Young love. Before Prince Harry wed Meghan Markle in 2018, he dated Chelsy Davy on and off for several years.
The duo met in South Africa in 2004 after Harry finished his studies at Eton College and before he began his military training at Sandhurst.
“One night, we talked about having some people over. For dinner. Just one small problem. We didn’t know anyone in Cape Town,” the Duke of Sussex wrote in his January 2023 memoir, Spare. “But wait, that wasn’t completely true. I’d met someone years earlier, a girl from South Africa. At the Berkshire Polo Club. Chelsy. I remember her being … different.”
In the book, Harry fondly described the Zimbabwe native as “wholly unconcerned with appearances” and his royal position.
“Unlike so many girls I met, she wasn’t visibly fitting herself for a crown the moment she shook my hand. She seemed immune to that common affliction sometimes called throne syndrome,” the BetterUp CIO wrote. “I’d always wanted to know what it might be like to meet a woman and not have her eyes widen at the mention of my title but instead to widen them myself, using my mind, my heart. With Chelsy, that seemed a real possibility. Not only was she uninterested in my title, she seemed bored by it. ‘Oh, you’re a prince? Yawn.’”
Soon after reconnecting in South Africa, the pair began dating. However, they would experience their share of ups and downs while Harry was in the army. “I recall one difficult chat. What were we doing? Where were we heading?” the former military pilot wrote. “She knew I cared about her. But she felt unseen.”
After years of dating on and off, the duke and Davy called it quits for good in 2010. In Spare, the Archewell cofounder revealed that the businesswoman’s reservations about life in the public eye contributed to their split.
“The whole world isn’t made to put up with constant scrutiny, and I don’t know if Chels could bear it, and I couldn’t ask her to. Chels insisted that she was not sure if she was prepared for all of that. A whole life with someone on your heels? What could I say to her?” he wrote, adding that he “completely understood her desire for freedom.”
More than a decade after the twosome split, their relationship was referenced in the prince’s lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers. In Harry’s witness statement, which he wrote in February 2023 and went public when the trial began that June, Harry claimed that the media company’s alleged unlawful intrusions “caused great challenges” in the relationship and caused Davy to conclude that “a royal life was not for her.”
Following their split, the jewelry brand founder moved on with Sam Cutmore-Scott, whom she wed in 2022. The pair share son Leo, born in 2022. Harry, meanwhile, shares son Archie, born in 2019, and daughter Lilibet, born in 2021, with Meghan.
Keep scrolling for a look at Harry and Davy’s relationship timeline:
