Prince Harry reveals all in his frank autobiography, Spare.
Before the bombshell book’s scheduled publication on January 10, leaked excerpts started to surface. Now, the real thing is out. The chapters expose stunning details about the duke’s life one after another, such as how he lost his virginity, the day he reenacted his mother’s last hours, and the horrific physical altercation he had with Prince William.
We summarize all the major disclosures here. Keep checking back for updates.
$39.99 RRP: $59.99 33% off RRP
Prince Harry allegedly was punched by Prince William.
Harry talks about a violent argument with his older brother, Prince William, that turned physical in 2019.
Harry claims that William described Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, as “difficult,” “rude,” and “abrasive” while he was at his residence in Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace.
After that, according to Harry, insults were traded, and William claimed he was attempting to assist him. “Are you for real? Please assist me. I apologize, but do you call this that? assisting me?” Harry remembered questioning his brother.
William was incensed by the remark, claims Harry. Harry brought William a drink of water and said, “Willy, I can’t speak to you when you’re like this,” in an effort to diffuse the situation.
Harry declined William’s request to strike back, despite William’s argument that they used to fight when they were younger. After leaving the residence, William later came back, “looking regretful and apologised,” Harry writes, recalling that William then told him, “You don’t need to tell Meg about this.”
“You mean that you attacked me?” Harry said.
“I didn’t attack you, Harold,” William replied.
His virginity was taken by a “older lady.”
In his memoir, the Duke of Sussex shared a very intimate story about his first experience with sex.
Harry claims that a “older lady” who “loved horses very much” is how he lost his virginity. He describes the incident as “a humiliating experience” that happened “in a field.”
“I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and held me back … one of my mistakes was letting it happen in a field, just behind a busy pub,” he writes.”No doubt someone had seen us.”
Princess Charlotte’s flower girl dress caused Kate to make Meghan cry.
Since Meghan denied a tabloid report that claimed she made Kate weep in the days before her 2018 wedding to Harry, a purported argument between the duchess and the princess of Wales has drawn much attention. Meghan adamantly maintained that “the reverse happened” in an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021. Spare now provides further context for the argument.
Initially, according to The Daily Mail, Meghan offended Kate by telling the senior royal, who had just given birth, that she had “baby brain” during a phone chat. According to Harry’s narrative, Meghan expressed regret for the remark, but William angrily “pointed a finger” at her. “Well, it’s rude, Meghan.” William apparently informed her, “These things are not done here,” to which she allegedly replied, “Kindly take your finger out of my face.”
Harry claims that Kate texted Meghan about a “issue” with Princess Charlotte’s flower girl attire on the week of Harry and Meghan’s 2018 wedding (harry even includes purported real text from the exchanges in the book). She claimed Charlotte “cried when she tried it on” because Charlotte’s dress was “too big, too long, and too baggy.” With only four days until the wedding, Kate informed the future bride that all the bridesmaid gowns had to be fully redone, despite Meghan’s assurance that a royal tailor on call could make the required adjustments to Charlotte’s gown.
According to Harry, Kate then referenced the opinion of Sarah Burton, the wedding dress designer for Alexander McQueen, who concurred that the gowns needed to be altered.
Despite their disagreement, Kate finally consented to take Charlotte to the tailor; nevertheless, Harry subsequently discovered his future bride sobbing “on the floor.” The duke also reveals that Kate sent flowers and a card the next day to express her regret.
Charles was advised not to wed Camilla by Harry and William.
According to reports, the royal brothers advised King Charles III not to wed Camilla, the current queen consort.
“Despite Willy and me urging him not to, Pa was going ahead. We pumped his hand, wished him well. No hard feelings,” Harry writes. “We recognized that he was finally going to be with the woman he loved, the woman he’d always loved. Fate might’ve intended for him in the first place. Whatever bitterness or sorrow we felt over the closing of another loop in Mummy’s story, we understood that it was besides the point.”
He also muses on his difficult bond with his stepmother. “I remember wondering … if she would be cruel to me; if she would be like all the evil stepmothers in the stories,” he writes. “Willy had been suspicious of the Other Woman for a long time, which confused and tormented him. When those suspicions were confirmed, he felt agonizing remorse for not having done or said anything before.”
On April 9, 2005, Charles and Camilla were legally married. After their marriage, it was made known that Camilla would not use the title of Princess of Wales, which was infamously held by Princess Diana.
Prince Harry acted out Princess Diana’s last moments.
