The year he got married, the exchange rate fell for some members of Prince Harry’s inner circle.
Standing before them in the 19th century at St Luke’s Church in Chelsea in December 2018, at the annual caroling held by the Van Straubenzee family, Harry gave not a ceremonial reading as might have been expected, but a solemn sermon on the poverty of the period.
The importance of the issue was never questioned, even if the subject was felt grossly unsuitable for an aristocratic church audience.
But it was from Harry—a man he had known best since he was a boy, and who had earned most of his reputation as the irreverent ‘Prince of the Party’—that caused the greatest astonishment.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on their wedding day in 2018 in Windsor
In his younger days, Harry was known to be a “party prince” and a prankster
A humorous Harry cuts form with jogging legend Usain Bolt in Jamaica, 2012
Harry apparently took pleasure in hitting on his brother William and sister-in-law Kate in 2017
Harry, just six months after his marriage to Meghan Markle, was a different man.
In fact, there is little today that his closest friends would ever know in the way they see him on screen so much.
Nor is there much to remind them of the gentle charm they once knew in the sermons he woke up to in Harry and Meghan’s Netflix documentary, his autobiography, Spear, about the royal family’s shortcomings, and his hatred of the royal family. Media, and his personal journey of grief and recovery.
But as his friends told The Mail on Sunday, signs of a personal transformation afoot were already there in the early days of the couple’s relationship.
And I started with granola.
“We first noticed a fitting change when he came down to the breakfast buffet during the shooting weekend and started bringing out bowls of granola to take upstairs to his bedroom,” said one source. We asked why he wasn’t feasting on bacon and eggs with the rest of us.
He said something about him doing yoga at dawn with Megan and they wanted to have breakfast together, alone in their bedroom.
A telling moment reveals just how amazingly Harry is willing to put up with it. During a dinner in London in the early days of their relationship, the friends told how Meghan ‘got agitated’ because she wasn’t seated next to Harry, despite British custom that the couple should sit apart.
Reportedly, Harry simply ignored her behavior – to the chagrin of his friends.
“You made a great scene,” said one source. She wanted to sit next to Harry and was offended that she wasn’t sitting with him.
We looked to Harry for an explanation — he just said, ‘I know, but she’s so hot.'”
Another dinner party followed, with Meghan reportedly handling social situations as if they were a Hollywood networking event.
Before a casual dinner hosted by Jack Mann, Harry’s polo-playing friend and presenter of their wedding, a source says Jack was amazed to receive a list of demands beforehand.
Harry with his late grandfather, Prince Philip, in 2015. He knew the art of making people laugh
Some childhood friends claim that Harry changed after his marriage to Meghan Markle
It is alleged that he simply agreed to her demands – to the chagrin of some friends
The former “Fab Four” on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in 2018. Tensions were brewing even at this point
“Meghan wanted to know what designers the women would wear, what the seating plan would be, that kind of thing,” the source said. Jack was so surprised that he simply didn’t respond. It was a strange request to receive before an auspicious occasion.
When Jack decided not to respond to the email, another message was released.
The source added: “In the second email, Meghan appeared to be particularly interested in knowing the names of the wives and girlfriends who attended.” Again, Jack refused to tell her anything. This wasn’t a networking dinner for movie directors in the Hollywood Hills with George Clooney; It was wine and food with friends.
Eventually they both showed up, but Megan seemed annoyed – and left before dinner.
By the time the couple married in May 2018, and attended a van Straubenzee carol service together this Christmas, the transformation was complete.
In fact, Friends believe the period’s poverty speech was so out of character for Harry that he may not have written it himself.
‘It’s a noble cause,’ recalled one of the former friends who attended that night: ‘It’s a noble cause, and he obviously learned about it from Meghan.
But this service of hymns was neither the time nor the place—he well knew that the congregation was made up of the old, seated fanatics. Harry had just decided to become an activist at the time, now that his eyes had been opened to Meghan. It didn’t seem like he wrote down everything he was reading.
In any case, most of the friends who were there that evening are no longer in contact with Harry. It sure didn’t appear in the Netflix documentary that told the couple “the truth.”
One source reports that Harry even cut Violet von Westenholz, the mutual friend he had with Meghan. She isn’t mentioned by name in the Netflix show, and a picture of Megan and Violet together — the one uploaded to social media that prompted Harry to ask Violet to set him up on a date — cropped out to her face.
The source adds: “Harry literally and figuratively cut Violet out of his life because of a ridiculous altercation with Meghan.”
The bewilderment Harry’s former friends feel is even greater because the colored man they remember is very different from the one portrayed in the movie and book.
Some of the most startling revelations involved details of his drug use, including taking cocaine as a teenager, smoking marijuana and using magic mushrooms at Friends actress Courteney Cox’s home, causing him to hallucinate that a pigeon box was talking to him.
But friends say these stories are a carefully crafted version of reality.
“If this was really an exercise in ‘clearing his conscience’, Harry could have had so much more,” says an acquaintance. “Yes, it was more than we’ve ever read of a senior member of the royal family – but there was only so much he could say.”
There is, of course, immorality in the book. An infamous trip to Las Vegas in 2012, where Harry was photographed naked playing pool after an all-day drinking session, is described in detail.
However, there is no mention of the freebie suite Harry accepted from a generous hotelier.
Friends say there are many other equally fun trips to Vegas that have been omitted.
“The infamous pool trip wasn’t a one-off,” insists one source. Harry went several times, and struck a deal with the hotel. He got to know an American girl so well that he spent Thanksgiving at her family’s home.
And Old Harry was “beating” canceling PC conventions.
One said: “Harry wasn’t afraid to say things that might cause offense.” At dinners for example, he has a history of acting as if he is in the school canteen, goofing around telling jokes within the school and generally interrupting the flow of conversation.
“There was one time when we went down to a state dinner and found that he’d rearranged a dozen Patrick Mavros animal figurines—expensive silver table decorations—in the dining room to make it look like ‘mating.'”
Harry is used to breaking the rules. Friends now say he “wants seating plans” before casual get-togethers. Pictured with wife Meghan in the explosive Oprah Winfrey interview in 2021
Violet von Westenholz reportedly set Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on a “blind date” in 2016. Here she was pictured with Meghan at Wimbledon the following year
Harry’s bestselling memoir, Spur, was released in January. It revealed intimate details of his life and made a series of complaints about the royal family
It was more scary than funny, as in pranks, from an adult man. One does wonder if all of these things are still beneath the surface – though he says his wife has changed him for the better.
Despite the Californian flamboyance and “healing talk,” there are still some who think Old Harry isn’t far from the surface.
It has been said, for example, that in the turmoil of all that is in his head, there is a grain of regret. and that he came close to abandoning the book project entirely after taking advice from Spencer’s family.
Will his former self, the one the nation loved, ever return? This is what most of his friends hope for.
How Megan sees it is another matter.
