Prince Harry, son of the late Princess Diana and the current British monarch King Charles, seems to have spared no detail regardless of how embarrassing it might be in his new memoir Spare. Even before the release of the book on January 10, news of the book and quotes made headlines what with leaks, interviews, and teasers making the rounds. The reactions to some of the bombshells dropped by the Duke of Sussex have many clutching their imaginary or real pearls in utter shock.
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What could possibly be so shocking about a public figure’s life? A lot! You see, Harry doesn’t just reiterate his claims that the royal family, staff members, and the British press all colluded against him and his wife Meghan Markle making their lives in Britain absolutely miserable. He also answers questions that absolutely no one asked like the story of when he lost his virginity. Yeah, it's a lot. Check out some of the most shocking revelations and get ready to do some clutching of pearls, real or imagined.
Wondering what inspired the title of the memoir?
According to Harry, when he was born, his father told his mother, “Now you’ve given me an heir and a spare—my work is done.” The point being that William would be the next in line to be king after Charles and if anything happened to William, Harry could be the backup.
His dad used to make ‘sadistic’ jokes about not being his real father.
“Who knows if I’m even your real father? Maybe your real father is in Broadmoor, darling boy!” Harry shared. “He’d laugh and laugh, though it was a remarkably unfunny joke, given the rumor circulating just then that my actual father was one of Mummy’s former lovers: Major James Hewitt. One cause of this rumor was Major Hewitt’s flaming ginger hair, but another cause was sadism. … Never mind that my mother didn’t meet Major Hewitt until long after I was born.”
His story of losing his virginity to an older woman is cringey, to say the least.
“She liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me, unlike a young stallion,” Harry wrote. “Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me to grace. … Among the many things about it that were wrong: it happened in a grassy field behind a busy pub.”
He may have overshared about his ding-a-ling.
Not that anyone asked, but Harry shared that when William was marrying Kate, his penis was not doing well. Harry had been on a 200-mile Artic walk for charity and the cold had done a number on his body. “While the ears and cheeks were already healing, the todger wasn’t. It was becoming more of an issue by the day,” he wrote.
And in case you are wondering, he and his brother are circumcised.
“There were countless stories in books, and papers (even The New York Times) about Willy and me not being circumcised,” he wrote. “Mummy had forbidden it, they all said, and while it’s absolutely true that the chance of getting penile frostbite is much greater if you’re not circumcised, all the stories were false. I was snipped as a baby.”
He used cocaine in his younger days.
“At someone’s house, during a hunting weekend, I was offered a line, and since then, I had consumed some more. … It wasn’t very fun, and it didn’t make me feel especially happy as seemed to happen to others, but it did make me feel different, and that was my main objective. To feel. To be different,” he shared.
William and Kate encouraged Harry to dress like a Nazi.
In 2005, Prince Harry showed up to a “colonials and natives” costume party dressed as a Nazi. He has since apologized for it and called it “one of the biggest mistakes” of his life. Well, apparently that mistake was approved by both Prince William and Kate.
He even modeled the Nazi costume for them before wearing it to the party.
Harry was debating on whether to dress as a pilot or Nazi for the party. “I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said,” Harry writes. He also modeled the outfit for them and “they both howled. Worse than Willy’s leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point.”
William and Kate were huge ‘Suits’ fans.
When Harry told William and Kate that he was dating Meghan Markle, their reaction surprised him. “Their mouths fell open. They turned to each other. Then Willy turned to me and said: ‘F— off?'” Harry shared. “I was baffled until Willy and Kate explained that they were regular—nay, religious—viewers of Suits.”
He regrets watching Meghan’s 'Suits' sex scenes.
Harry watched some of Meghan’s racier scenes on the show Suits and wishes he hadn’t. “I’d witnessed her and a castmate mauling each other in some sort of office or conference room,” he wrote. “I didn’t need to see such things live.”
William was not excited about Harry proposing to Meghan.
According to Harry, his older brother thought that he was moving “too fast” and didn’t want him to propose to Meghan. Then when the proposal was done and the wedding was being planned, William didn’t want Harry and Meghan to be married at Westminster Abbey, where he married Kate, or at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where King Charles and Princess Diana where married.
He believes he and Meghan were used to help his stepmother’s image be ‘rehabilitated.’
Camilla, Queen Consort, “…sacrificed me on her personal PR altar,” Harry shared in his book. In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Harry shared that in his opinion, Camilla made connections in the British press to rehabilitate her image. Remember that for a long time, Camilla was cast as a villain because she had an affair with Charles when he was married to Harry’s mother, Princess Diana.
And it wasn’t just Camilla who fed the British press negative stories about him and Meghan.
As to why anyone in his family or on staff would want to feed the British press stories about him and his wife, Harry explained to Anderson Cooper: “If you are led to believe as a member of the family that being on the front page, having positive headlines, positive stories written about you is going to improve your reputation or increase the chances of you being accepted as monarch by the British public, then that’s what you’re going to do.”
According to Harry, he was physically attacked by his brother.
Harry wrote about how in 2019, William showed up at Nottingham Cottage, where Harry and Meghan were living at the time, and started saying that Meghan was “difficult,” “rude,” and “abrasive.”
Things escalated quickly.
“He set down the water, called me another name, then came at me. It all happened so fast. So very fast,” Harry recounted. “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. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.”
William apologized.
Harry wrote that after the fight, William came back and apologized, but he also told Harry, “You don’t need to tell Meg about this.” When Harry replied, “‘You mean that you attacked me?’” According to Harry, William responded, “I didn’t attack you, Harold.”
He ‘snapped’ at Meghan and she wasn’t having it.
Harry shared that once when he was having an argument with Meghan, he lost it and spoke to her “cruelly.” She left the room and when he went to talk to her, she made it clear that “she would never stand for being spoken to like that.” When she asked him if he had heard a man speak to a woman like that when he was growing up. He responded, “Yes.”
A woman with ‘powers’ gave him a message from his late mother.
Prince Harry’s son Archie broke a Christmas ornament and when Harry went to see a woman who claimed to be communicating with his late mom Princess Diana, that incident came up. “'Your mother says … something about a Christmas ornament? Of a mother? Or a grandmother? It fell? Broke?'” the woman said to Harry. “'Your mother says she had a bit of a giggle about that.'”
Harry shared his kill count.
Harry served two tours in Afghanistan as part of the British army. During his second tour in 2012, he wrote because of gun-cam footage, he could establish “with exactness how many enemy combatants I had killed. And it seemed to me essential not to be afraid of that number. So my number is 25. It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me.”
He also wrote about what he did in order to be able to take so many lives.
“When I found myself plunged in the heat and confusion of combat I didn’t think of those 25 as people,” he wrote. “They were chess pieces removed from the board. Bad people eliminated before they could kill good people.”
Check out our Meghan Markle page for all the latest news about Meghan, Prince Harry, and their growing family.
