How blonde Chelsy Davy became the love of Harry’s life before it all started to unravel…

Among Prince Harry’s many personal statements in the ongoing civil case against Mirror Group Newspapers, there was little more emotional than the evidence he gave about the breakdown of his relationship with former sweetheart Chelsy Davy.

The constant attention of the press, the “curious glances of the tabloids,” he said, had driven the blonde Zimbabwean away.

And he told the court that journalists had even celebrated the collapse of the relationship.

(Though that view seemed to misinterpret the headlines at the time.)

There would have been a time when Harry had good reason to regret Chelsy’s departure. It was a relationship that seemed to work well – and had lasted seven years.

When the romance finally came to an end in 2011, it was Chelsy who made the decision between calling it quits or accepting the prospect of marrying into the royal family.

During the last two years of their often choppy friendship, the pair had had endless arguments about how much Chelsy’s life would change if she accepted Harry’s proposal.

Could she manage to swim (in a phrase she used at the time) in the “royal goldfish bowl” in the future?

As Harry put it in his memoir Spare when he recalled the end of their romance in 2011: “The world is not made to be constantly scrutinized…and Chels insisted she wasn’t sure she was up to all that.” prepared. An entire life with someone on your heels? What could I say to her?’

He added: “I completely understood her desire for freedom. If I could choose, I wouldn’t want this life either. I would miss her dearly, but I understood that she put her freedom first.

“If I had the choice, I would want to live like this.”

For Chelsy, who had never really adjusted to the constant media attention that came with her relationship with Harry, the last straw was the worldwide attention paid to Prince William’s engagement and subsequent marriage to Kate Middleton.

Chelsy, who, like Kate, was not the product of an aristocratic family, told a friend at the time that there was no way she could “form herself like that”; on display 24 hours a day and not a foot out of place,” adding, “I just know they’d all be waiting to trip me.”

Six years after they broke up, Chelsy shared how the level of scrutiny had affected her.

She told an interviewer, “It was so full: crazy and scary and uncomfortable. I found it very difficult when it was bad. I couldn’t handle it. I was young, I was trying to be a normal kid and it was horrible.”

There is no doubt among the Prince’s friends at the time (before he lost contact with many of them after his self-imposed exile to California) that Chelsy was the love of his life then. As she was indeed hers.

But that was more than a decade ago, when they were both relatively carefree and in their twenties, enjoying what would become a formative relationship for both of them.

Harry had first been introduced to Chelsy at the Berkshire Polo Club while they were both in school – the Prince at Eton and Chelsy in sixth form at Stowe – but he didn’t ask her on a date until almost two years later when they met. met at a barbecue in Cape Town, where the prince spent part of his gap year.

He discusses their night together in Spare.

“I remembered that she was… different,” he writes.

“Unlike so many people I knew, she seemed totally unconcerned with looks, decency, kingship.” He then talks about their “first kiss under the stars.”

Much of the couple’s blossoming romance took place in Zimbabwe, where Chelsy’s father Charles owns and manages a game reserve.

It was clearly serious when Chelsy not only attended Harry’s cousin Peter Phillips’ wedding to Autumn Kelly – where she was introduced to the Queen – but was also invited to the celebration of Prince Charles’s 60th birthday. And she was by Harry’s side at the Diana memorial concert in London in 2007.

By this time, Chelsy was a fixture in Harry’s life, often staying in his bachelor quarters on the top floor of Clarence House, his father’s home in London.

She was recognized as the golden girl of the prince’s shining gang, whether she was cheering on her prince at polo matches in Gloucestershire, or leaning on his arm as they tumbled out of the capital’s nightclubs.

Chelsy had by then decided to spend more time in the UK, opting to take a two-year law degree at Leeds University – and almost certainly to be closer to Harry.

But while she wanted to spend more time with Harry, she found the media attention unbearable.

The pressures of their conflicting careers – Chelsy held a coveted, albeit junior, position in a City law firm, while Harry trained with the army – also took its toll, and the couple reluctantly agreed to part amicably in 2011.

A few years later, the public’s attention would instead be focused on the woman Chelsy had replaced in the Prince’s affection, Meghan Markle.

So did Chelsy have a lucky escape? Does she regret that her intense romance with Harry didn’t grow into marriage?

Chelsy has always objected when the topic of Harry comes up, but she was invited to Harry and Meghan’s wedding in 2018 and has said she will “always be good friends” with the prince.

But she has made it clear that she is happy in her own life, which now consists of running an African jewelry brand called Aya, as well as taking care of a husband and one-year-old son, Leo.

Despite wealth, looks and royal connections, Chelsy has managed to sink back under the radar with great success.

Last year she married Sam Cutmore-Scott, 38, an entrepreneur who was in the year above Harry at Eton.

The family does not live in Zimbabwe now, but in a Victorian terraced house in Chiswick, west London.

Sam is a director of his parents’ hospitality company, the Bijou Collection, and last year he opened a posh hotel in Norfolk, The Harper, where Chelsy occasionally saw help.

“Chelsy respects her past, which has been a bit bumpy along the way,” a close friend reports.

“But now she feels free, happy and blessed with Sam and Leo.”