Prince Harry has claimed in his new memoir that his father King Charles III once joked that he may not be his father amid longstanding rumours he may be the lovechild of James Hewitt, who had admitted to an affair with his mother Princess Diana.
The claims were made in the Duke of Sussex’s new memoir Spare, in which he states that his father, King Charles III, used to joke with him, saying, “who knows if I’m even your real father?”
The conversation came about after King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, allegedly spoke about meeting a patient at the Broadmoor mental hospital who claimed to be the real Prince of Wales, The Sun newspaper reports.
“Which could say which of us was insane? Who knows if I’m really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I’m even your real father?” Prince Harry alleged his father as saying.
“He’d laugh and laugh, though it was a remarkably unfunny joke, given the rumour circulating just then that my actual father was one of Mummy’s former lovers: Major James Hewitt,” Harry wrote.
While Hewitt admitted to having an affair with Princess Diana, Prince Harry claims the pair did so after he was born and that King Charles never addressed the rumours directly.
The Duke of Sussex noted that the rumours had persisted largely due to both he and Hewitt possessing red hair and said, “Readers were delighted by the idea that the younger child of Prince Charles wasn’t the child of Prince Charles.”
Prince Harry also claimed that he and William, the current Prince of Wales, personally begged their father not to marry Camilla Parker Bowles prior to the pair’s marriage in 2005.
According to Prince Harry, Camilla, now Queen Consort, sacrificed him for her own personal image in the public and even leaked a conversation to the press involving Prince William in an effort to marry Charles, despite the objections of his sons.
“All that we asked in return was that he did not marry her. ‘You do not need to remarry,’ we begged him. A wedding would… make the whole country, the whole world, compare our mother and Camilla, something that nobody wanted,” Harry wrote.
The Duke of Sussex went on to write that Camilla showed little interest in him during their first meeting, claiming she was not overly interested in him as, unlike Prince William, he was not the direct heir to the throne.
The allegations are just the latest to be released from Prince Harry’s memoir, which has yet to go on sale in the UK but was leaked after Spanish booksellers put it on the shelves early. The Duke of Sussex’s tell-all has also included other family drama, such as alleging that his brother Prince William had assaulted him and tore off his necklace during an altercation that saw Princ Harry land on a dog bowl.
“He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me,” Prince Harry said.
More bizarre revelations have also emerged from the memoir, including Prince Harry stating that he lost his virginity to an older woman in a field, with the woman reportedly spanking him afterwards, and the Duke stating that the use of illegal drugs like cocaine and magic mushrooms had let him see “the truth.”