s “real father”
All that said, Harry comes clean in Spare that the current King had a curious reaction to all the speculation that Harry was not his. According to the Duke, Charles once joked about the rumors, at the height of the interest around them in the early 2000s.
“Who knows if I’m really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I’m even your real father? Maybe your real father is in Broadmoor, darling boy!” Charles told his son.
Harry admits in his book that he did not find the joke funny and was shocked that his father would utter such “a remarkably unfunny joke, given the rumor circulating just then that my actual father was one of Mummy’s former lovers: Major James Hewitt.”
Chalk that up as another of the King’s countless personality quirks.