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In his new memoir Spare, Prince Harry goes into detail about many of the rumours and tabloid reports he’s had to live silently with his entire life, including the persistent talk over whether his “real father” is actually Princess Diana’s former lover James Hewitt.
For decades, people have speculated that Hewitt is the 38-year-old’s father, not King Charles III, despite Harry being born in 1984, three years before Diana met Hewitt in 1987.
According to Harry who writes about the paternity conversation in Spare, not only did the royal family know and speak openly about the rumour, but his father King Charles III would laugh about it.
“Pa liked telling stories, and this was one of the best in his repertoire,” Harry writes, adding that Charles used to joke, “‘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!'”
Recalling how Charles would “laugh and laugh,” Harry went on to say 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 went on to write that one of the main causes for the rumour was Hewitt’s “flaming ginger hair,” but another was ” sadism.”
“Tabloid readers were delighted by the idea that the younger child of Prince Charles wasn’t the child of Prince Charles,” Harry wrote. They couldn’t get enough of this ‘joke,’ for some reason. Maybe it made them feel better about their lives that a young prince’s life was laughable.”
He added, “Never mind that my mother didn’t meet Major Hewitt until long after I was born, the story was simply too good to drop.”
In 2017, Hewitt, now 64, also denied the claims, saying it only continues to perpetuate because it “sells papers,” adding, “It’s worse for [Harry] probably, poor chap.”