August 2019 saw the Duke of Susssex’s former flame, Cressida Bonas, announce her engagement to Harry Wentworth-Stanley. A touching image posted to Wentworth-Stanley’s Instagram account shows the couple embracing in a field in Nantucket, with a dazzling engagement ring clearly visible on Bonas’s finger.
The couple went on to marry in an intimate ceremony in the English countryside, after postponing their wedding due to the coronavirus lockdown. And now, Bonas has given birth to their first child. So just who is the property developer who has stolen the heart of the actor and model?
The couple were spotted pushing a pram in West London
Harry Wentworth-Stanley is the son of the Marchioness of Milford Haven (a former Tatler Social Editor) and her first husband, Lloyd’s List underwriter Nicholas Philip Wentworth-Stanley. As well as growing up with a sister, Louisa, and a brother, James, Harry’s mother’s second marriage to George Mountbatten, 4th Marquess of Milford Haven, brought him two step-siblings: Lady Tatiana Mountbatten and Henry, Earl of Medina.
He attended the illustrious boys’ public school, Harrow, as a child, before moving on to the University of Leeds to study Business Studies and Spanish. Clearly a popular student, a contemporary at the university states that Wentworth-Stanley was ‘extremely well liked, somebody who had time for everyone and was a lot of fun.’
It was at Leeds that Harry met Bonas. He originally dated the dance student before her stint with Prince Harry, but the couple parted ways when Wentworth-Stanley left for a year abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Among his university pals were Fred Coleridge Cole and Rory Buchanan, with whom he lived in his fourth year in Leeds’s Hyde Park – a rather less glamorous location than its London equivalent. Clearly a tight-knit group, Buchanan also dated one of Bonas’s best friends, Georgia Forbes.
Prince Harry's controversial biography will be released on 10 January, and will reportedly feature old flames and friends
Bonas and Wentworth-Stanley reportedly remained friends following their break up, but Harry would have far more than just romantic hardships to contend with in his youth. In 2006, his 21-year-old brother, James Wentworth-Stanley, took his own life, after spiralling into depression following a minor operation. His parents consequently set up the James Wentworth-Stanley Memorial fund in 2008, to raise awareness of anxiety, depression and suicide among young people in the UK.
Harry Wentworth-Stanley has himself often raised money for the cause, even undertaking a 3,000 mile row across the Atlantic in a four-man team in 2016 – and raising over £650,000 in the process. June 2018 saw the creation of James’ Place, a non-clinical centre for men experiencing suicidal crisis in Liverpool, funded by the organisation. The centre was officially opened by the Duke of Cambridge, himself a champion of mental health causes.
The actress and model is expecting her first child with her husband, Harry Wentworth-Stanley
Prince Harry and Bonas dated for two years, from 2012 to 2014, but it seems that Wentworth-Stanley was never far from the It Girl’s mind. Having swapped Leeds for London, he undertook a Masters in Real Estate at South Bank University, followed by a stint at luxury property developer Finchatton. Harry then landed himself a place on a graduate scheme with Savills in 2012, where he continues to work, focusing on ‘development opportunities in west London’.
Wentworth-Stanley and Bonas are now firmly back together, having first been spotted hand-in-hand again back in 2015. Now 33, the property developer is a keen sports fan, his Instagram peppered with photographs of rugby matches, sailing trips, skiing holidays and travel shots of his fiancée. And while his family does, admittedly, have a number of aristocratic links, Wentworth-Stanley and Bonas’s reunion and subsequent wedding proves that not every fairytale ending needs a prince.
Instagram content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Subscribe now to get 3 issues for just £1, plus free home delivery and free instant access to the digital editions.
