Among the most prevalent rumors that have dogged the royal family regards the parentage of Prince Harry. According to a longstanding rumor, Harry is not the second child of then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana but the illegitimate love child of Diana and Capt. James Hewitt, with whom she’d had an affair. Harry addressed this in his 2023 memoir, “Spare.” “One cause of this rumor was Major Hewitt’s flaming ginger hair, but another cause was sadism,” Harry wrote. “Tabloid readers were delighted by the idea that the younger child of Prince Charles wasn’t the child of Prince Charles. They couldn’t get enough of this ‘joke,’ for some reason.”
The rumor was resurrected in the 2014 play, “Truth, Lies, Diana,” based on playwright Jon Conway’s claims Hewitt had told him his affair with Diana began 18 months before Harry’s birth. While Conway admitted he couldn’t be certain Hewitt is Harry’s father, he insisted that the timeline allowed for the possibility.
Hewitt, however, has publicly denied the rumor, and Harry confronted it head-on in a statement he read during his 2023 lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers. “Numerous newspapers had reported a rumor that my biological father was James Hewitt, a man my mother had a relationship with after I was born,” Harry said, also complaining about a tabloid plot to prove it by stealing his DNA (via Daily Beast).
