If Chelsy was prepared to cut Harry slack where his drinking was concerned, she was not so willing to overlook what she regarded as being taken for granted. When Harry chose to attend the Rugby World Cup final in Paris rather than be with her for her twenty second birthday, she dumped him. This was but the first of the endings that led to reconciliations, but by 2009 she was sufficiently resolute, after Harry had decided to embark on a two year training course to learn to fly helicopters for the Army Air Corps, to alter her online Facebook profile to ‘Relationship: Not in One’. She knew it was only a matter of time before the news leaked to the press, but she welcomed the respite, as by then she was heartily sick of the media intrusions, and also looked forward to a break from the strains of a long distance relationship.
For the next two years, Harry and Chelsy’s relationship was on and off. There was genuine affection there, but their youthfulness and Harry’s career in the Army meant that she had to endure the same sacrifices that other Army wives and girlfriends do, all the while running the gauntlet with the press, who followed her every move. By the time of William’s marriage to Catherine Middleton on the 29th April 2011, their status remained unresolved yet the trust between them was so strong that Chelsy not only helped Harry to write his best man’s speech, but was also his plus one for the wedding and the events following it.
By 2012, Harry and Chelsy were definitely headed in opposite directions. Princess Eugenie knew that her first cousin wanted a girlfriend and that her good friend Cressida Bonas had recently split up with boyfriend Harry Wentworth Stanley. They had been an item at the University of Leeds, but when Wentworth Stanley took off for his gap year on his own, the relationship came to an end. So Eugenie introduced them and Harry and Cressida hit it off.
For a while, it looked as if they were ideally suited. Both were athletic, good looking, bohemian, and she had the advantage of being resolutely British upper class, with a family that was as colourful as Harry’s.
Unlike the Davy family, Cressida’s was used to the press. Her mother and aunt had been It Girls in the 70s, when we were all young and few weeks went by without all of our names featuring in the gossip columns. Her mother Lady Mary Gaye Curzon was the elder of two daughters of the 6th Earl Howe’s second marriage. Her aunt Lady Charlotte Curzon was a year younger, and in the 1970s the Curzon sisters were such social luminaries that you couldn’t go to a party anywhere in London or the shires without running into one or the other of them.
At the time, Mary Gaye was married to her first husband, Esmond Cooper Key, who was even better connected than the Curzon girls, if such a thing were possible. His maternal grandfather was the mighty press baron Esmond, 2nd Viscount Rothermere, and his uncle the Hon. Vere Harmsworth’s wife Pat was one of the most outstanding figures in Society. While Vere was so laid back that he was almost reserved, with a delightfully droll sense of humour, Pat, who relished becoming the 3rd Viscountess Rothermere in 1978, was an unpredictable firebrand, perennially bedecked in Lacroix, a large bow in her curly chestnut-coloured hair styled like Shirley Temple, her ears and hands weighed down with stones the size of almonds, the inevitable pair of sneakers contrasting with the whole costume, which was finished off with a glass of champagne in one hand and a dazzling swizzle stick in the other. Pat drank only champagne, but hated bubbles. Hence the gold swizzle stick and the ironic nickname Bubbles, which she loathed and friends hesitated to use to her face.
By the time Cressida was born in 1989, Mary Gaye was on her third marriage, to an Old Harrovian businessman called Jeffrey Bonas. His family had once had a lot of money but no longer did. Cressida was their only child, but she had seven half-siblings: three paternal half-brothers from her father’s first marriage, a half-sister from Mary Gaye’s marriage to Esmond, and two other half-sisters and a half-brother from Mary Gaye’s second marriage to John Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe.
Fortunately for her parents, Cressida was athletic and won a sports scholarship to Park Prior College in Bath, after which she attended Stowe before heading to one of the aristocracy’s favourite universities, Leeds, where she studied dance. She was a beautiful girl, which was just as well, for she wanted to become an actress.
The years between Cressida’s birth and her introduction to Harry had seen profound changes in British society. These had loosened up everyone, including the royals and aristocracy, with the result that everyone now had greater choice as to what they could do with their lives. This was as a result of the flipping of the hierarchical ladder, which had once defined the social order from the bottom to the top, from vertical to horizontal. The divisions between the classes still existed, but they were now perceived as being surmountable. Although the aristocracy still had a degree of influence, in national terms it had ceased to be the oracle it had been in the days