The Duke of Sussex recounts passing through the same tunnel in Paris where Diana was killed in a car accident in 1997 in one devastating passage. Harry was 23 years old at the time, and he was in Paris for the 2007 Rugby World Cup semifinals.
“The World Cup provided me with a driver, and on my first night in the City of Light I asked him if he knew the tunnel where my mother … I watched his eyes in the rearview, growing large. The tunnel is called Pont de l’Alma, I told him,” he writes.
According to Harry, he asked the driver to enter the tunnel at a speed of 65 mph. “The exact speed Mummy’s car had supposedly been driving, according to police, at the time of the crash. Not 120 miles per hour, as the press originally reported.”
Harry remembers what happened after they exited the tunnel, “We zipped ahead, went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course. But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it. As the car entered the tunnel I leaned forward, watched the light change to a kind of water orange, watched the concrete pillars flicker past. I counted them, counted my heartbeats, and in a few seconds we emerged from the other side. I sat back. Quietly I said: Is that all of it? It’s … nothing. Just a straight tunnel. I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel. No reason anyone should ever die inside it.”
He comes to the conclusion that trying to recreate her last trip didn’t really help him deal with his loss. “It had been a very bad idea. I’d had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived,” he writes. “I’d told myself that I wanted closure, but I didn’t really. Deep down, I’d hoped to feel in that tunnel what I’d felt when JLP gave me the police files—disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away. She’s dead, I thought. My God, she’s really gone for good.“
Harry made contact with his mother in the afterlife through a medium.
In his autobiography, Harry claims that he sought the assistance of a lady who “claimed to have powers” to communicate with the deceased, particularly his late mother, Princess Diana.
He shares his headcount.
In his book Spare, Harry claims that while serving in Afghanistan with the British Army, he killed 25 people.
“Most soldiers don’t know exactly how many kills they have to their credit. Under battle conditions, you often fire indiscriminately,” he writes. “However, in the age of Apaches and laptops, everything I did in the course of two tours of duty was recorded and time-stamped. I could always tell exactly how many enemy combatants I had killed. And it seemed essential for me not to be afraid of that figure. Among the many things I learned in the Armed Forces, one of the most important was to be accountable for my own actions.”
Adding, “So my number: twenty-five. It was not something that filled me with satisfaction, but I was not ashamed either. Naturally, I would have preferred not to have that figure on my military resume, or in my head, but I would also have preferred to live in a world without the Taliban, a world without war. However, even for a casual practitioner of wishful thinking like myself, there are realities that cannot be changed.”
His best man wasn’t William.
The prince claims in Spare hat that, contrary to what Buckingham Palace first stated, he did not select his elder brother Prince William to serve as his best man at his marriage to Meghan Markle. Instead, Harry claims that he appointed his “old pal Charlie” to carry out the best man responsibilities.
Harry alleges that William “cancelled last minute” arrangements to go out for drinks with him and his pals the evening before his and Meghan’s wedding. “”He’d told me, just before he attended tea with Granny: Can’t do it, Harold. Kate and the kids,”
“I’d reminded him that this was our tradition, that we’d had dinner before his wedding, that we’d gone together and visited the crowds. He held fast. Can’t do it.”
He went on, “I asked myself what was really going on. Was he feeling bad about not being my best man? Was he upset that I’d asked my old mate Charlie? (The Palace put out the story that Willy was the best man, as they’d done with me when he and Kate married.) Could that be part of it?” Harry continues by saying that William did not pick him to be his best man during his nuptials to Kate.
Prince Diana’s death led Harry to believe that she was “hiding.”
The prince found it extremely difficult to comprehend his mother’s untimely death; it was so difficult, in fact, that he initially denied it to himself.
In his memoir, Harry states: “With nothing to do but roam the castle and talk to myself, a suspicion took hold, which then became a firm belief. This was all a trick. And for once the trick wasn’t being played by the people around me, or the press, but by Mummy. Her life’s been miserable, she’s been hounded, harassed, lied about, lied to. So she’s staged an accident as a diversion and run away.”
Harry was persuaded to don his famed Nazi outfit by William and Kate.
For a “Native and Colonial”-themed Halloween party in 2005, Harry remembers pondering whether to go as a Nazi or a pilot. He apparently asked his older brother and sister-in-law for guidance.
“I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said,” Harry writes, saying he then tried the costume on in front of them. “They both howled. Worse than Willy’s leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point.” Harry adopted the Nazi appearance, and soon a picture of him enjoying himself while sporting a red swastika armband and a white military shirt made headlines in British newspapers and throughout the world. Two weeks prior to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp, the event occurred.
